Other books by Helen Martineau

On the Inside: An Intimate Portrait of Sheila Florance(2005)

Marriages of the Magdalene(to be published 2016)

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Prodigal Daughters

A NEW VISION OF SPIRITUALITY AND THE INNER HISTORIES OF THE ARTS

HELEN MARTINEAU

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Copyright © 2015 by Helen Martineau. Library of Congress Control Number: 2015910645ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-5035-0594-0

Softcover 978-1-5035-0593-3eBook 978-1-5035-0592-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced ortransmitted in any form or by any means, electronic ormechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by anyinformation storage and retrieval system, without permission inwriting from the copyright owner. Cover illustration Dances in the Wheel of the Cosmos by MonicaBisits Designed and typeset by Helen Christie Rev. date: 07/17/2015 Xlibris1-800-455-039www.Xlibris.com.au714957

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

Why I Wrote ‘Prodigal Daughters’. What it is About

PART ONE: THE ARTS AND US – A DYNAMIC RELATIONSHIP

1 :The arts and our twenty-first century crisis: howcan they help?

A fountain of inspiration; Reading the ‘signs of thetimes’; In genuine art we are looking at deeprevelation; Personal and archetypal consciousness; Dowe really value the arts? What is art really about? Howthe artist reveals spirit; When the artist becomes aprophet; Art needs a responsive audience; Opening oureyes to take in the big picture; The work belongs to all.

2: Macrocosm and microcosm – how the fullness ofour human nature connects with the archetypalsources of art

Behind the artistic drive – the difficulty in accessingour inner nature; The inner life of the soul; Thecomplex world of the fourfold human being; How thefour levels are organised on earth and in relation to thehigher worlds; Cosmos, self and the arts – on knowingthe macrocosmic-microcosmic connection; Thearchetypal source of the arts; On metaphysical maps –mapping the relationship between macrocosm andmicrocosm as expressed in the arts.

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3: Interweaving threads – as human consciousnessevolves the arts travel with us

An inside-out history; Charting the evolution ofconsciousness; The first arts – communal andindispensable; The coming of agriculture and the sunmysteries; City states and divine rulers; Learning tothink philosophically and intellectually; Towards the‘consciousness soul’; This world has the answers?Personal vision, deep-seated longing.

PART TWO: THE ARTS IN THEIR GLORIOUS DIVERSITY

4: Architecture and sculpture – how to rediscover theforms of the sacred

Building for us; The earliest architecture; Temples ofspiritual power; Places of worship that welcomeeveryone; Our own space; But shouldn’t form followfunction? A revolutionary geometry; So many choicesfor today’s architect; Domestic buildings; Sculpture –visual art in three dimensions; How we experiencesculpture; Nourishing forms in nourishing spaces –bringing them home.

5: The two-dimensional visual arts – reflections ofheavenly light

Visual art doesn’t have to replicate what’s before oureyes; The problem of trying to make two dimensionsbecome three; The importance of colour; Colour andlight; Spiritual colour gives the meaning; The attributesof colours; Artists explore the potency of light andcolour; Line and drawing; Democratising ‘big art’ untilpictures find a place in any home; Photography;Pictures that move within their frame; Totally machine

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art; What of the prophetic? There’s alwayscontroversy; As the world opens up.

6: Music – the food of loveOtherworldly music; Music is about us; Pythagoras andthe cosmic laws; Greek modes and their ongoinginfluence; Intervals and their meaning; Further intomusic for the consciousness soul; Musical instrumentsand spiritual archetypes; Music for the I AM; Timbrerevisited in new ways; Song; Troubadours then andnow; Recording and more.

7: Dance, drama and Dionysian powerDeep entertainment; Dance – why it is more thanmovement; Seeing the dance; The dancer’s body is likea musical instrument; The evolution of dance; Dance isalso inherently sexy; From personal display torevolutionary moves; On improvisation and the searchfor meaning; Drama – a mirror on our world? All kindsof drama on all kinds of screens; Secrets of Dionysus –towards live drama; From Mystery to the stage inGreece; ‘The Play’s the thing…’; The actor; Deadly orholy theatre?

8: The art of the word – when the Logos speaksthrough us

Our repertoire of heavenly and earthly sounds; The artof poetic language; The birth of poetry; Poetryseparates from drama; Reclaiming the lyrical; OnStorytelling; Big story – the novel; Grammar is goodmedicine for us; Symbols and signs and the loss ofmeaning; Persuading or manipulating – two poles ofthe same technique; Learning to speak art-fully.

PART THREE

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SEEDS OF THE FAR FUTURE ARE BEING PLANTED NOW

9: The creative process – what artists know; thecreativity we all need

A unique ability to be consciously creative; Threespiritual qualities of creativity; The artist examines thecreative process; The cycle of creativity – firstbeingness; The cycle of creativity – onward from pointto point; The part played by the senses; Making gooduse of our senses; Moving beyond the senses; Whencreativity fails; The questions we need to ask.

10: What now? Where next? – Crises, dilemmas andredemptive possibilities

Change is in the air; An existential crisis? Let’s slowdown a bit; Anything can be art? Anyone can be anartist? A shift towards arts democracy; Postmoderntrends; Calling up music from the underworld; What ifthe arts slide into non-arts disciplines? The harmonioustrinity of human expression – on their breakings andreunitings.

11: Towards integral consciousness and deepeninginner unity

Embracing possibilities – or closing them down;Looking inward to open up the future; Communicatingfrom the Self and awakening empathy; Crossings –underlying archetypal connections and a feeling forinner relationships; Towards unity – links through thelanguage of artistic elements – rhythm, shape/form,space, time, force and dynamics; The connection withour will, thinking and feeling; Our senses can cross theborders; The deepening of art – entering within; We arethe arbiters – developing a genuine aesthetic; The

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artistic journey – a road for us all.

ENDNOTES

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

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To Mario

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IntroductionWHY I WROTE ‘PRODIGAL DAUGHTERS’. WHAT IT ISABOUT

This work grew out of my lifelong love affair with thearts. As a child I wrote poems and stories, includingwhat might now be called graphic novels, for myfriends (which compensated rather well for not beinggood at ball games). The idea of being a writer faded inadulthood. That is until thirty years later when I startedwriting seriously and became a published author.Childhood ballet lessons, which became the source fordramatic dance compositions in the living room to thefew LPs my parents owned, did lead to professionaltraining, performance and choreography. I alsoundertook a diploma in visual arts and studied literaturein my university degree. I pulled this all together andtaught arts subjects in schools and creative movementfreelance with diverse populations. Music found aspecial place in my heart when I learnt to play guitarand sang in a choir. Drama? That occurred mainly byproxy – I often worked with actors and was married formany years to a film and theatre director. Over thismulti-faceted journey the arts have crept into mybloodstream and still live there.

I know that good art in all its forms can move peopledeeply. Without the experience I feel bereft. Yet

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something else led me to ask: Why art? This was thelonging to comprehend the meaning, or meanings, ofour existence – or at least give it a try. In my twenties Ilived in a four-hundred-year-old house in the north ofEngland, complete with a far more ancient well in thecellar and a ghost in the attic. We were two families, allof us good friends. One summer afternoon we sippedour wine beneath the venerable trees in the gardencontemplating big issues of birth and death andeverything in between, as one does. My friend startedsinging Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock, and followed up bydeclaring, ‘That’s us, stardust, billions of years old.We’re part of the earth, part of the universe and whenwe die the molecules we are made of merge back intothe earth. That makes us eternal. Simple.’

The notion of webs of interconnection and unbrokenwholeness is ancient. It hangs on despite plenty ofopposition. It has been proposed as a theory from theancient Greek philosophers to our time by unorthodoxtheoretical physicist David Bohm and biochemistRupert Sheldrake.

I accepted the soundness of these ideas, which oftenimply a more than physical connectedness, whilehankering for that ‘aha’ moment when everythingclicks, the epiphany that means you ‘know’ in aprofound way. It led me to delve into variousmetaphysical philosophies. In 1984 in a Buddhisticframe of mind I went trekking in Nepal, a north-westerly route towards Machapuchare, a beautifulunclimbed peak sacred to the Nepalis. The local people

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were delightful and welcoming, the lofty Annapurnaranges were unbelievably stunning and separation fromcivilization had loosened up everyone in our smallparty. I kept a journal rather than taking photos and itcontained a series of small epiphanies, more or less likethis:

The silence was a palpable hum. The song of themountains. Exhaustion and an overpowering senseof the majesty around made me burst into tears.Sitting weeping on a rock ledge while themountains stood, impassive, I felt my tiny part inthe everlasting surge of creation and destructionthat was more than my senses could fathom.

The spare and refined air had heightened my intuitionof a mystery that was life-affirming. But back at workoffering more artistic activities for people to enjoy, Ibegan to wonder. The arts live in our worldly sensesand yet they too can invoke a feeling for that mysterybeyond the senses. In this lies their potential to unite uswith a larger whole. But how? Could there be a spirit ofart, some universal arts impulse? If so why do we havethe motivation to create such a diversity of art forms?And what is going on in our experience of them?

These were challenging new questions for me yet theopportunity to address them opened up in the veryasking. Within two months I had encountered MarioSchoenmaker who had founded a centre which grew outof the 1970s human potential movement. It was also

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home to an unconventional church, called the Church ofthe Mystic Christ. This community included a collegewith studies based on mysticism and esotericism acrossages and cultures, along with Mario’s own inspiringvision of a life lived in harmony with the spiritualaspect of self. It wasn’t a doctrinaire place and theteaching embraced freedom of expression andcomplexity rather than the simplistic answers thatconfine so many human systems, religious or secular.My years there were personally transforming. What Ilearnt also gave me the means to explore the art formsas an avenue of human expression here in the world thatembraces the profound dimensions of the spiritual.

I studied formally in the college and graduated withan honours diploma. Subsequently I was employed bythe college and designed and taught a course, TheSpiritual Significance of the Arts, which built on thediploma study. In addition articles I wrote on differentart forms were published.

That period came to an end with Mario’s death in1997. This book is a further development of my workduring those years. The need for such expansion wasobvious when I had another look at my study andcourse notes. It’s a given that learning never finishes,and the arts are an ever evolving adventure in awonderful and very important field of humanachievement.

I have not attempted a critical academic study, or acomprehensive survey in the manner of historians likeE.H. Gombrich or Kenneth Clark. Rather, the task I set

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myself was to explore different themes and to call onselected artists in various fields – works I havepersonally experienced or others which illustrate thedeeper purposes behind the art forms. Central to myapproach is the hypothesis that artistic creation involvesspiritual activity and that this metaphysical dimensiongives depth to our appreciation of the arts.

This is not about ‘spiritual art’, which is a misnomer.There’s religious art, yes, but more germane to the artistis the spirit in which he or she works.

In what follows I investigate the nature of that ‘spirit’and how artists have approached the spiritual in theirartworks. My aim has been to back up the propositionthat there is an imaginative, inspirational and intuitiveworld, a metaphysical dimension within our humanconsciousness available to every artist in any field.Inherent in this is the understanding that this dimension,inaccessible to ordinary sense consciousness, is as realas anything physical. The value of the arts as I havecome to understand them is that they create a bridgebetween the two worlds and give us a genuine feelingfor things beyond everyday consciousness, things thatcould not be conveyed in any other way than bysymbols in images, sounds, shapes and movements.

I also hope to bring the value of the arts closer tohome. I am convinced of their direct relationship to ourlives in the world. The creative process involved inmaking genuine art comes from a wholeheartedcreativity we can all apply in most aspects of our lives.As well, because of their distinctive nature I agree with

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countless practising artists who believe that the arts canplay a redemptive role, helping in lifting us out of themire of our deeply troubled world.

Although I drew on many sources in my initialresearch, the finished work has become my personalstory about the artistic and spiritual interconnection. Ihope you will enjoy the subject as much as I haveenjoyed writing about it. Helen Martineau

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