Craven Images

Any time our home state, Oklahoma, gets itself into the news it's always for something either horrific, or vaguely embarrassing! This time, thankfully, it's the latter. It's a variation on the old controversy about depictions of The Ten Commandments being displayed in State buildings or on State property. If I recall correctly The Ten are displayed in the foyer of a public building in our town - the courthouse, I think. I remember doing a "tsk tsk" as I walked past last time we were in there. It wouldn't rankle half as much if those displaying The Ten would live up to 'em. "Thou shalt not kill!" that one didn't take, did it? And what about the warning against graven images - could it not be argued that a sculpture or any display of The Ten is nothing more than a graven image?

This latest news has a lighter side to it - it's another "if you didn't laugh you'd cry" moment. From The Daily Mail:

Satan worshipers want 7-foot-tall statue of devil put at Oklahoma state Capitol

The New York-based Satanic Temple formally submitted its application to a panel that oversees the Capitol grounds. The application includes an artist's rendering of Satan as Baphomet, a goat-headed figure with horns, wings and a long beard. They want it to sit where a Ten Commandments monument sat in 2012. In the rendering, Satan is sitting in a pentagram-adorned throne with smiling children next to him.......................

The push by the Satanic Temple has rankled elected leaders in this conservative state known as the buckle of the Bible Belt, who say such a proposal would never be approved by the commission.

'I think you've got to remember where you are. This is Oklahoma, the middle of the heartland,' said Don Armes, Republican representative for Faxon.

'I think we need to be tolerant of people who think different than us, but this is Oklahoma, and that's not going to fly here.'

While Greaves acknowledges the Satanic Temple's effort is in part to highlight what it says is hypocrisy of state leaders in Oklahoma, he says the group is serious about having a monument placed there.

Wonder how it'd go down if I put in an application to have a sculpture in the Capitol grounds depicting the ecliptic with signs of the zodiac ?

Talk of the Devil.......

In some recent "news" History Channel's current series "The Bible" has been criticised for their depiction of Satan. Apparently the actor involved has a passing resemblance to President Obama. Alright.....I'll stop myself from expanding upon that thought just now, and instead will wander along the secondary pathway it opened up: where did commonly held ideas of the physical appearance of Satan / the Devil originate?

An immediate thought shot me back to a novel I read last year: Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End. Oddly the part of the book which has most clearly remained in memory was the explanation of why humans have kept the commonly accepted picture of "the devil" or demons embedded in communal memory - the winged horned cleft-footed nasty - you know the one. Towards the closing chapters of Childhood's End it is explained by Rashaverak (one of the alien Overlords) to Jan, a character who has spend many years away from Earth and arrives back to find it much changed, and not much longer for the universe. The average Overlord, by the way, is much taller and more strongly built than a human, with large wings, horns on its head, and a barbed tail. Their appearance had, for many centuries, remained hidden from humans. Rashaverak revealed why the Overlords look so much like the Devil to the human eye. The reason is not, as many humans had guessed, that the Overlords had visited Earth in the past. Instead, it was a kind of collective precognition: the human race had a vague premonition, a foreshadowing, of its ultimate demise, and a creature looking like the Devil would be involved. That creature, it turned out, was Karellen, the Overlord.

The real explanation (or is it?) is that the horns and tail are derived from pagan lore which had, in turn, come about via Greek and Roman mythology: the Satyr, the god Pan provided horns, hooves and tail; the pitchfork he's often depicted carrying likely came from the two-pronged sceptre of Pluto, the King of Hell. Pagan gods were routinely demonised by the early Christian church in an effort to entice new converts, as well as restraining those already within "the flock" from falling back into the old ways.

Hat tip to Book Drum for the illustration.

Reverting to that mentioned in the first paragraph: this isn't the first time, actually it's probably one of many times, a President/Prime Minister has been linked to thoughts of Satan. In a rather different thought pattern Frankie Boyle, a Scottish comedian, once said of Britain's then Prime Minister: "For 3 million pounds you could give everyone in Scotland a shovel, and we could dig a hole so deep we could hand her over to Satan in person".

The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance;
We find delight in the most loathsome things;
Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings,
And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance.
~ Charles Baudelaire.