FOLKLORE AND MYTHOLOGY
FOLKLORE AND MYTHOLOGY
The
Healing Power and Magical Effect of Art, Images, Talismans, Mantras and Masks
By Dr. Jacques Mercier
Photo: Zahuli mask dancing,
Guro people, Cote d'Ivoire.
Talismans"
and "fetishes" have been exciting Western curiosity for a long time: Les
Curiositez inouyes sur la sculpture talismanique des Persans
(Unheard-of curiosities in the talismanic sculpture of the Persians), by
Jacques Gaffarel, appeared in 1629, and Du Culte des dieux fetiches
(On the cult of the fetish gods), by Charles de Brosses, in 1760. The first
of these works, a popularization of erudite humanist scholarship, was part
of the movement to rehabilitate antiquity that developed after the collapse
of Christian scholasticism; the bases of the second were the belief in
progress and the slave trade. For de Brosses, African fetishes are "nothing
else but the first object that it pleases each nation or each individual to
select and to consecrate.... They are sacred objects and talismans for the
blacks, as much as gods are." He identifies this African religion with that
of "ancient peoples."
Photo:
Afro-Brazilian altar to the Yoruba creator God Oju Oxala, also known as
Obatala, as installed in 'Face of the Gods,' Museum of African Art, New
York, 1993.
This opinion, restated by Auguste Comte and the proponents of evolutionism, was taken as a lasting proof for 150 years: fetishism is the most primitive form of religion; fetishes and talismans are somewhat arbitrarily chosen objects. It was another several decades before a better ethnographic acquaintance with these objects, linked to the development of a critical understanding of the workings of religion in our own, Western societies, deconstructed these ideas of fetishism and indeed of magic. Today these objects have regained their power to amaze. Their topicality signifies not a return to magic and the irrational during a period of crisis but an opening of new cultural perspectives on them. That perspective begins by taking their therapeutic function into account. Why this interest in the use of works of art in medicine? Beyond the problems internal to these therapies, and the evolution in the understanding of the work of art (notably with the introduction of the notion of the Gestaltung, the artwork's configuration-literally, the form's forming), we are led to acknowledge the existence of other events, of which the most important is the change in the status of the image. Omnipresent on screen and on paper, it rivals and even supplants speech as a medium of communication. Until now, language has classically been the medium of the cogitio, the model for understanding the unconscious, the narrative image's support. What can the image, or the plastic expression of a subject, supply that language cannot? What subject is secreted by the world of the image? Objects endowed with effectiveness and therefore with a certain autonomy, may make a critical contribution to this debate. For theoreticians of the image, the Byzantine icon is among the most seductive objects of all.
Photo:
Pablo Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon-"my first exorcism painting," in the
words of the artist. 1907, oil on canvas, 244 x 234 cm. Collection: The Museum
of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. Photo:
copyright 1966 The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The new Western interest in African objects' functions may be manifested by artists themselves. After a visit to an exhibition in which Ethiopian talismans were presented as medicinal rather than as merely aesthetic objects, teachers at Paris' Ecole des Beaux-arts wanted to invite the talisman-maker Gedewon to create a workshop there for a month, for they saw in his works a force "much larger" than that in works based purely in the aesthetic. They were interested in his "stance." Picasso spoke similarly of the objects that so strongly impressed him on his famous visit to the Trocadero one day in 1907. Talking thirty years later, to Andre Malraux, he described his sudden realization that African masks were not just "good forms," as they were for his friends Andre Derain and Georges Braque, but "magic things," "intercessors" between men and evil, "tools" against pain and danger. It was at that moment, he said, that he understood what it meant to be a painter. In many respects, the thinking of Parisian artists today is continuous with that of Picasso. They feel an artist's emotion in front of Ethiopian talismans, and they are probably familiar with Picasso's adventure, even if they don't remember it at that moment. In their educational role, they are particularly versed in the evolution of the artwork and its meanings during our century: subject to a greater and greater defoliation, part ideological, part critical, it has been either relieved or voided of its essence, depending on one's point of view. This may be the cause of their enthusiasm for overdetermined, violent works. In 1907, Picasso reacted to the Trocadero experience by painting the final version of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: "They [the demoiselles] must have arrived that day, but not at all because of the [African] forms: because it was my first exorcism canvas" (Malraux 1974:17-18).
