The Serpent's Wisdom

This post brought to you by the Thievery Corporation, who started their latest album Radio Retaliation with "Sound the Alarm," a collaboration with Sleepy Wonder:

Sound the alarm, order the attack
Selassie I soldiers beat Babylon back.

There's a lot of meaning in that beyond the historical reference, though we can start there. In 1928, Ras Tafari Makonnen was crowned King of Ethiopia and he assumed the royal name Haile Selassie I. Ethiopia was then one of only two independent nations in Africa, and many in Africa and the African diaspora saw the crowning of Selassie I as representing African resistance to the European colonial scheme.

In 1935 Benito Mussolini, who aspired to be the ruler of a new Roman Empire, invaded Ethiopia. It's hard to think of this as a "war"; Italian casualties were somewhere between 355 and 500, while Ethiopian casualties were in the order of 275,000. The colonial powers of Europe approved and recognized the occupation and annexation of Ethiopia in 1936 by the Italian Empire. Selassie I, in exile in England, warned Europe: "It is us today. It will be you tomorrow." Three years later saw the start of World War Two; and in 1941 British and Free French forces helped Ethopian troops liberate Ethiopia.

On one level the song is about these historical events, and on another level it is about the larger context of Africa shaking off the colonial powers. It also echoes the present day anti-neo-colonialist movement.

On yet another level, the song is a profession of the Rastafari worldview. "Babylon" is a generic name for empire (taken from those parts of Jewish scripture written after forced exile in Babylon) in a way that blends political reality with religious worldview. In this view all empires are the same; and all emperors, while they may have conflicts with one another, recognize each other as the powers that control the world's businesses, governments, and institutions.

Because my awareness of this worldview started with my investigations of ancient middle eastern Gnosticism, I still think of this as the gnostic view of political reality: worldly rulers are seen as shadows of demigod archons, whose empire over the earth is all-reaching; the faces may change, emperors may be deposed, but the numinous nature of Empire casts a permanent shadow on the human soul, and dominance will always resurface. Resistance against Empire is therefore not just political rebellion, but a challenge to the very concept of fate and to the notion that human nature is forevermore shaped by the desire to dominate others by force when possible. But this view is more than "gnostic": it the response of the religious spirit to the totality of economic and hegemonic domination that exists in the human sphere.

The visage on the album's cover is that of Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the EZLN, and I bring this up to point out that while the song casts resistance to Empire in militaristic terms, the EZLN has actually turned away from the militaristic approach. This is good and necessary because, as the Revolution is beginning to understand, there is no way to defeat the Empire by matching the Empire's violence. When you take up arms "against" the Empire, you become of it, because Empire is rooted in the power you gain by pointing a weapon. For a graphic illustration of this point, I recommend Karin Badt's illuminating interview with a former FARC guerilla who was recruited as a young girl.

Many thanks to queenofhalves who made it possible for me to go to the Museum of Fine Arts on Tuesday! She had two tickets to share and so she and I and queen_of_wands and childling I. (I'm unclear on the relation?) got to see all sorts of interesting old stuff. :)

The museum was too big to take in all at once, so while picnicing on the lawn we talked to see which parts were most interesting. We all agreed that what held the most fascination for us was the ancient material, so we decided to focus on the sections of the museum with ancient Egyptian, Nubian, near Eastern, Japanese, Asian, and Islamic art.

Towards the end we also took in Mesoamerican, African, and south Asian art, and a room with musical instruments from various times and places.

One thing that struck me was the three-dimensional intricacy of Indian sculpture. These sculpures utilize three-dimensional negative space in a way one doesn't find in western sculpture. A photographic representation does this sculpture no justice -- it simply has to be seen in person to be fully appreciated.

I also got to see some samples of Mayan hieroglyphic writing up close! One of the listed interests on my info page about which I think I've never posted before is Mayan hieroglyphs. The Maya developed a pictorial writing system which, like the Japanese system of writing, combined unique glyphs for people, places, and things with grammatical glyphs marking noun and verb modifiers and a syllabic system for representing the sound of a word. Over 800 glyphs have so far been identified, but interpretation thereof remains an imprecise art because the Spaniards destroyed so many Mayan artifacts, and no one among the present day Maya read or speak the classical Mayan language. Even so, amazing progress has been made in learning to read ancient Mayan.

The Mayan hieroglyphs are captivating, though, because of their intricacy. Whereas most other hieroglyphic and pictographic systems are notable for their parsimony of form and stylized abstraction, Mayan writing was stylized without becoming abstract or parsimonious. It's believed that parsimony and abstraction in pictographic writing is something that develops over centuries, and it seems that classical Mayan civilization did not last that long. (Some sort of economic collapse befell the Maya long before the Spanish arrived; most probably, their population boomed to a level the land couldn't support.)

So, Mayan writing is made of pictures of recognizable woven baskets, heads and faces, animals, bugs, even rather gruesome elements like severed hands.

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There are also some excellent pages on Mayan writing:

John Montgomery's Dictionary of Maya Hieroglyphs
Mayan Hieroglyphic Writing
Omniglot's article on Mayan Script
MesoAmerican Writing Systems