It is very likely that art is a child of the sacred. It shares in the numinous sensations of religion and, as a result, art and religion are intertwined in a profoundly intimate manner. It is unclear, however, whether one can be called the origin of the other. It is possible that the sacred does not discriminate and has origins even deeper than its children.
We do not know who the first artists were, but there is some record of them from the dawn of behavioral modernity. There are stone and occasionally wooden statuettes, as well as the famous paintings on the walls of caves and other stone formations. Debate continues, as it always does, on the precise nature of these works and the role they played in the unknowable societies of our ancestors.
A famous wooden statue of a lion-headed man, for example, may simply be a fantastical chimera. On the other hand, it may have been a totemic object of great religious significance—perhaps an idol of some unknown Paleolithic god. As we know from the civilization of ancient Egypt, the oldest gods were very often syntheses of the human and the animal.
The famous “venus” figurines of the female torso and genitalia are equally ambiguous. Some believe they are representations of a great mother goddess; others posit that they may be the Stone Age equivalent of today’s commercial pornography.
Cave paintings are, at first glance, a less ambiguous phenomenon. The best of them are purely representational, which implies a solely aesthetic motivation. At the same time, however, their locations are onerous to access, precluding the possibility of general exhibition. This could indicate a monastic, ritualistic, or shamanistic motive. It has been theorized that these paintings represent a kind of magic of the hunt, in which power over the beasts could be seized by the act of depicting them.
Nonetheless, the aesthetic quality of these prehistoric works demonstrates a level of artistry that goes beyond the purely ritualistic. It implies an attention to the medium in and of itself, something characteristic of the aesthetic alone.
On the question of origins, then, it would seem that there are two possibilities: The aesthetic or the ritualistic. That is to say, we must ask whether art began as art and became religion; or whether religion began as religion and became art. This is further complicated by the fact that art has always contained a measure of the sacred and religion a measure of the aesthetic.
It is possible that the origins of art lie in the religious. The process would be a simple one: As the construction of totemic objects became more sophisticated over time, their creators became increasingly concerned with their aesthetic quality. That is, with the medium itself, to the point that concerns of a religious nature receded over time until they became wholly irrelevant.
This is an evolutionary theory, however, and as such it stands or falls on the gradual nature of the process. This means that it fails to take into account the role played by transcendent genius. As we know from the history of recent centuries, art does not always “evolve.” It often emerges in full, apparently in an instant, at the hands of a practitioner who deranges tradition so radically as to bring about a permanent change in its trajectory.
Moreover, the possible role played by transcendent genius in the origins of art forces one to ask a similar question about the emergence of religion: Was religion born from the gradual coalescence of instinctual communal beliefs over the course of centuries? Or were entire pantheons created out of whole cloth by singular persons? One need only point out the extraordinary role played by prophets in the monotheistic tradition and the rhapsodes of the Grecian myths to understand the importance of this query.
Putting the prophet aside for the moment, the role of the rhapsode complicates matters even further. Did these artists not only recite but also create the great myths? Was Greek religion forged by artists rather than priests or oracles?
There are strong indications that the answer is no. One can look, for example, to the greatest of all the rhapsodes: It is clear that when he came to compose and sing his tales of Troy and Odysseus, Homer was inspired by pre-existent and long-established myths. To the extent that these myths dealt with the gods, they were self-evidently religious traditions that were already ancient in Homer’s time. Indeed, Homer is infused throughout with the sacred, from the gifts and curses of the gods to Achilles and Cassandra to the direct intervention of Athena and Poseidon to Odysseus’ great descent into the underworld. Odysseus’ entire ordeal, in fact, is a result of his impiety, while the Trojan War is set in motion by Paris’ conduct as judge of a divine competition.
Moreover, while they were compiled, studied, read, and sung to exhaustion, the Homeric epics never actually became religious texts. They were not the Bible of the classical world, as they are sometimes described, mainly because they never became truly ritualized. They might have been sung at sacred events, but they were not directly used to evoke, praise or placate the gods. The epics remained firmly in the realm of the aesthetic.
Greek tragedy presents a similar but much more complicated case, in that it is difficult to discern whether it originated in religion or aesthetics. In favor of the former, one can note Aristotle’s theory in The Poetics that the first intimations of the tragedy came through the dithyrambs—ecstatic ritual hymns to the god Dionysus.
“Tragedy—as also comedy—was at first mere improvisation,” the philosopher wrote. “The one originated with the authors of the dithyramb, the other with those of the phallic songs, which are still in use in many of our cities.”
Tragedy evolved via a process that “advanced by slow degrees; each new element that showed itself was in turn developed. Having passed through many changes, it found its natural form”—the tragedy—“and there it stopped.”
Aristotle cited further important innovations, stating, “Aeschylus first introduced a second actor; he diminished the importance of the chorus, and assigned the leading part to the dialogue. Sophocles raised the number of actors to three and added scene-painting. Moreover, it was not until late that the short plot was discarded for one of greater compass, and the grotesque diction of the earlier satyric form for the stately manner of tragedy.”
Thus, by the time Aeschylus arrived to define the art form—“and there it stopped”—the initial dithyrambs were unrecognizable. They had lost all but the most rudimentary religious context and, in the form of the tragedy, become a purely aesthetic experience. Indeed, Aeschylus and his successors were often awarded with prizes that were presumably bestowed on purely aesthetic grounds. The process by which the medium came to be valued purely as a medium was complete. Now, the issue was not sanctity but greatness.
The history of the tragedy seems to confirm that art emerges out of religion or at least religious ritual. But this is complicated by the fact that, according to Aristotle, the dithyrambs were “at first mere improvisation.” Thus, while the ecstatic spirituality of the Dionysian festivals may have been the setting and motivation of the dithyramb, the dithyramb’s actual creation was that of an individual in a moment of creative spasm.
This means that the dithyrambs were not ritual incantations that evolved over centuries in the context of a specific religious community. They were created in moments of supreme inspiration and we must imagine that the best of the rhapsodes were of the order of transcendent geniuses.
In the case of Greek tragedy, then, we appear to have an example of art emerging out of art. These were the works of men, not the gods, and they were loved as such and for that reason. The tragedy was an impious art, as Plato noted as his justification for banning it from his perfect city.
As dispositive as this might seem, however, it ultimately leads back to the same dilemma. Because while the dithyrambs were improvised, their raw materials were mostly if not entirely religious in nature. Without the god Dionysus, the rhapsodes would have had nothing to improvise upon. The dithyrambs broke with tradition but were nonetheless based in tradition and could not escape it—nor, one imagines, did the very idea of escaping it occur to the rhapsodes themselves.
What, then, of the question of origins? We can only guess at an answer, because the proofs are mostly lost to primordial time. But religion and art do seem to share at least one common origin: The moment of inspiration. That is, both the gods and the tragedy—the raw materials and the defined form—burst out in sudden and eruptive moments that deranged and disturbed what had come before. In this sense, neither art nor religion can be said to evolve. They are beset by percussive, explosive phenomena that change the trajectory of tradition in a sudden and often drastic manner.
This is not to say that the moment of inspiration itself constitutes a conscious break with tradition or, indeed, a consciousness of tradition at all. The moment of inspiration takes place not only outside of tradition but outside the world. It is alien to context. At the instant of spasm, tradition becomes irrelevant. There is no anxiety of influence.
This is because inspiration is, in its essence, a state of wholly altered consciousness. It is pre-verbal and pre-textual. It need not even consist of imagery. It is only in its translation that such epiphenomena become necessary. Socrates asserted that this was the result of possession by a strange god, but in the god’s foreignness, the inspired man stands other to the world, infused with a sudden and inarticulate revelation.
This state of being strongly resembles the mystical experience. It is quite possible, in fact, that the mystical experience itself is nothing more than a singular form of the moment of inspiration. In understanding the mystical experience, the moment of inspiration may be understood as well.
For example, as William James wrote, one of the defining aspects of the mystical experience is “ineffability.”
“The subject of it immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words,” James asserted. “It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others. In this peculiarity mystical states are more like states of feeling than like states of intellect. No one can make clear to another who has never had a certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it consists.”
James also noted what he calls a “noetic quality” to the mystical experience, saying, “Mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time.”
If the mystical experience is taken as a paradigmatic example, then it would seem that the moment of inspiration constitutes above all a state of altered consciousness. A state that plays the most essential role in the moment of inspiration, sometimes to the point of outright mental illness. In the religious realm, for example, we find the phantasmagoria of Ezekiel the prophet. In the aesthetic realm, the bizarre visions of William Blake. Neither man seems to have been particularly stable, but the raw integrity and power of their visions is undeniable. One senses that, in them, something is true.
Innumerable religious visions and artistic works have taken shape in this realm of tenebrous illumination. But as James noted, the essence of the moment of inspiration is incommunicable. This forces the inspired man to seize upon whatever vocabulary is available in his particular sociocultural milieu in order to achieve a partial and imperfect expression.
Is there an ultimate underlying structure to these altered states of consciousness? Perhaps it is that they are, in essence, a slight derangement of the mind. This derangement is insufficient to collapse the personality, but powerful enough to create the sensation of an alien force, an other presence at work upon and within the psyche. As James put it, “The mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.”
This experience may be terrifying or euphoric, but it is always consistently other. As a result, such experiences can be attributed only to a god (as per Socrates) or some unknowable other consciousness acting upon the self. This other consciousness imparts a specific sensation of the new that contains a revelation that demands expression. The inspired man believes he has received or borne witness to something that is indisputably real and true, and others must be told.
In the religious context, this phenomenon is most prominent and powerful at the founding moment. There, the prophet reveals his truth, which is in turn sensed as true by his followers and derided as falsehood or worse by his opponents. We see the same phenomenon at work in the eruption of sudden heresies or reformist movements. It may also occur in less radical fashion, resulting in theological innovations that can be assimilated into orthodoxy, even as they force a profound change in that orthodoxy. It does so by cultivating the appearance that it has emerged out of the orthodox itself in the form of a new elucidation of the initial revelation. Quite often, however, such revisions constitute radical changes that religious authorities can only institutionalize by declaring that they had always existed from the beginnings of the faith.
The aesthetic form of this phenomenon is not radically different, except inasmuch as aesthetic orthodoxy is rarely as violently guarded as religious orthodoxy. There is no difference in kind; only the type of sanctity is in question. In the religious context, sanctity is associated with a god; in the aesthetic, it is associated with one’s predecessors. Religion trembles only with the creation of new gods or the transformation of old gods. Aesthetics, however, is shaken at the moment when the inspired man is forced to sanctify only the medium; at which point, the predecessors, while not wholly erased, fall away.
Aesthetic inspiration, then, is a matter of ancestors—rhapsodes and dithyrambs. Religious inspiration is a matter of accretions. In both cases, the inspired moment is that which transcends the one or the other.
Given all this, can we finally answer the question of origins? That is, was there a first inspiration from which all the ancestors and accretions emerged?
It is difficult to believe that there was not a first, primordial inspiration or something very much like it. There must have been those who, at the dawn of consciousness, perceived themselves dwarfed by the night sky or the infinite sea and were driven mad; or, at least, were gripped by a vertiginous sense of alteration.
It is not unusual even today for otherwise psychologically healthy human beings to be seized by such sudden passions. These moments can possess all the attributes of clinical psychosis except for the fact that they do not last for any great duration. Out of such momentary revelations of the mystery of the world—and man is the only animal to whom the world is a mystery—may come all attempts to discover that mortal secret, to know the beginning and the end, and emerge intact. All that remains is for the inspired man, restored to his quotidian self but forever changed, to find the imperfect means of expressing the truths he has carried back with him from the other world.