Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877–1947)

I felt deprived of a symphony of events and essential art while reading this book. I had a grim contempt for the present that acknowledges the losses of the past that will never revive. As opposed to the empty, gestureless, chewed up, digested, regurgitated and spat out vomit of infotainment, narrative-instituted mass control theatre MASS CULT for the mob that will flood the globe from all forms of media in the next Kali Yuga round.

Case in point:

If you go to a Western philharmonic hall to hear, say, a symphony concert, there are basically four types of audiences:

(a) opportunists (who want to go, once in a blue moon, rarely, why not)
b) Snobs (it's good to be there, to be seen, to pretend, for a show)
c) Cognoscendi (educated in music theory, history, art, reception, standards of mastery, etc.)
d) Aesthetes (they go there for catharsis, experience, conversation with the art, trained or untrained, the gnosiennes).

In the modern world, it is almost impossible to find a trained audience for any form of high art. It is equally impossible to find outstanding artists who create near divine art. This is the age of craft and artistry, celebrity status and individual praise, peer and status machinery and profiteers. This is the age of manipulating ever-decreasing demand and providing ever-decreasing content that clogs the minds of audiences in the sewers as they drown in ignorance and oblivion of all previous stages, scenes, and memories.

Great art, like great history, should be enduring, sustained, focused on a high ethos and standards, and protect itself from the thieves, the mob, and the trivial vulgar repeaters.

Any art that is merely a fad is mere bait - to attract the attention of the masses, to entertain them, to divert their attention, their focus from the true, valid, important things.

I wanted to read this book to prove to myself that people can achieve such a high level of competence and mastery, and so can their audience, that it is completely misunderstood by our modern, incompetent minds.

We simply would not understand the bulk of such a subtle show, we would not grasp in our vulgar, obscene minds what it is to convey, how to move through myths and legends, how to move the soul, mind and heart to such thresholds of understanding that it borders on great acts of magic.

Thank you… (mais)

Los ensayos finales no publicados de Coomaraswamy, que incluyen: La iconografí­a de Sagitario, la Doctrina de los querubines de filo, las esfinges concernientes y el concepto de éter en la cosmologí­a griega e india, se complementan con las propias ilustraciones del autor de sus archivos personales. - Coomaraswamy's final un-published essays, including: The Iconography of Sagittarius, Philo's Doctrine of the Cherubim, Concerning Sphinxes, and The Concept of Ether in Greek and Indian Cosmology, are complemented by the author's own illustrations from his personal archives.… (mais)