The Reality of Casas Grandes Potters: Realistic Portraits of Spirits and Shamans

Most Native American groups believed in a form of animism in which spirit essence(s) infused forces of nature (e.g., the wind and thunder), many living plants and creatures, and many inanimate objects. This animism created other-than-human persons in which spirits were fused with matter that allowed them to interact with and even influence humans. Art in Western culture tends to denote “imagination”, and many scholars studying Native American art bring a similar perspective to their analyses. However, many Native Americans do not equate art with imagination in the same way, but instead use art to realistically portray these other-than-human persons, even when they are not typically visible in the natural world (e.g., the Southwestern horned-plumed serpent). Here, we apply a cognitive framework to evaluate the interplay of spirits at various levels that were created as Casas Grandes artisans used art as a means of depicting the inherent structure of the Casas Grandes spirit world. In doing so, they created links between ceremonially important objects such as pots and spirits that transformed these objects into newly created animated beings. The art thus simultaneously reflected the structure of the unseen world while also helping to determine the characteristics of these newly created other-than-human persons. One technique commonly used was to decorate objects with literal depictions of spirit beings (e.g., horned-plumed serpents) that would produce a natural affinity among the ceremonial objects and the spirit creatures. This affinity in turn allowed the animated ceremonial objects to mediate the interaction between humans and spirits. This approach transcends a view in which Casas Grandes art is considered symbolically significant and instead emphasizes the art as a component that literally helped create other-than-human collaborators that aided Casas Grandes people as they navigate ontologically significant relationships.

Gesamtkunstwerk

Lawrence’s engagement with a remarkable range of arts is demonstrated throughout this Companion; this chapter considers the extent to which he brought aspects of these various arts into play within single artworks, notably in Women in Love and The Plumed Serpent. The Gesamtkunstwerk (or total artwork) is usually associated with Wagner, whose influence disseminated through Nietzsche and the German Expressionists into a modernism that sought to engage all the senses at once. Yet, despite its totalising potential, the Gesamtkunstwerk consists of separate artistic media that struggle for coherence or supremacy, and thus it also works to fragment and loosen form, as illustrated by Lawrence’s most experimental works of the 1920s. This chapter considers Lawrence in the context of his German contemporaries ‒ Brecht, Kandinsky, Mann and Schoenberg ‒ and how the paradoxes inherent in the totalising and non-totalising potential of the Gesamtkunstwerk influenced his ambivalent attitudes to society as a form of brotherhood.

“After all, anybody is as their land and air is … ”

Both Robert Frost and Gertrude Stein confront the need for belonging with a certain American ambivalence, one that can also be found in the novelistic tradition, but their complicated attitudes toward the land of their birth puts the English attitude that we find in George Eliot in sharp relief. The English novel after George Eliot turns increasingly to what has been called questions of agro-romantic values. The chapter looks specifically at such values in Thomas Hardy (Tess of the d’Urbervilles); Joseph Conrad (Lord Jim); D. H. Lawrence (The Rainbow and The Plumed Serpent); E. M. Forster (Howards End and A Passage to India); and Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts).

Author’s Transformations and Their Translation In “The Plumed Serpent” By D.H. Lawrence

The article is devoted to the analysis of phraseological units (hereinafter referred to as PU) with author’s transformation found in “The Plumed Serpent” by D.H. Lawrence, the peculiarities of their translation into Russian are also considered. Phraseological units with the author’s transformations are analyzed in accordance with the classification of the latter developed by leading linguists from the Kazan Linguistic School. Each type of the author’s transformation of PU was illustrated by numerous examples from the given piece of literature in the original language, as well as in the language of translation. Each case of translation was classified as for the used translation techniques, preservation of the author’s transformation of PU and retaining the original figurativeness of the statements; English-Russian versions of PU were compared thoroughly. The result of such an analysis enabled us to estimate the quality of Russian translation of “The Plumed Serpent” by D.H.Lawrence, done by an official translator Valeriy Minushin.

Chivo expiatorio, intercambio sacrificial, violencia y corporalidad

Este texto desarrolla una reflexión de la relación entre culto, celebración y sustituto sacrificial en la fundación del tiempo-espacio humano. Para ello, se recurre a la novela de D. H. Lawrence The Plumed Serpent (La Serpiente Emplumada), donde se retrata una corrida de toros. Para leer este fragmento de la novela, el argumento que articula el texto tiene como soporte enunciativo el concepto de chivo expiatorio de René Girard, el de fetiche desarrollado por Auguste Comte y el análisis de Michel Serres sobre el intercambio sacrificial que le da sustrato a toda práctica social humana.

When God Was a Bird

At one time, God was a bird. In ancient Egypt, Thoth was the Ibis-headed divinity of magic and wisdom. Winged divine beings—griffins and harpies—populated the pantheon of Greek antiquity, and Quetzalcoatl was the plumed serpent deity of the pre-Columbian Aztecs. It is said that in spite of—or better, to spite—this time-honored wealth of divine avifauna, Christianity divorced God from the avian world in order to defend a pure form of monotheism. This narrative, however, misses the startling scriptural portrayals of God as the beaked and feathered Holy Spirit, the third member of the Trinity who, alongside the Father and Son, is the “animal God” of historic Christian witness. Appearing as a winged creature at the time of Jesus’ baptism (Luke 3:21-22), the bird-God of the New Testament signals the deep grounding of archi-original biblical faith in the natural world. This book calls this new but ancient vision of the world “Christian animism” in order to signal the continuity of biblical religion with the beliefs of indigenous and non-Western communities that Spirit enfleshes itself within everything that grows, walks, flies, and swims in and over the Earth. To this end, it weaves together philosophy (Heidegger, Girard), theology (Augustine, Hildegard, Muir), and the author’s own birdwatching visitations (wood thrush, pileated woodpecker, great blue heron, American dipper, domestic pigeon) to argue that all things are alive with sacred personhood and worthy of human beings’ love and protection in a time of ecocidal, even deicidal, climate change.