The sacred tree, the sacred stone are not adored as stone or tree;
they are worshipped precisely because they are hierophanies,
because they show something that is no longer stone or tree but sacred,
the 'ganz andere' or 'wholly other.'
Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries
this is stunning
ReplyDeleteto me these last three pictures have something of a violence about them. My poem's in the may issue under Marion McCready! :)
ReplyDeletea, R, a tree for you...
ReplyDeletebroken
thank you all! Sorlil, I didn't think of them as violent, just evoking holiness in a way, I have another group of violent ones I wanted to post later :-) but maybe there is a certain violence manifesting itself every time the holy disrupts our orderly life, and the emotion one commonly describe as "awe", the sacred horror, is also violent, it tears one apart and thus makes one perceive the unseen and be fundamentally changed by it. Arjuna, the Gita-hero, was so terrified when witnessing the real form of God, that he couldn't stand the view and had to ask for mercy, i.e. to regain the ordinary vision of human beings, which is only seeing with the eye, and not through the eye, as Blake would put it.
ReplyDelete