Since the perception of a light characterizes the apparition of the divine, the luminous has always been associated with the numinous. The great dilemma that Walter Benjamin proposes is whether the visual impression is determined exclusively by the biology of the human eye or is also characterized by cultural and historical specificities. This contribution seeks to reconstruct how the experience of light in the West has changed over the centuries in intensity and suddenness and how its modes of manifestation have changed.
di Alexander Gabetta
cover: Nicholas Roerich, βThe Mother of the Worldβ, 1924
Β
Before the advent of modernity, a luminous halo enveloped the objects of vision. A curtain covered impressions and the very experience of perception like fog, filtering and modulating the light. It was the era ofhate, which flashed like a magic lantern through the atmosphere and the soft colors of the watercolors, the transparencies of the rainbow, the ink and lipstick stains, the halos of the saints and angels. The ethereal atmosphere solidified like an envelope around works of art or objects loaded with cultic value. In the depths of the human, the metaphors of the breeze and the luminous halo were rooted from time immemorial; already on the walls of the prehistoric caves divine beings were painted surrounded by a halo.
In both Hindu painting and Chinese culture, the clothing and hair of supernatural creatures floated in a shining circle. We were led to breathe the images, as if the aura were taken in the sense of air, in accordance with the Greek etymology Ξ±α½ΟΞ±, a breath or a breath of life. The vortex of wind, the crowned halo on the head or the almond around the whole body then spread in the sacred painting of the West to delimit the auratic effect. Even for a medieval troubadour like the ProvenΓ§al Arnaut Daniel, the nude of the beloved halo against the light of the lamp was an anticipation of the joys of Paradise.
Throughout the nineteenth century the term was used for various uses: a treaty of 1836 attributed fertilization to the aura of the semen, and aura was called the irradiation of the metal tips charged with electricity, the stunning that preceded the epileptic attack and by extension the bewilderment that heralded possession in macumba and voodoo. As he remembers Elemire Zolla, until the mid-twentieth century Europe was still an aura factory; it persisted in the great monasteries, it still vibrated in some castles, villas and gardens, because the custom of courtesy and ceremonial was maintained in those places.
In the cloisters and in the rituals the recollection still allowed the condensation of its splendor, and it is no coincidence that in Sanskrit aura translates as yes, the luster, the glory, the majesty, referring to its root mrs, that is "To warm up", "to sweat": the superhuman concentration of internal heat, the Tapas, that blazes and shines. Hence the aesthetic expedient of using theoval, not only in the religious field, which still appeared in the first photographs of the twentieth century and which surrounded the faces, giving fullness and security to the gaze.
Capturing the aura subjectively meant seeing the object inside its envelope, appreciating the historicity of its tradition and belonging. In this way, theuniqueness of experience, marked and delimited as a rite, in which the magical dimension connected to the epiphany of the sacred and of theoriginal. The aura appeared as a characteristic of the object, not bound to the voluntary memory of the observer but a manifestation of the subjectivity itself lowered within the thing, as Proust and Valery had illustrated. In particular, it was his that was transmitted authenticity, connected to the authority of the artist who had created the work, and to the very idea of passability over time, for which the object made was part of a tradition.Β
But this state of things he would not have survived the bomb blasts of the First World War, the raids of the flash photographs and of the masses on the stage of history. The medium that allowed the light to spread: no more transparent fluids, magic lanterns, dioramas and will have, but radio, cinema, telephone and glass architecture were essential. For Walter Benjamin the modality through which the perceptual experience itself was organized had been transformed; conditioned not only by natural predispositions but also historically determined.
In 'epoch of technical reproducibility the aura dissolved, freeing the object from its envelope and from its unique and unrepeatable existence, a decline which, however, for Benjamin was accompanied by a positive increase in "play space" for those who could benefit from it. The technique subtracted the reproduced work from the realm of tradition, and its unique existence was replaced by its being available to the masses.Β Traffic and crowds, the click of the camera and the montage of the camera rearranged the perceptual experience in a whole new way: shock. The technique continually exposed the human apprehension apparatus to these stresses and collisions, which had to train itself to withstand these sensory and motor stresses in places of leisure and work.
Photography and cinema extended the field of view beyond the natural limits of the eye and the media could extend regions of consciousness into hitherto unexplored areas.: the unconscious was no longer instinctual but optical. If the auratic work was based on the immobility of the magical and sacred dimension, the bullets disseminated by Dadaism, advertising, cinema, offered a quality of experience that could be enjoyed by the masses in which one was affected and manipulated by distraction, interruptions and from the shots.
The need for fruition pushed to move closer to the sensorial source to have an experience in hand, overcoming the uniqueness of any data to receive its reproduction and take possession of a copy. Too much closeness and greed to bear for dimensions of the spirit that need peace and focus. Between the explosion of a grenade and the neon light of the advertising signs, the aura vanished, from the West to its homeland of clouds.
Inner lights
In all religious traditions the theophany it is connected with the appearance of light; where the numinous appears also the luminous bursts on the scene: in the celestial lightnings, in the luciferine phosphorescences, in the Apollonian solar radiance and in the splendors of the miraculous epiphanies. The mystery tremendous e fascinating accompanying such visions for Rudolph Otto distinguishes the experience of the sacred that pierces the soul flooding it with fear and awe. But the divine does not appear only outside oneself but is perceived as an interior light in intimate and meditative recollection.
In many religions the instantaneousness of spiritual enlightenment appears as a flash, filling the soul with sacred terror. At the Eskimos and Yakut instantaneous thunderbolt initiation involves death and resurrection through sudden enlightenment for one destined to become a shaman. The light appears as a flash that is suddenly perceived in the body, in the center of the head, as a luminous beacon which allows you to see concretely and metaphorically in the dark, giving the faculty to scrutinize the darkness to predict future and secret events. Clairvoyance extends far away, beyond valleys and mountains, to recover the souls of the sick kidnapped in the underworld lands of the dead. The inner light confers on the Eskimo shaman both faculties of a paragnomic type and knowledge of a mystical order.
in medicine men Australians the same initiation of light is found, deriving however from a sprinkling by means of a sacred water which is the liquefied quartz with which the neophyte is mixed after being dismembered. Thanks to the rock crystals, closed in its body and head, the medicine man acquires the ability to see spirits, to read thoughts and to make oneself invisible and fly. The solidified light fills the medicine man internally suffused with supernatural light at the moment of mystical resurrection.
If the shamanic initiation of Eskimos and Australian aborigines is homologable, the more complex is the mystical light of the Indian tradition. In Upanishad being itself manifests itself through pure Light, which shines
Β«Beyond this Heaven, beyond everything, in the highest worlds beyond which there are no more others, it is in truth the same light that shines within man. "Β
The identity between interior and transcosmic light is accompanied by subtle phenomena: the warming of the body and the hearing of mystical sounds, which involve an existential transformation, from non-being to being, from darkness to light and from death to immortality, so the atman he becomes one with the person placed inside the heart of man, the fearless immortal.Β
Not only is light the very essence of the divine, but mystically perfect beings also radiate light. The sign heralding the manifestation of Brahma is "the light that rises and the glory that shines" and the Buddha is represented as a pillar of fire that rises, whereby the overcoming of the human condition is highlighted through the fiery luminosity and the ascent. When a state is realized in the Buddha samadhi, a ray called the "ornament of the Light of Gnosis" emerges from the opening of the cranial protuberance and plays above the head. The shining body is the realization of the transcendence of a conditioned stage by which it identifies us with the ultimate state, with the Being.
Even in tantrism, Durante it maithuna, the ritual sexual union ceremonially achieves a union of the mystical order by virtue of which the couple comes to consciousness nirvanic. The awakening thought reached is identical to a drop, bindu, which descends from the top of the head and immerses itself in the sexual organs with the jet of fivefold light. If the conscience nirvanic it is the experience of an absolute light, in maithuna Tantric penetrates into the depths of organic life and also shines forth in the seed, the divine radiance that created the world.
Taken together, the experiences of inner lights described in Hinduism and Indo-Tibetan Buddhism appear where the supreme reality manifests itself as Self-consciousness in theatman, when one penetrates the very essence of life and the cosmos and at the moment of death as in Bard Thodol. Men radiate light if they can overcome the conditionings that characterize profane life, freeing themselves and participating in divine spontaneity, playing as gods and flames in the new plane of existence of the purity of Being. The perception of Light is the sign of the revelation of the ultimate reality with which one merges beyond one's own individuality.
Similarly in China the overcoming of the profane condition and the achievement of extreme peace are characterized by the irradiation of a celestial light, which allows the vision of the inner Man, reachable through a long ascent or spontaneously. Some psychophysiological practices developed by neo-Taoism give great importance to a series of exercises focused on meditation on the breaths and their reabsorption until you see the color. It was imagined that they came from the four cardinal points and from the Center, that is, the whole universe, and were swallowed by forcing them to penetrate the body. Thus, cosmic energy, as the essence of life and germ of immortality, fills the body, illuminating and transmuting it. The same result is obtained by absorbing the image of the Sun and its breath or by concentrating on its image designed to ingest it and make it stay in the heart, which will illuminate the whole interior, warming it as it passes through the body.
As reported in Mystery of the Golden Flower in Taoism the circulation of the inner light is fundamental to see the Essence of Life which is contained in the Light of the Heart. The practice insists on exercising the eyes to look inward going against the tide whereby thoughts gather in the place of celestial consciousness, where the Light is sovereign. If a circular motion is impressed on it, it crystallizes the cosmic powers of Heaven and Earth, forming in the center the Golden Flower that germinates or blooms, or the seed that develops and becomes an embryo and finally the pearl, symbols of the elixir of immortality achieved. . It is a practice that allows the reacquisition of a primordial spontaneity lost following the civilization process, so it is both natural instinct and mystical sympathy with cosmic rhythms.
Eclipse of the sacred
If the divine term designates a celestial manifestation or a light source, this designation is expressed through the assimilation of light to the sacredness captured in its principle, of which the gods themselves are in reality an emanation: the sacred it is a condition for the existence of the divine itself.Β The term refers to the radical *Thing, Then conforming to the cosmos and fundamental structure of things, so i sacred they constitute the fundamental realities, the use of which is essential in life. Ambiguously, the term indicates on the one hand the divine power, mysterious and terrible, forbidden to contact with men, on the other it essentially expresses the life-giving force, spiritual integrity and growth..
The sacred, however Mircea eliade, it is "what has more to be", the invisible dimension of the world which is based on reality captured in its essence, and expresses the need for recomposition with its principle as a condition of integrity.Β The distinction from the layman implies that the sacred accepts its manifestation in a limited place, a glimpse of light which, however, establishes the very possibility of entering into communication with the other levels: participation of the divine in the sacrifice, of man with the divine through the link between heaven and earth.
The process of disenchantment in the West, this communication between nature and sovereignty for Gogarten arises from the original distinction between the Jewish God and the cosmos created, which is found from the beginning emptied of all life-giving forces, by which nature and its powers come desacralize in itself as no longer direct manifestations of the divine. Even the light in the Old Testament is not sanctified as it is analogous to the spiritual life: it is sanctified because it is a creation of God.Β The world as a being is ruled by a having to to be, not a datum to be respected in itself, but a whole to be constituted through a series of transformations and actions towards the object that is now dominable by man.
"Since the world is no longer sacred, man is free towards it, the desacralization of the world becomes the right of exploitation for him": this is the first origin of the economic attitude towards nature. The sacred also implies a form of innocence that generates astonishment antithetical to rational thought, and it is no coincidence that for Schleiermacher it is the feeling that opens the subject to the invisible. Also for Rudolf Otto the sacred is inaccessible to conceptual understanding since it springs from the "source of the deepest knowledge in the soul itself".
Desacralizing an object corresponds to limiting oneself to understanding it in its utilitarian and rational dimension, over which man exercises his power. The take-off of classical science has arrested the irrationality that gave access to the sacred, projecting the principle of reason onto the profane. The need for rationality develops at the expense of mythical conscience, making the sacred fall into the background, until it dissolves, transforming the world into a system of objects: the victory of the lights of reason as a calculation, an account, ratio.
Modern technique allows the calculated exploitation of nature that can be subjected and reproduce to your liking. The lights of the West now flicker seductively in the products, epiphanies made concrete by the use of reason and science. In the background shines the glitter of the object new mint, just out of the factory and flashy, pleasing to the eye. In Western society the wonderful it no longer appears, but in the realm of quantity the object possessed and the reification of the person have credit.
The arts are transformed into industrial activities and the symbolic possibility of playing with the infinite correspondences of the world is replaced by its aestheticization, increasingly understood as aisthesis, that is, as sensitivity in a broad sense, as a form of knowledge of reality that passes through the senses and not mediated by the relationship with the divine. For Lipovetsky, the aestheticization of the world is also the bearer of a series of values, first and foremost the perennial search for New, the need to be entertained, the imperative of arousal and pleasurable stimulation, the social obligation of seeking an experience that is fulfilling.
The man aestheticus he is engaged in a nomadic, disposable research, whereby the real is built everywhere as an image that integrates an aesthetic and emotional dimension in itself, in which individuals structure their subjectivity through the senses and their use, but also starting from a perception of reality that is already in itself veiled in the imagination: to all intents and purposes a hyperconstruction of oneself and a multiplication of the profane. The sacred has thus been eclipsed into darkness, taking refuge where the dazzling light of excess of reason and secularization cannot reach it. In the interior of Western man there is another light, almost fearful, which emerges when consciousness declines.
Nature also has a spirit in it, Jung reminds us; if not, the only spiritual form would be human reason. It is the natural lumen, the light that emanates from nature itself and illuminates the consciousness from the darkness, the second form of knowledge that like a spark opens the doors to understanding alchemical of himself. After the rational excess of the Enlightenment, Jung proposes a vision of the world in which the coexistence of supernatural light from above and the natural lumen of the unconscious from below are kept in balance. For Jung, this balance of views in the twentieth century has shifted excessively towards man's self-centeredness, which has risen to divinity.
Consequently the "bright" rationalist excess made the darkness even darker and the flame of natural lumen shines in the unconscious in such a way as to reconnect the consciousness to its instinctive wisdom hidden like a spark in the heart. natural lumen, particularly during sleep, it reveals that the unconscious is not only nature but also a spiritual source of anticipations about the future development of consciousness through symbols. If the mercurial fire for the alchemists was a composition of what is superior, that is, of the celestial, spiritual virtues, below, in the chthonic sphere, for Jung the revelation through the natural lumen it is now an unveiling of what has been hidden and, fundamentally, a psychological and abysmal event: what was superior now reappears in the depths of the human soul.
The possibility of self-knowledge opens up for man, a morning light that appears after the night in which the conscience slept wrapped in the darkness of the unconscious.Β In accordance with Benjamin's intuition of the change in the modalities of perception, dream contents are also presented in the dreams of contemporary Western man that follow forms aesthetically similar to the diurnal world: even the unconscious proposes shock, explosions and flash. In trance states, in psychedelic experiences, in deep meditations even in the West appear i photisms, lights of various colors that emerge from the bottom of the human like Sparks. These preliminary forms of luminous epiphanies listed in the various yogic traditions as fog, the sun, the fire, the crystals, the star, the eye, the disk of the moon, must however be reabsorbed in the heart, in meditation.
Irradiation
However, secularization in the world has not completely eliminated the secret game between the light of the world and its objects and the impressions aroused on the observer. Famous it is the ecstasy of the mystic Jakob Boehme caused by the reflection of the sun on a plate and followed by an intellectual illumination of the mysteries of the divine e la night of fire by Pascal, noted on a sheet that the philosopher sewed forever inside his clothes and which marked his definitive conversion. During these illuminations the interior light is initially perceived as coming from the outside, in a secret dialogue between object and subject, but later on, any separation is temporarily canceled, in an immense joy.
To grasp the light of these revelations it is perhaps necessary to appeal to the exceptional observational capacity of the poet and philosopher of German Romanticism, Novalis:
Β«This manifestation becomes particularly evident at the sight of some human figures and faces, especially some eyes, gestures, movements, listening to certain words, reading some passages, in certain aspects of life, of the world, of destiny. Lots of randomness, some natural events, especially parts of the year and day, offer us this experience. Some particular moods are privileged for such revelations. Most are instantaneous, few last, very few remain. There is a lot of difference between man and man in this respect. Someone has more revelatory power than others. One has more sense, the other more intelligence for it. In the second case you will always remain exposed to its delicate light, while in the first you will have only alternating but clearer and more varied illuminations. "
If the daily experience touches these irradiation in their poetic evasion, however, there are moments of the year and states of mind in which abandoning the consciousness at its twilight allows the emergence of these lights on the horizon of the world.
Even the aura in the West has not completely disappeared: it appears fleetingly in some circumstances of instantaneous duration where a correspondence is created between a premonition, an internal image and external reality, or more rarely, when the superimposition between an archetype and perception arouses sudden illuminations. Elements that were separated in time and space suddenly find themselves reunited in a meaningful coincidence.
Scholastic philosophers used to remember a metaphor: the angels, who are out of the river of time, from time to time dip a foot into it. When the synchronic event occurs we feel an angelic footprint in our world. Even Schopenhauer in his Transcendent Meditations on the apparent purpose of individual destiny, fascinated by the subject, he concluded is when the wakefulness shows coincidences without cause and effect, but rich in meaning, it becomes one with the dream.
Synchronicities, in the expression of a secret analogical bond with nature, signal the irruption of an archetype and generate a numinous aura. Its glow reminds us of the existence of a hidden truth that has lifted its veil for an instant and hits us with a ray.Β As Zolla recalls, "archetype" is basically a learned and metaphysical word for what the imaginers once called "archangel". Whoever pays more attention to his inner life is more sensitive in grasping these epiphanies and at the same time looking for them as nourishment for the soul.
But it is the very fate of the aura to manifest its diaphanous and ineffable nature, always on the verge of fading and dissolving. Not surprisingly, when the primordial Being, Prajapati, he became fervent and created living beings, from him, exhausted and hot, the Aura rose, splendid, shining and anxious. Seeing her so splendid, shining and anxious, the gods targeted her and robbed her of everything.
Bibliography:
- Alain De Benoist and Thomas Molnar, The eclipse of the sacred, the books of the Borghese
- Carl Gustav JungΒ Psychology and alchemy.Β Stamped Boringhieri.
- Elemire Zolla, Auras. Places and rituals. Marsilius.
- Gilles Lipovetsky, Jean Serroy. The aestheticization of the world. Sellerio publisher Palermo.
- Mircea Eliade. Mephistopheles and the androgyne. Mediterranean Editions.
- Mircea Eliade. The sacred and the profane. Stamped Boringhieri.
- Novalis. Philosophical work volume 1. Einaudi.
- Rudolph Otto. The sacred. SELF.
- Walter Benjamin. Aura and shock. Essays on media theory. Small Einaudi library.