The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

This thread on evil and dark deities took a turn that I thought was interesting and would transfer here.

In How Art Made the World (BBC documentary) I heard about this anonymous Turkish soldier who had grown up in an Islamic theocracy, where realistic art was forbidden as it was seen as competition with God.

When this Turkish soldier was shown a realistic oil painting of a horse, he didn't see a horse. He couldn't see a horse, because, as he said, he couldn't walk around it. The highlighting and colorblocking seemed to look to him like a lot of dried goop smeared on a cloth which, to be fair, is what it really was.

I'm a little suspicious that it was hearsay, though. Maybe whoever met this Turkish soldier just made it up to make fun of Muslim customs. Or maybe the Turkish soldier was confronted with such a taboo thing that he politely pretended that it wasn't all up in his face, by pretending that he couldn't see it.

But suppose that such a thing were true, then how would he know what to avoid (realistic art imagery) if his society had cleansed it so completely that he wouldn't recognise it if it were right in front of him?


That might be a strange example, but it's I get a similar sentiment from these ideas that, say: Only somebody envious of others would accuse others of envying oneself. Somebody truly pure and innocent a victim of envy would be unable to comprehend the motive. Replace envy with any vice. Takes one to know one, basically.

I guess this is a really broad question then: How does that work? Actually, what I feel like asking more is how doesn't that work? Because a lot of evils in the world, I think, aren't all accounted for by personal projections. Neither is it so simple as, for example, learning to feel hatred by direct example, because how it's expressed on the outside might not create hatred in all those who witness it but fear first (or sometimes) or some other strange reaction because as without isn't as within to a one-to-one ratio by my experience. Inner motivation seems to have its own roundabout chemistry of disposition and circumstances.

Just throwing this out there and seeing what comes of it.

I have always thought that if just having a statue or pictures of an animal or a person might lead you to worship them - then there is something about you, it's not just the statue.

That could be related, yes. Not necessarily to virtues or vices within the mind as reflected by objects in the world, but aspects. If you can access YouTube, there was , because the objects and movements are what make us whole in a way, like it's human nature to externalize thoughts or have that meaning become real and reflected back through objects and rituals.

The story of the Turkish man was interesting but sounds more like a physiological brain issue in combination with the culture he's grown in because that's a really extreme sort of reaction.

Ooh, I hadn't thought of that! Thanks.

When I tried to look for more details on that Turkish soldier, I found a Google book (that I can't find again now) where the writer made a chicken-egg paradox out of drawing and recognizing drawings. I'm no scholar of neuro-anthropology, but I thought that seeing patterns, associating similarities in organic forms--like shapes of things in the clouds or a Rorschach ink blot--would be instinctive, and to expand that strange cerebral development into creating art and a community with art appreciation would not be so paradoxical.

As to your larger point about "it takes one to know one" -- I agree that it's hard to forbid something without also defining it. It's as if someone said "Don't glirpooble, it's a terrible sin!"

 
"Follow thou the virtues of Tubso and Bissomony. Flee the demon of sloo-theory!"

This thread on evil and dark deities took a turn that I thought was interesting and would transfer here.

In How Art Made the World (BBC documentary) I heard about this anonymous Turkish soldier who had grown up in an Islamic theocracy, where realistic art was forbidden as it was seen as competition with God.

When this Turkish soldier was shown a realistic oil painting of a horse, he didn't see a horse. He couldn't see a horse, because, as he said, he couldn't walk around it. The highlighting and colorblocking seemed to look to him like a lot of dried goop smeared on a cloth which, to be fair, is what it really was.

I'm a little suspicious that it was hearsay, though. Maybe whoever met this Turkish soldier just made it up to make fun of Muslim customs. Or maybe the Turkish soldier was confronted with such a taboo thing that he politely pretended that it wasn't all up in his face, by pretending that he couldn't see it.

But suppose that such a thing were true, then how would he know what to avoid (realistic art imagery) if his society had cleansed it so completely that he wouldn't recognise it if it were right in front of him?


That might be a strange example, but it's I get a similar sentiment from these ideas that, say: Only somebody envious of others would accuse others of envying oneself. Somebody truly pure and innocent a victim of envy would be unable to comprehend the motive. Replace envy with any vice. Takes one to know one, basically.

I guess this is a really broad question then: How does that work? Actually, what I feel like asking more is how doesn't that work? Because a lot of evils in the world, I think, aren't all accounted for by personal projections. Neither is it so simple as, for example, learning to feel hatred by direct example, because how it's expressed on the outside might not create hatred in all those who witness it but fear first (or sometimes) or some other strange reaction because as without isn't as within to a one-to-one ratio by my experience. Inner motivation seems to have its own roundabout chemistry of disposition and circumstances.

Just throwing this out there and seeing what comes of it.

To be honest, I'm somewhat suspicious of the example given. While some Islamic groups, Arabs I think, do oppose the depiction of humans and the like, not so much for Turkish art styles. This would be especially true if the guy lived in the later periods of the Ottoman Empire which was becoming more influenced by European art styles. Of course this Turkish soldier may have lived earlier and under a different Islamic group. In which case his response to the European painting might simply mean that the painting itself was not very good.

Or maybe he was a critic.

Also, the ability to recognize objects from partial information (such as being partly covered, or at a distance) and the ability to group similar objects are both fairly basic forms of cognition

…

while you might find individual humans who couldn't comprehend drawings, I think a whole culture without such a concept would be a stretch.

Indeed. It calls into question what is a basic form of cognition and what is a value judgment conditioned by society.

would a person with no word for 'evil' be able to do evil? As a sociologist, rather than a linguistic anthropologist, I would rephrase the question.

Why do we socially construct some things as 'evil' and others as 'good'?
How do we decide what goes into which category?
What happens when we disagree?
And with all this difficulty around defining something as subjective as 'evil', does it really exist?

Creating a 'thing' from a concept like this is called 'reification'. I use this concept in my work in relation to the idea of 'health'. We have created a reified idea called 'health' that doesn't exist objectively. The meaning of the term changes from era to era, but still we somehow believe that it is a real thing. Evil is a lot like that. Society decides what it looks like, and a lot of different influences and ideologies go into deciding what it looks like, as a reified 'thing'.

Thanks, I think you're on to something when it comes to how.

These have given me a lot to think about!

To be honest, I'm somewhat suspicious of the example given. While some Islamic groups, Arabs I think, do oppose the depiction of humans and the like, not so much for Turkish art styles. This would be especially true if the guy lived in the later periods of the Ottoman Empire which was becoming more influenced by European art styles. Of course this Turkish soldier may have lived earlier and under a different Islamic group. In which case his response to the European painting might simply mean that the painting itself was not very good.

Or maybe he was a critic.

I'm suspicious of the example given, too.

On the other hand, I can see how something like that happened to me. I was the child of a single mother, and grew up believing that my sperm donor was a literal sperm donor, and science and technology were cool, so I identified with being this wave of the future designer baby. By the time I found out I was a bastard, I'd already gotten into Game of Thrones which has some pretty cool bastards.

But if I had grown up with the ability to parse illegitimacy or legitimacy as a value judgment, I might very well have suffered the full brunt of prejudice against the discrimination that was actually there. "Oh, that child is from a Broken Home because there is only one parent." "Oh, no father figure! She's going to grow up to be a stripper because she won't have any idea how to relate to men! She must feel so abandoned and neglected!" None of that made any sense to me because my own narrative was: "Dr. Victor Frankenstein had a human-baby hydroponics garden beside the NASA training center. That's where I was conceived. Isn't that cool?" Which made no sense to the people who said such horrible things as Broken Home, which I couldn't connect to NASA, which meant that our realities were irreconcilable.

If I'd known from the start that it was a sad story, or even doubted for a moment in my formative years the grand delusion that my mother had fed me, maybe I would have "seen the painted horse" of illegitimate parentage that everyone was pointing out, so to speak. I'm a wee bit bothered by it now, because I have to explain my birth certificate when I deal with paperwork, but I consider it a shallowly-seated personal issue rather than this systemic injustice that could ruin people's lives (even though it is that; has been that, friends-of-friends have seriously damaging complexes about that.)

Art is intensely culturally mediated.  It's a number of different languages.  Remember that perspective drawing was an invented innovation, and that that sort of "realism" is something that's intensely culturally linked.  Someone viewing that from outside might well not have the skillset required to interpret it - we're surrounded by that sort of image all the time, and that has trained our brains in different ways.

The ancient Egyptians had a very stylised art form designed to represent the major features of what they were drawing, in part because if it didn't have those parts it looked wrong to them, and in part because a belief that including those parts had certain magical effects and neglecting to include them would do harm to the artwork.

(Somewhat tangential, but it seemed a relevant thing to bring up.)

 
I think that was spot-on, actually. It's like the visual equivalent of The Coconut Canter:

From the days of radio, banging two coconut halves together was the standard way to generate the sound effect of horse-hooves. Anyone who has ever actually been around a horse knows that horse-hooves rarely sound like this unless they're on a hard surface like concrete or pavement. All the same, the sound became so ingrained in the public consciousness that even when it later became possible to insert much more realistic sound effects, the coconut sound effect was still used. The audience wouldn't accept horse hooves making a sound not generated by coconuts.

Comes around back to how there's basic cognition, and there's the myriad of ways that it could become a basic condition over generations.

I'm borrowing these to use as an antonym for grok and a synonym for iahklu.

 
I've contributed, in a miniscule way, to the English language. That's ... pretty glirpooble.