Mysteries, Magic and Powers of Art
The Secret Healing Powers of Images and Icons
Photo:
Talisman of Cyprian, Syrian priest, to free the virgin Justine." Protective
scroll, nineteenth century, parchment, 24 x 17.6 cm. Private collection. Photo
courtesy of Guy Vivien.
The theme
of the divine face surrounded by cherubim appears fairly often in clerics'
explanations of the talismans, especially in cases of a central face framed by
four eyes or four faces. (Doesn't a prayer say that "the vision of his Face
and the hearing of his Names" undoes spells?) God is represented in Ethiopian
spiritual painting, then, as surrounded by four bearers, who have the faces of
a lion, a man, a bull, and an eagle, all "full of eyes." The interpretation of
the eyes as the eyes of the cherubim is thus doubly justified. The recitation
of the invocation puts vision and speech not in an illustrational relationship
but in parallel: both compete for the cure.
No talisman has a canonical
interpretation. In the eight-pointed star, the cleric in Shire might see a
"face of man;" others see the seal of Solomon, or the Cross, a face in light,
or a symbol of the four directions of the compass.
Photo,
right: This talisman wards off spirits
that make business enterprises go bad. Solomon's seal by Gera, 1947,
ball-point pen and marker on paper, 20.5 x 16 cm.
Collection: Musee National des Arts
d'Afrique et d'Oceanie, Paris. Gift of
Jacques Mercier. Photo courtesy of Guy Vivien
A number of clerics would
offer no interpretation at all. When a cleric gives a colleague a talisman, he
indicates its application, the prayer associated with it, its method of use,
the master from whom he obtained it, and his own experience with it--that is,
how many people he has cured with it. The talisman's name and its symbolism
are not indispensable. Asked about the meaning of a talisman, a skillful
cleric can recount it while reading prayers. Professors of poetry (qene)
are best at this game, for they have at their disposal an immense base of oral
traditions in which the symbols are no less important than the character
themselves.
Christianity, Possession, and Talismanic Art
Integrated into the cult of
a zar, the scroll tends to become a sacrificial medium. While it is
used according to Christian orthodoxy, it loses its material and almost all
reference to the particular situation of the patient. Between the extremes of
moist and dry, blood and dust, the depths of the body and the heights of the
soul, the Ethiopian scholars have developed the most original part of their
talismanic arts. They have done this in relation to situations where one must
register an invasion of the body, must chase the intruders out, seal the body
up, and forbid them access to it: "The house that is the body will no longer
have either door or window by which the demon may enter," as Asres used to
say. While differing elsewhere, Christian discourse and the discourse of the
zar are mutually reinforcing on the question of possession. If
Christianity is a religion of transcendence, it still allows spirits, and even
the holiest of these, may dwell in a human body. Talismanic art, which has
always flirted with possession, has found an extraordinary catalyst of this
potential in the Ethiopian universe. And if this potential is really implicit
in Christian visual art, we can legitimately ask if Christianity has not been
able to engender a talismanic art in its purest form, that is, in asceticism.
This is suggested by the association of the seals with the image of abba Melki
driving a demon before him. It is as if, the better to fight the violent and
insidious assaults of demons, the athletes of God needed to exercise their
inflexible will through images more powerful than simple commemorative
portraits. In the West, possession and ecstasy found a privileged expression
in Baroque sculpture. Did the churches of the East do something similar in
talismanic art?
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