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Nefertiti

 


Her name means ’The Beautiful One Approaches’. She was the wife and the queen of the heretic king Akhenaten, reigning in the new capital which had been stamped out of the virgin desert a symbolic halfway between the cities of Memphis in the north and Thebes in the south. The king named his new city Akhetaten – ‘Aten on the Horizon’, although it has become more familiar to us from the name of the nearby contemporary town of Amarna.

Nefertiti presented her husband with three daughters. But then as now it was a man’s world, and it was a lesser consort who gave the king the necessary male heir: an ineffectual ruler who died before his twentieth year. The son might have remained an obscure name on the fringes of history but for an extraordinary twist of fate – the discovery of his intact tomb in 1922. The son’s name was Tutankhaten. His change of name tells its own story. With his father’s death, the boy was an easily-manipulated puppet of the priests ready to claim back power, and his name was changed to Tutankhamen.

The glories of the royal court at Amarna collapsed back into the desert sands, its very stones rifled to rebuild the temples of the old gods. Nefertiti, now a widow with a disintegrating power base, must manoeuvre to survive. But did she? History has left no record of the queen’s fate, and we are left to wonder. 

Nefertiti’s legendary beauty is wholly due to the surviving portrait bust of her in the Berlin Museum: a bust which has become so iconic that it takes an effort to think one’s way past it. But I wanted deliberately to pull the focus of attention away from the familiar tall crown back to the queen herself: a very human woman contemplating the best way to move forward in a hazardous and politically adverse world almost three and a half millennia removed from our own. And it seemed only fitting to include the queen’s personal cartouche – a cartouche that was deliberately defaced from the stones of Amarna by the reinstated priests.


You can read and see more about Akhenaten, Nefertiti and the royal court of Amarna at: http://shadowsineden.blogspot.nl/2013/10/the-amarna-heresies.html



Three Brides


My portrayal of the 'three brides' of Dracula in Bram Stoker's narrative. What are we to make of these exotic creatures? They seem more like elaborate dolls than anything human. Perhaps this indeed is the case for these three who have abandoned their humanity in favour of a hollow moonlit immortality.

Words of Warning

"I could hear a lot of words often repeated, queer words, for there were many nationalities in the crowd, so I quietly got my polyglot dictionary from my bag and looked them out. I must say they were not cheering to me, for amongst them were “Ordog”—Satan, “Pokol”—hell, “stregoica”—witch, “vrolok” and “vlkoslak”—both mean the same thing, one being Slovak and the other Servian for something that is either werewolf or vampire."

~ From Jonathan Harker’s journal, as related in Bram Stoker's Dracula. This astonishing five-horned skull actually exists: I photographed it as a specimen of a fossil deer in Naturalis Museum in Leiden, then added even more horns for effect. Apparently one can never have too many horns when portraying these darker forces.

Dracula

It has become something of a tradition to assume that Bram Stoker’s inspiration for the character of Dracula stemmed from the exploits of the 15th-century Romanian tyrant Vlad Țepeș - Vlad the Impaler. I disagree, and instead have come to conclude that the true origins of the character lay much closer to home for Stoker, and with an individual who dominated his own life: his overbearing employer, the despotic actor-manager Sir Henry Irving, for whom Stoker worked for 27 years, and whom Stoker seems to have both loathed and revered. Stoker even asked the charismatic Irving to portray Dracula on the stage – a role which Irving, perhaps aware of how much of himself had been written into the character, consistently declined. In my 'portrait' of the Count Stoker’s wish has at last been fulfilled: it is the features of Irving himself which form the basis for my own Dracula.

Does an imagined portrait of the notorious Count really need a heavy emphasis on blood and fangs? Not to me. Horror is in suggestion: in what you think you see, rather than in literal detail, and menace and dark charisma can be as much in the eyes as in more obvious attributes. And there is no actual 'blood' anywhere here: what you see is merely an overlay of brushstrokes.

Sister Bertken



Why would a woman allow herself to voluntarily be walled up in a small cell with no way out, not for a fixed period of time, but for the rest of her life? In the 15th-century Sister Bertken of Utrecht did exactly this, and her story confronts us both with our own reactions to her extraordinary decision and ultimately with what faith actually is.

You can read more about Sister Bertken and her remarkable story on my post The Woman in the Wall

Mary of Egypt



Having run away from home at the tender age of twelve, Mary lived a dissolute life in the city of Alexandria for the next seventeen years. She then journeyed to Jerusalem, where a conversion experience led her to cross the River Jordan and live a life in the unforgiving wilderness of the Jordanian desert as a reclusive naked penitent, not for months, nor even for years, but for almost five decades. At the end of her life she was discovered by chance by the monk Zosimas, to whom she told her story. In conventional terms Mary’s life is a textbook example of redemption through faith, but in human terms her story is one of astonishing survival, and a life which brings us to the threshold of what faith is, and how as individuals we conduct ourselves in the light of that faith. But for me, Mary's story is not so much about the mysteries of faith, but the greater mysteries which the human heart contains. 

You can read more about Mary and her life on my post Mary of Egypt: A Heart in the Wilderness.

Pandora



The story of Pandora, the first woman on Earth, who opened the forbidden box and so released all of the sorrows and misfortunes into the world, is one which has entered into folklore. But the familiar myth needs some revision. The 'box' is actually a mistranslation from the original Greek, which specifies the vessel as a lidded pot or jar. And the parallels with the story of Eve in Eden are unmistakable: it is a woman’s curiosity that is to blame for all the ills that afflict humankind. But as with the Eden story, perhaps the truth is less simplistic. Eve in her wisdom released all the human travails, knowing that the encounter with these was needed in order for the soul to progress in experience. Wise Pandora acted out of the same motives, and with the same result: she has been blamed ever since for all the ills which afflict humankind. But Pandora was wise in another detail of the myth: she kept Hope in the jar. Hope is a mixed blessing, which can prove to be as deceitful as it can be rewarding. ‘False hope’ is not just a phrase, and Pandora perhaps deserves our gratitude, rather than our blame.

Where I Live

Some time ago I created a series of photos documenting the woods near where I live. The only rule I gave myself was that all the photos should be taken just a few minutes’ walk from my front door. Now I have revisited those original photos, reshaping them as if through the veil of memory: a record, not of these scenes as they are, but as I remembered how they felt to me when I was there.





























































The Gospel of Mary



Who was Mary Magdalene? Thanks to a misguided assumption about a passage in Luke's gospel by Pope Gregory I in the 6th-century, the erroneous tradition that Mary was a redeemed whore has persisted for fourteen long centuries. But the text of the Gospel of Mary, written three centuries earlier, reveals a very different Mary. The image of Mary in the gospel which bears her name is of a woman of great dignity, leadership, personal courage and deep spiritual insight: a view of the Magdalene as remote from her misguided portrayal down the centuries as is possible.

We have three surviving fragmentary copies of the text known as the Gospel of Mary, all of them from Egypt. One discovered near the town of Akhmim is from the 5th-century and written in Coptic, and the other two from the 3rd-century and written in Greek were discovered in an ancient refuse dump at Oxyrhynchus – a valuable archaeological site which also has yielded some of the poetry of Sappho.



The Gospel of Mary is the only known gospel to be attributed to a woman. Unlike the verses of Sappho, we cannot know who wrote it, any more than we can ascertain who really wrote the four canonical gospels. What we can say is that its unknown author wrote from a viewpoint that is so sympathetic to a woman’s perspective, so insightful, that it could indeed have been written by a woman, which would have been entirely feasible in an early Christian Gnostic community.

Being closer to the source, this text offers us perhaps a more authentic Mary: a Mary who is indeed a wise and profound teacher, and who is even the closest to Jesus and most deserving of his disciples. This Mary is a very long way indeed from the redeemed whore perpetuated by the Church, and the time for her overdue and deserved reinstatement is now.

You can read more about the Gospel of Mary on my other blog here.