Friday, July 1, 2011

World's Arts and Religions are All Related

Wisdom Quarterly
Messiah, a great pharoah in a lineage of great rulers,*King Tut (copycateffect blog)

The world's great artistic and cultural (particularly sacred mythological/historical texts) borrowed from one another. From prehistory, to ancient Sumeria, to Egypt, to Vedic India, to Buddhism, to Christianity, to our "Western" eclectic cosmopolitan tastes, the similarities are no coincidence. Ancient astronauts (devas) shared much around throughout the planet -- particularly to mystics and shamans wherever they were residing -- leaving behind pyramids to massive stupas visible from space.
The world is interdependent and one.

Maitreya, the Buddha-to-come, from the Tibetan Thiksey monastery in Ladakh, India (allposters.com)

Fjordman Report (Scandinavia) Gatesofvienna
There was...was the heretical Pharaoh Akhenaten in the 14th century BC. The art depicting him and his wife [the great] Nefertiti is quite naturalistic.

It is unlike anything before in Egyptian history and may have been inspired by that of the Minoan culture on the island of Crete -- considered by many to be the first European civilization.

This style is still discernible in objects found in the tomb of Tutankhaten, believed to be son of Akhenaten, who later changed his name to Tutankhamun [King Tut] as the old religion was reestablished.

Even though the artistic legacy of Akhenaten was quickly forgotten, his religious ideas may have proven far more durable. His insistence on worshiping one supreme god, Aten, makes him a pioneer in monotheism. It has been speculated, though disputed by many scholars, that Akhenaten’s ideas may have inspired those of Moses, which led to the creation of Judaism and, by extension, Christianity.


King Tut's Lineage Revealed (witola.com)

The earliest alphabet, the ancestor of nearly every alphabet used around the globe, including -- via Phoenician -- the Greek and the Latin [Indo-European, rooted in Sanskrit] ones, was partly derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs representi
ng syllables.

Greek artists studied and imitated Egyptian art but experimented and decided to look for themselves instead of following any traditional, ready-made formula.

As Gombrich says, “The Greeks began to use their eyes. Once this revolution had begun, there was no stopping it.” It is surely no coincidence that this Great Awakening of art to freedom took place in the hundred years between, roughly 520 and 420 BC, in Greek city-states such as Athens, where philosopher Socrates challenged our ideas about the world:


“It was here, above all, that the greatest and most astonishing revolution in the whole history of art bore fruit.... The great revolution of Greek art, the discovery of natural forms and of foreshortening, happened at the time which is altogether the most amazing period of human history.”

This art was later spread far beyond the borders of Greece, when Alexander the Great created his empire and brought Hellenistic art to Asia:


“Even in far-distant India, the Roman way of telling a story and of glorifying a hero was adopted by artists who set themselves the task of illustrating the story of a peaceful conquest, the story of the Buddha. The art of sculpture had flourished in India long before the Hellenistic influence reached the country; but it was in the frontier region of Gandhara that the figure of Buddha was first shown in the reliefs which became the model for later Buddhist art.... Greek and Roman art, which had taught men to visualize gods and heroes in beautiful form, also helped the Indians to create an image of their saviour. The beautiful head of the Buddha, with its expression of deep repose, was also made in this frontier region of Gandhara.”


Buddhism spread from India to the rest of Asia and brought with it these influences from Western art. This is highly significant if we remember that the invention of block printing during the Tang dynasty in China was intimately linked to Buddhist monasteries and Buddhist art.

Alexander the Great ma
y also have brought with him inked seals to India during his invasion, and Indian merchants later introduced them to the Chinese. Stamped figures of the Buddha marked the transition from seal impression to woodcut in China.

The oldest surviving printed texts from East Asia are Buddhist scriptures. Printing was thus used to promulgate a specific religion, just like Gutenberg’s printing press in Europe was later used to print Bibles.

The Islamic Middle East, however, for centuries rejected both the Eastern and the Western printing traditions due to religious intolerance and hostility towards pictorial arts. And they suffered all the more for it. More
  • *We are suggesting that the reason St. Issa (Isa, Y'shua, Joshua, Jesus Christ) seems to have come out of nowhere to dominate world headlines is not only because early Christianity and subsequent Catholicism borrowed from the best of all the world's spiritual traditions, particularly Buddhism with Jesus learning Buddhism at Hemis Gompa, a Buddhist monastery in the Indian Himalayas), but because the pharoahs also believed in rebirth and returned to rule their people like Dalai Lama incarnations. The many gospels of the Judeo-Christian Bible said so before it was edited out at various councils that particularly excised the African (Egyptian and Ethiopian) connection and what are now known as the enlightening Gnostic Gospels of the Essenes and the libraries of Nag Hamadi and Qumran that paint a much more complete picture of his life and explain the roots of the monasticism he brought to Jews.

No comments:

Post a Comment