The Anathemata
Rite and Fore-time (continued)
Chthonic?a why yes
but mother of us.
Then it is these abundant uberab, here, under the species of worked lime-rock, that gave suck to the lord? She that they already venerate (what other could they?)
her we declare?
Who else?1
And see how they run, the juxtaposed forms, brighting the vaults of Lascaux; how the linear is wedded to volume, how they do, within, in an unbloody manner, under the forms of brown haematite and black manganese on the graved lime-face, what is done, without,
far on the windy tundra
at the kill
that the kindred may have life.
O God!
O the Academies!c
David Jones notes
1 The reference is to the first work of plastic art in-the-round known to us, the little limestone sculpture just over four inches high, of very ample proportions, known as the Venus of Willendorf. It is dated, I believe, as contemporary with some of the recently discovered Lascaux cave-paintings, and is of the same Aurignacian culture of 20-25,000 BC. If it is a ‘Venus’ it is very much a Venus Genetrix, for it emphasizes in a very emphatic manner the nutritive and generative physiognomy. It is rather the earliest example of a long sequence of mother —figures, earth-mothers and mother goddesses, that fuse in the Great Mother of settled civilizations-not yet, by a long, long way, the Queen of Heaven, yet, nevertheless, with some of her attributes; in that it images the generative and the fruitful and the sustaining, at however primitive and elementary, or, if you will, ‘animal’ a level; though it is slovenly to use the word ‘animal’ of any art-form, for the making of such forms belongs only to man.
additional notes
c DJ writes: ‘... but my outcry “‘O the Academies” was, so to say, automatic when I considered the art of these men of the Aurignacian culture & hunters on the tundra and the depiction in the inmost caves of the animals hunted, the artists being rather as mass-priests in the sense of making artefactions that would literally aid by their work the strenuous and dangerous work of the hunters far on the ringing tundra. For if they failed there would be no life-giving food to sustain the tribe; in short, the work on the tundra and the work within the limestone caverns were essential to the life of that culture, whereas the “Academies”, broadly speaking, [were] hardly a necessity [to] folk, but cultivated an art patronised by a “civilisation” [DJ uses the word, following Spengler, in contrast with “culture”] at a certain phase of its development, an Art which, at its best, could be of much beauty .. . Your feeling that the words “O God! O the Academies!” had some echo of Maritain or something French might well be based on some forgotten thing. But, for me, writing this I suppose in 1947 or 1948 in Mr Carlile’s house on Harrow Hill, they come as a natural exclamation, but that does not rule out a forgotten connection within the mind of the 1920’s or 30’s when Maritain was more in our minds.’ (The connection is with Maritain’s treatment of artist and artisan, and the elevation (with the Academies) into fine arts of what had in antiquity and the Schools been regarded as servile arts; see Art et Scolastique, pp. 70, 272-5 (pp. 62, 137-40 of John O’Connor’s translation, read by DJ.). [quoted by Hague, p. 48-9.]
see also
The theme of the tundra wanderers returns on page 62.
semantic structures
glossary
achthonic: dwelling in or beneath the earth.
bubera: plural of Latin uber, teat.
comments
who else: this is an anticipation of the ‘how else’ theme which begins on page 74.
‘under the species of bread and wine’ is a traditional Catholic phrase for the elements of the Eucharist which DJ would have been familiar with.