Synopsis

Eric Rhode takes on some of the most fundamental aspects of human experience, thought, and meaning. He journeys into fascinating corners of “monsoon Asia” — and into areas in mind and spirit that are both knowable and unknowable. He conveys the thrill of a personal quest to understand some of the meanings that come together in Plato’s vision of the axis mundi.

He interprets the axis mundi not as an expression of a perennial and unchanging pivot of the cosmos, but as an enabler of revelations of a sort that cannot be acquired through experience. His familiarity with ancient mythologies and cosmologies enables him to make clear that axiality involves the crossing of a threshold between human relations and a range of meaning that can be conjectured without reference to experience. He enters the many dimensions of myth, art and artefact, geology, geometry, the human mind and body, ritual and ceremonial, philosophy, psychology, and religion. This book examines “the truth of the mind and the truth of experience”. It is truly a tour de force.

Margot Waddell Ph. D. (Psychoanalist & Consultant Child Psychotherapist, Tavistock Clinic)

Reviews

Reviewed by Meg Harris Williams

In this fascinating and beautifully presented book, richly illustrated with spectacular photographs, Eric Rhode takes Plato’s myth of the Axis Mundi as a starting point for a personal inquiry into the nature of man’s relation to the unknowable. Rhode adopts the term ‘axiality’ to demarcate the knowable from the unknowable, after the story of the pillar of light which appeared to travellers as a revelation linking the heavens with the Fates - those ‘daughters of Necessity’ who weave the threads of life. His exploration of axiality is founded on his longstanding interest in ancient civilizations, together with the more recent acquisition of an extensive knowledge of eastern religions - in particular those of ‘monsoon Asia’. Rhode has not merely read about these but also travelled in order to experience on the pulses the impact of sacred sites and ceremonials and their ‘architecture’ - in the shape of both buildings or artworks, and belief systems.  He writes:

“In monsoon Asia, the concept of making artefacts and the concept of consecration are little differentiated… Sacred space can be originated whenever there is a scope for an act of sacrifice, or for travelling from a certain point here to a certain point there by means of the threshold that carries the significance of dying and being reborn.” (p. 162)

The concept of a ‘threshold’ between different modes of existence has both spiritual and cultural significance in this book.  In exploring the ‘traditional cosmologies’ of India, China and Thailand, Rhode tackles not just the divide but also the meeting-point which exists historically at the root of eastern and western spirituality - something of which we may be aware in principle, but probably know very little about in detail. Rhode’s dedicated researches combine with his psychoanalytic experience to make him especially well qualified to interpret for us the oriental affinities and indeed influences behind the father of western philosophy, in such a way that we can see their relevance to current thinking about thinking - especially in the wake of Bion.

The cosmic pillar of Plato’s axial, reverberating through world religions as it does, is - says Rhode - like a ‘spaceship’ or ‘falling star’ descending to earth to transfigure the site of its reception. The space of its landing may be defined by an array of dualities: such as that between Yin and Yang, sun and moon, male and female, water and fire, wrathful and peaceful faces of the Buddha, theological and artistic viewpoints, and the outside and inside of Plato’s cave.  Such rhythms both support and destroy the ‘continuities of daily existence’ and prepare the ground for death or breakdown in the shape of a revelation which pierces them and disturbs the composure of their routine vision. The pillar of light has analogies with the Taoist Unknowable Way, and finds representations in such western myths as Jacob’s ladder, or in the sacrificial posts of Vedic altars, or other eastern representations of a ‘luminous cranial cord’, whose segments appear in turn in certain mandalas or the Buddhist lotus sutra, in stone-age markings in a secret recess of a cave in the Combarelles, or in the unfolding terraces of the temple at Borobudur in Java. All feature in Rhode’s account of ‘the geometry of revelation’ - an intersecting structure in which it is required that a situation of human ‘error’ be set up (if it does not exist already) in order to be re-formed.

Axiality, in Rhode’s definition, marks our awareness of a source of knowledge (or light or music) which may be ‘responded to but not known’.  Citing an ancient Chinese source, ‘it does not exist and yet everything exists because of it’. It is the ‘space between’ that ‘activates revelation’. The axial threshold mediates between the worlds of Being and Becoming - the spindle that turns on the knees of Necessity. It is the ground from which religion, art and mathematics spin their semi-abstract structures: ‘In Platonic speculation, geometric forms arise out of the fire of the anima mundi’ (p. 134), and ‘Out of the threshold of death and rebirth appears the geometric form’ (p. 152). It is the threshold between Bionic ‘O’ and the Kleinian ‘combined object’. Thus Rhode relates the axial pillar (and its representation in sacrifice posts) to the primordial mound or stupa, with its evidence of man’s conjectures about ‘the nature of the interior’:

“In psychoanalytic thought, this archaic time-space conception of the absolute as a meaning within an interior that cannot be accessed is represented by the idea firstly of the combined object and the idea secondly of an architectural representation of the combined object, which is the primal scene.” (p. 62)

In this way, he suggests, Freud’s primal scene rediscovers its ancient roots, subsequent rather than prior to the combined object itself. The light of the eternal or unknowable ‘refracts prismatically into forms of the combined object’ (p. 190), rather like the thousand Buddha-bodies or Buddha-fields. All these sensuous manifestations intimate ‘the combining of objects that arise out of a ground that is infinite’ and (in Bionic terms) contribute to ‘the resilience of the contact barrier’ (p. 136):

“The ancient Greeks attributed geometry as a power to the male; they thought of semen as carrying a blueprint. But Vedic thinkers attribute the prerogative of creating geometric forms to the matrix and describe the linga and god-foetus as though they were united into one being in the matrix. Potency in this setting originates with yin rather than yang and with the moon rather than the sun.” (p. 136)

Inevitably, the axial threshold is rarely crossed smoothly or comfortably, and hence is traditionally associated with jarring intimations of mortality, and - in primitive societies - with literal enactments of human or animal sacrifice. Rhode does occasionally refer to the more sinister implications of such pre-artistic representations, as in fetishism and the ‘concrete equation’ of dismembered bodies, or in the way the sacrifice-post as axial explicitly brings up ‘issues of murder’.  He just hints at the historic change from place of sacrifice to place of drama.  In general however, the structure of the book - which is like a personal dream-narrative - smooths over distinctions of genre. Shiva, Parvati, Perseus, Lachesis, Sophocles’ Oedipus, Shakespeare’s Richard II, appear to exist on the same level of reality as each other and as the ancestral gods of sacrifice, or indeed as the stones which have acquired the significance of ‘a poetic of the immeasurable…as though stones were noumena’ (pp. 99-100). The effect of this is to intensify our sense of Rhode’s personal vision, as the culmination of axial wanderings in which - perhaps like Oedipus himself in the chapter on ‘Disturbing gaits’ - he is accompanied throughout by presiding spirits such as Lao Tzu and Wang Bi; guides such as Coomaraswamy and Kramrisch; and indeed by his wife, to whom the book is dedicated. As he writes of Borobudur, the terraces are laid out

“… in order to have the traveller feel the existence of a threshold within the axial of circumambulation, the crossing of which signifies a passing through death as a stage in being reborn. Only by undergoing the rigours of walking along the terraces is the traveller made ready for the open spaces that reveal the presence of the heavens.” (p. 145)

One might suggest that the book is itself one of those geometric forms born from a terraced threshold of psychoanalytic theoretical constructs. The traveller on this axial journey partakes of a universal myth whose human roots are in the mother-infant gaze. Towards the beginning of the journey of his book Rhode ruminates:

“An infant may see in its mother’s gaze a diamond thunderbolt travelling through oceanic waters, and it may come to think of the axial joints of its mother’s body as spirals, or as eyes, or as angels.” (p. 183)

Such things are the sources of much of the religious iconography that he encounters in his travels, and that transcend the east-west theological divide; and at the end of his investigation, Rhode reviews the Platonic myths in terms of a family history which is both that of individuals and of the human family as a whole:

“Memories that have returned to their ground in the unknowable may return in a renewed form in the guise of intuitions. Parents and grandparents, who are surely the originators of the six characters in search of an author, regain their authority by means of the prism that has them return to the present as rays of light in refraction. The axial by which they undergo this change does not have the meaning of an terrestrial axial. Personality is no longer of consequence. Within the cave, forgotten ancestors assume the shape of animals, or of angels, or of some drift among the stars.” (p. 192)

Our philosophical roots are themselves such unknowable ancestors, whose life and earliest incarnations continue to return and be reinterpreted in the context of our own personal journey. And in the rich evocativeness of Rhode’s book, many ancestral spiritual systems may be said to have found an author.

Meg Harris Williams
http://www.artlit.info

Reviewed by Judy Shuttleworth

This book is about journeying beyond one’s familiar world - actual journeys made by Eric Rhode to Monsoon Asia and the internal journeys that were prompted by its impact – and it is itself a journey for the reader. It is full of wonderful photographs of ritual spaces and structures, beautiful and sometimes terrifyingly alien sculpted images, largely taken by the author himself. The presence of Rhode and his guide visiting these sites is only occasionally glimpsed. This allows the reader to be drawn more directly into something of what Rhode’s experience must have been and to have one’s own encounter with the unsettling vision of ultimate reality that these objects embody.

As Rhode weaves together the many facets of his own response, the rich associational threads evoked within such an erudite mind and imaginative sensibility, one slowly begins (slowly enable one to begin) to grasp the vision at the heart of this book. If it was a daunting experience which I felt ill-equipped for, and sometimes resisted, it was in the end also one I felt drawn to and rewarded by.

Rather than the more familiar anthropological perspectives which would see the temples, ritual objects and activities as religious symbols carrying meanings readable within the context of a culture and way of life, there is instead an opening out to the larger themes of the nature of mythical thinking and intuition, and the critical part played by them in all psychic development, as this has been grasped in Buddhist and Hindu cosmology and within Greek and Judeo-Christian myths. Rhode wants the reader to consider the artefacts he photographed and the rituals he observed as direct intuitions of a reality which lies outside all socially constructed understandings of the empirical world. They are not symbols of something else within the social world but rather they are themselves visions of what lies behind the contact barrier thrown up by the development of ordinary human consciousness.

If the revelations stipulated at the core of the world’s cultural traditions – such as ‘there is no God but God’ - are not hypotheses open to empirical verification what are they? From the vertex of ordinary human forms of knowing they are delusions. But as Rhode puts it with respect to seeing the pre-historic paintings in the caves of the Dordogne, “(I)in being taken out of the actual world I had been taken out of habitual senses of being: and a certain type of mythic thinking had begun to seem plausible.” (p 171) From this vertex, the eternal cycle of life and death in Buddhist and Hindu cosmology, like the myths recounted by Plato of the migration of souls after death and the vision they encounter of the earth spinning on its axis between heaven and the underworld or, from my own field of study, the mystic journey of Mohammed to the Prophets in the heavens, are revelations about the nature of the world outside our empirical knowledge. As revelations they can only be perceived through the imagination. In Bion’s later writings, a similar radical shift of perspective is required in order to perceive the fundamental nature of psychic reality. This is the reality with which the mystics and shamans have sought union and with which the dying are felt to come into contact.  The objects in Rhode’s photographs are the physical traces left by early human attempts to imaginatively grasp this dimension of the world. The revelatory myths of Greece and Judeao-Christianity have become, for this recent tradition of psychoanalysis, central in the formation of imagination and our attempts to grasp its nature.

This is in marked contrast to the accounts of ritual practice and the routine of living out God’s commands within a religious tradition that are characteristic of mainstream anthropology. Yet there are moments when ethnographers have felt themselves in the presence of an experience that they cannot easily report on within their intellectual framework, as they get to the boundary between the observable and the intuited. The principled agnostic stance of the discipline and the line drawn by Evans-Pritchard between ethnography and theology, even as he seemed most drawn towards the spiritual world of the Nuer (Evans-Pritchard 1956), remains in place, as in a sense it must if the pursuit of knowledge by empirical means is to continue. Yet for those who built them, the rituals and sacred structures that Rhode describes were openings to the heavens, receptacles for the unknown and vehicles of divine power – vital ‘life support systems for terrestrial beings’, as he puts it.  Bion’s account of the psychoanalytic encounter places him close to this same threshold and the tensions it produces. So this reality beyond our physical senses, and our capacity to be aware of it, starts to become central to any meaningful study of the nature of religious experience and also of the deepest level of our imaginative lives.  This book brings the reader uncomfortably close to the tensions in this paradox.

Although Rhode remarks wryly that while “the dimension of myth is important… it is one to visit rather than live in”, there is a strong sense in the book of the loss entailed in the course of human development. The formation of the contact barrier, essential in the evolution of human culture, carries with it the implication of the loss of a capacity for this kind of intuition, embodied in the Old Testament account of the expulsion from Eden. It is a capacity which mystics and shamans have sought to regain through meditation and hallucinogenic rituals.

A different possibility seems to emerge from Rhode’s beautiful description of the Wilton diptych. He observes that the arrangement of the figures of Richard II and the three saints on the left hand panel make it appear that they cannot see the figures on the right hand panel, the Madonna and Child, with a host of angels, who are reaching out to them. Yet the left hand figures are praying despite being unable to see the image of the divine presence on the right - “they are steadfast in their trust concerning the meaning of the other panel because they are able to communicate by ways other than ways of seeing” (p103). This depiction of the intuition of ultimate reality is embedded in a collective life lived out within the medieval Christian cosmology. As Rhode makes clear, ritual activity not only opens up a space for divine power but also meets the ordinary human needs of its practitioners faced with suffering and death. Thus we can see our capacity for an awareness of ultimate reality, as both outside ordinary human knowing and yet as emerging from within shared traditions of thought and practice.

Judy Shuttleworth
69 Collingwood Avenue
London N10 3EE

Bibliography

Evans-Pritchard, EE (1956) Nuer Religion Oxford: OUP