Sculpture
_I: Human…
_AM: “Humus”, wet earth, clayey mud. Born from the internal sources of the earth and rainwater creating rivers of mud that the gods gave shape to.
_I: Molded by divine hands, in the image and likeness... Yesterday I tried to make something with clay, but it was difficult...
_AM: Why?
_I: It's the first time I've used it, and I wasn't inspired, so I made a kind of casing to put a candle in. Maybe I don't have the patience to work with clay.
_AM: It is not a question of patience, it is a question of inspiration, and inspiration is the essence of the spirit, which breathes, and which, therefore, reminds you of your manifesting capacity.
_I: So I wasn't united with my spirit...
_AM: You were worried about other things that took you out of your being, organizational things that don't allow you to express yourself. Let them go, and see yourself in the mud.
_I: Why the mud? Why is creation there?
_AM: Every day you water the pots where the seeds are. Every day you see them grow, take shape. You see the stems spread, the leaves follow the sunlight. With the water that wets the earth, you see the mud become, and the plants swell, strengthened, powerful. When the ancients saw that small seeds grew in the mud, at the union of water and earth, they were able to understand where life comes from, since plants give food to animals, and thus, to humans. What makes us be, what gives us food, what gives us material for the home, to build jugs, bricks, stoves, food, what sustains all life on Earth, must inevitably be our origin as well, because in a certain way shape, we are clay.
_I: “Of those muds, these muds.”
_AM: And everyone agreed on it, even, for the most ancient, not even the gods escaped this logic.
_I: Were the gods made of clay?
_AM: At least with a much cleaner and more subtle clay. In Babylonian mythology, nothing could exist if it did not have a name, and two of the forces that did have a name were fresh water, Apsu, and salt water, Tiamat. Together they united to create the gods, who united to generate new gods, their sons and daughters. Among the gods who were born from the waters were the primeval sky, Ansar, and the primeval earth, Kisar. They both gave birth to Earth and Heaven as we know them, whom we call Ki and Anu. The Heaven, Anu, joined with Ki to beget her children (Na), who populated the world. The children of Anu and Ki, called “Anu-na-Ki”, had the mission of creating all living creatures, led by their firstborn son: Enki (meaning: lord of the earth). Together with his brother Enlil (lord of the wind), they gave rise to the attributes of arts and agriculture, since while the first was ruler of the waters of the rivers, the second was the creator of storms, ruler of the climate. Enki encouraged his children to continue his task of creation, and thus, Marduk (amar-Utu = calf of the Sun), together with his father, created humans. “I will knead the blood and make bones. I will create a wild creature, it will be called “man”. He will have to be at the service of the gods, so that they live without care” (from the poem Enuma Elish). By combining his blood with clay, he molded the first humans.
_I: The Anunaki, they are those extraterrestrials that created us, that we all talk about, right?
_AM: Well, it is necessary to see this story objectively. There were aliens involved, yes, they came from other planes, yes; but they did not do what the stories of the Anunaki tell. The strange thing about the “new spirituality” is to deny what the Bible says and believe what the Enûma Elish says. It's as if 6,000 years from now someone finds a Marvel movie and believes that Chris Hemsworth really was Thor, and that there were superheroes in the 21st century. That he is in a movie and is made of flesh and blood does not mean that he really has those powers, but rather that he exists, but his qualities are exalted for a purpose. The same thing happened with many of the ancient gods, who were not gods nor did they have super powers, but rather attributed those powers to themselves, and since there were no movies at that time, they were translated into poems.
_I: I understand... So granting powers was related to having Power.
_AM: And that is what Marduk did with humans, condemning them to work for them, calling himself their creator, giver of arts and agriculture alongside his father. But unfortunately, this is only a story from one region of the world. What will catch your attention is that all peoples talk about the same story, told in different ways, and that is why you should not take Mesopotamian history literally, but rather gather the key that unites it to the others: beings of the natural elements that create humanity through clay.
_I: What other stories?
_AM: Ra, the spirit of Light, tired of being alone, breathed deeply and in his breath created Shu (the wind), and from the saliva that arose from the breath, Tefnut (the humidity) was born, making them live in the other polarity of Nun, the cosmos. Ra decided to create a place where he could sit and contemplate, and he made a dry space emerge between the waters from which he had emerged, creating two children with Shu and Tefnut: Geb, the Earth, and Nut, the Sky. Walking through Geb, he traced a path along which to move freely, since he was born from the waters, this path was a river, the Nile. Geb and Nut loved each other deeply, uniting without leaving space between them. Because of this, Amon Ra, seeking to create life, decided to ask Shu to separate his children in constant copulation, and since then, the wind circulates between Heaven and Earth, and his children, the stars. Ra sent one of his eyes to contemplate what was happening, but when he returned, another eye had taken his place, so he collapsed in tears. From her tears emerged the creators of life, and this eye was rewarded by being placed on Ra's forehead, creating the Sun. One of the gods that emerged from these tears and the earth was Khnum, who in Egyptian mythology is the potter god, the creator god. With the head of a ram, he is the one who fashioned all the forms of this world. Thus he made the human among many other things, until one day, he was exhausted, and he decided to break his pottery, distributing it in pieces to all the women he had created. “I want to give you the body of a goddess. You will be perfect like all the gods and you will receive from me happiness and health, and the crowns of both countries, and you will be at the top of all living beings.”
_I: They arise from almost the same thing. This time, directly giving creative power to women.
_AM: The Greeks also had their creator: Prometheus (foresight), who had the courage to challenge the gods and not comply with their laws or intentions. Free of spirit, he toured the created world seeing that there was no being in creation capable of housing the spirit of a god. He then took mud from the river banks and molded the human. He asked all the animals to give him their different qualities and defects, and he placed them in the heart of this creature, and by closing it, human life emerged. The same happens with Asian and Amerindian mythology. In China, the Dragon goddess Nüwa, feeling lonely, took the mud of the Yellow River and designed humans in her image but with legs so they could walk. In the Popol-Vuh, the community book of the Mayan people, it is narrated that human origin was also through mud, although it fell apart, so they chose to rebuild it with a mixture of mud, wood and corn.
_I: A lot of mud…
_AM: And of course, the Assyrian, Akkadian, Sumerian and Judeo-Christian myth of creation, the first man, Adam, was made of clay, in the image and likeness of God, which gave him his na_I: Adama = red earth.
_I: For most ancient people, clay was the human origin, but, clearly we are not made of clay; So, the idea is basically related to what we once talked about: seeds, agriculture, the first humans covering themselves in mud to protect themselves from predators, to avoid emitting a smell, or being bitten by insects.
_AM: As always, everything is based on a simple logic that goes beyond magic. The magical story, the narration, the stories, tales, legends, myths, are nothing more than a literary description of the mundane events that mobilize cultures to believe, to desire, to awaken their adoration or will. And above all, to recognize that the world has the basic materials for creation. And if the gods gave us their creative spirit, it means that we can do it too...
_I: Shape reality. Create.
_AM: From mud, clay, the union of water and earth, the first humans developed something much deeper than making a pot: molding their imagination. Before discovering the work potential, the tool potential that clay offered them for their daily lives, clay was an instrument of play that allowed them to mold something without form, to give it a spirit. When they saw that they could design the face, the body of a person, of an animal, from clay, they understood everything: the gods must have created us this way...
_I: Oh!! Now I understand... It's not that the gods made us out of clay, it was us who, upon discovering that we were capable of designing a human image from clay, understood that it is the most logical way to create a person...
_AM: You got it. We created the stories based on what we saw we were capable of doing. Seeing the clay, taking a piece, and designing a figure is the oldest and most rudimentary art of humans who lived in caves and forests. The oldest recorded figures, discovered in history, are of women with a prominent figure: chubby or pregnant. Symbol of fertility, prosperity and well-being. Every human family used to have one in their cave, as a symbol of creation.
_I: Like the Venus of Willendorf, one of the oldest “Venus” in the world.
_AM: Since the Paleolithic, clay and clay figurines symbolized the prosperity of manifestation: making with the hands. The fire cooked the clay, turning it into stone, making it eternal. The human put his spirit into it, gave it life in a certain way. This is how one of the most amazing fine arts emerges.
_I: The Sculpture.
_AM: Sculpture comes from the Indo-European “skel” which means to cut, which derived from the Latin “scalpere”, being “to carve, tear”, and which originates the word sculpt. Sculpture is the result of sculpting. The art of taking a material and giving it shape, of tearing it, removing the extra to give it the expected shape. Since prehistory with clay, the techniques were perfected through pottery, then in construction, and ended up being developed as a method of capturing poetry through forms. Sculptures can be divided into different types, the most famous being statues and figurines (which represent a complete figure of a being, whether human or animal). But one of the most seen in the ancient world are the so-called “Relief”, being low relief (when the figure is carved into the rock) or high relief (when the background is carved leaving the image standing out. Both Types are seen in many cultures of the Americas, Egypt, the Middle East and Asia. Especially in these last three territories and in Europe, complete sculpture was also developed in other types of materials, more complex to work with, starting with plaster. , but continuing through alabaster, granite, marble, stucco and metal. Being able to add material, remove, or cast, as well as cast, the sculpture allowed us to show the human ability to be gods, giving life to something inert, inorganic , something that seemed dead.
_I: “I saw an Angel in marble, and I sculpted it until I freed it,” Michelangelo said when he made “The David.” Are we the creators, or are we actually the ones who discover what is in the material?
_AM: Divinity is found in all things, in every atom, and nothing is truly dead, but asleep. Life exists in the mind, and discovery occurs mutually, that is, between the observer and the observed. As we saw in quantum, a reality does not manifest until it is observed, and it is what is observed that defines the observer. The relationship is mutual, and therefore, when you sculpt, draw, write, you manifest in the matter the potential that it has in relation to your interior.
_I: So by discovering the world hidden before our eyes, we only discover ourselves.
_AM: The art of sculpture has a very profound metaphor to give us. It is the ability to shape ourselves, to touch our imagination and inner world, the ability to sculpt the structural and inert forms that cover our souls until we find the essence, “freeing the angel.”
_I: The process of life, personal growth, can be seen as a sculptural process, then, in which we try to free ourselves from the oppression of the rock, of the structures, of the beliefs, of the patterns, in order to discover the softness hidden, the beauty that lives within us…
_AM: Or also, adding new parts, fusing new elements with old ones, adding clay for certain arrangements.
_I: I think I'll start again with a new sculpture, this time, knowing this.
_AM: We are water and earth; The internal fire strengthens us, and the air dries our skin, giving it firmness. We are the perfect sculpture of the minerals of creation. We are clay with a soul, a product of the same minerals that create the mountains, of the same silicon of quartz and granites, of the same salts of mud, of the same waters of clay. We have in us all the bases of the mineral world that has molded us to give life to itself. It is our task to continue with his art, and transform it into eternal beauty.
_I: Sculpting both the body, the soul and the spirit.
_AM: You are a work of art, live as such, admire yourself as such.
_I: Made in the image and likeness…
_AM: From a Universe based on minerals.
_I: I am the rock…
_AM: And I am the chisel.