Realisation-from Seeing to Understanding: The Origins of Art by Julian Spalding

Author:Julian Spalding [Spalding, Julian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781908524461
Publisher: Wilmington Square Books
Published: 2015-03-15T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Veil

Our next perception of the universe was triggered by something we couldn’t see. Zoroaster, a priest who lived in Persia about three thousand years ago, argued that if heaven was our reward for leading a good life on earth, we had to be free down here to choose between good and bad. Free will separated us from the animals, who couldn’t tell right from wrong, and placed us all on the same level with an equal potential to become saints or sinners. Zoroaster’s world was flat and, for the first time, everyone, whether kings or peasants, men or women, stood shoulder to shoulder on the same level under the celestial dome.

The price of this new freedom and equality was a sense of loss. Free will cut us off from heaven. We must have come from there, for we alone among the animals had a grasp of what was good, but clearly we’d fallen from this state of grace because of some sin we’d committed in the past. The concept of guilt wormed its way into our spirit. All our suffering on earth was explained: life was a punishment, literally a death sentence, and each one of us was on our own, left to make the best of it. The only hope we had was the gift we’d been given of free will, a drop of invisible starlight in our hearts and minds which we came to call our soul.

Souls were pure, translucent essences, as distinct from flesh, blood and bone, Zoroaster argued, as fire is from the wood on which it burns. His teachings were a moral system based on the worship of light and fire. It was the purity in the flames, he said, that made them rise to heaven. Cremation was outlawed among his followers because burning flesh would corrupt fire. The Zoroastrians left their dead to be eaten by vultures in round Towers of Silence built high on the tops of hills. A few of these are still in use in India, though their future is at risk since vultures are becoming increasingly scarce. The bodies lying in them were arranged in circles, children near the centre, then women, with men on the outer ring, an emulation of the rotating stars, the moon and sun, ranked according to the strength of their shining. Goodness and truth, Zoroastrians believed, made the human soul glow more brightly. In the world’s first egalitarian schools, they taught their children the importance of truthfulness, alongside cooking and sewing for girls and riding and shooting for boys.

Belief in free will spread rapidly, but despite the Zoroastrians’ attempt to promote a degree of sexual equality, old hierarchies persisted in most societies. Men increasingly came to accept that women had souls, and eagerly anticipated their attendance in heaven, but they didn’t allow them free will. Women, until modern times, were considered to be instinctive creatures, nearer to nature, incapable of logical thought and rational judgement and therefore not fully responsible for their actions. Women existed on a lower rung, to be guided by and to obey their masters.

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