Damigeron's Dungeon: Clear Cosmology: The Elements

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Earth 01 - Earth as Substance
Earth 02 - Places of Earth
Earth 03 - Magic of Earth
Earth 04 - Earth Personified

Places of Earth

Just as there are numerous allotropes of Earth as a substance, Earth as a place is highly varied. While the different qualities of particular places may seem self-evident, much of the intuitive distinctions between these places as categories are lost on modern storytellers, denying them full access to the dynamic qualities of place.

Rapeseed field in Kärkölä, Finland.

The default place of Earth, the field is the outside where people do things. Fields are blank slates, passively expressing whatever stakes claim. A field of poppies is the place of poppies. The farmer’s field is where farming takes place. People meet in the field for love and war, roads cut through them, and we till them for food. The field is the open space of happening.

This extends into the abstract. We regard skilled specialists as having a field of practice, and academics as having a field of study. Scientists who conduct work outside the confines of a laboratory or workroom are engaged in fieldwork, regardless of whether they operate in jungles, caves, or urban environments. Journalists who step outside the building to find stories on behalf of their publication are called field reporters.

Wadi in Nahal Paran, Negev, Israel.

While many biologists will tell you that deserts are actually complex ecosystems with a richness of life and biodiversity, this scientific perspective does little to dissuade the instinctive reaction to the expanse of hot, dry rocks and whirling dust.

The desert is a desolate, liminal space that bears the open ‘place-of-happening’ qualities of the field with the character of oblivion most often associated with the open ocean. The desert is indeed regarded as a sea of sand, and in Egyptian thought, it was regarded as a functionally synonymous place with Chaos.*

The sterile character of the desert renders it a place of happening in isolation. For this reason, it is the home of the hermit and the place of religious revelation, a liminal zone where one is alone with the sun. It was in this desolation that Christ was confronted by and tempted by Satan. The desert is the place where the sands scour away the trappings of civilization and one bares oneself, alone, to the supernatural.

*Compiler’s Note: The enterprising storyteller could characterize the desert and the ocean as the masculine and feminine dimensions of oblivion (take your pick).

Cave Mouth

The cave is Earth-as-structure. On the positive side, it is a shelter that has housed humans well into prehistory and continues to shelter us into the present. In form, the cave is often the literal womb of the earth, as seen in stories like that of Zipacna in the Maya Popol Vuh. In many cultures, the origin of people is found in caves. In Turkish mythology, the first man was born from a cave. The Aztecs claim mythic origin in Chicomoztoc, the “Place of Seven Caves.” In Christianity, the manger where Christ was born is often characterized as a cave.

In the negative, it is the mouth of the devouring Earth-monster, the ravenous inevitability of death.

Olmec Earth Monster

The cave’s religious dimensions cross over significantly with the desert as a place of confrontation with the divine. Unlike the desert, the cave is an enclosed space where the germinating powers of elemental Earth are thought to congregate. The place of birth, death, and rebirth for hermits, shamans, and prophets, the cave offers the first natural, closed liminal space. It is in caves that oracles breathe in volcanic gases and divine the will of the gods, where the aspirants of cultic practice are reborn as initiates. It was in a cave-prison that St. John of Patmos experienced and wrote the Book of Revelation. In China, Emperors were buried in caves in the belief that they would be reborn into immortality from them.

This liminal quality of caves can be understood through distinct yet often overlapping frameworks that manifest consistently across cultures: the passive microcosm and the active tunnel.

In the first, the cave as a model of the universe in the form of an enclosed space, as used in the Mithraic rites. This concept has also been employed negatively by Plato, who used the cave as an allegory for the illusory qualities of the material world.

The second form of the cave will be familiar to the modern reader via the expression “light at the end of the tunnel.” In this formulation, the cave is the path of a journey, an action-place. In the 2nd century AD, the Greek geographer Pausanias described an oracular cave at Lebadea. Here, petitioners went feet-first through a cleft in the rock and went on a journey through nightmarish tunnels to consult the immured architect-king Trophonius, before emerging again shaken but enlightened.

In folklore, the cave is a place of potentiality with a more vulgar character: a place of treasure and monsters, as in Beowulf and Aladdin and a thousand others.

"In dragon's form Fafner now watches the hoard."
By Arthur Rackham, for Heinemann's Sigfried & The Twilight of the Gods (1911).

Mount Everest

The mountain is a place with access to the outdoors, but it is also a structure with a defined shape. This shape presents a contradiction that transcends the normative elemental hierarchy, as it is Earth that is elevated. The mountain, with its high peak, is a stairway to the heavens, piercing up through the cloud layer. It is on the mountaintop where the world of the profane and the sacred celestial meet in open air.

Mountains are also eternal and unmoving. No memory of the living or in the oral tradition of the people can recall a time when the mountains were not, save at the creation of the world itself. These upthrust bones of the world are eternal in accidental causality—that is, tangibly immortal, and so a place where the essential immortal is revealed to the world and disseminated.

This transcendent structure is emblematic of transcendence itself, appearing in both sacred and secular contexts, and indicative of enlightenment, as exemplified by Lao Tzu in the Tianshan mountains, or ambition through more worldly pursuits, such as wealth or esteem. This journey upward is challenging, rendering the mountain an obstacle and its peak the reward. Mountains, with their hostile invitation and the elevation they promise to the successful challenger, are as eternal as the mountain itself. The successful climber has overcome and achieved self-knowledge and so finds himself above it all. Able to see equally in all directions, the climber stands at the center of the universe, the axis mundi, or world-navel, the point on which the consequential world turns.

The Ming Mongkol Buddha, atop Nagakerd Hill, in Phuket, Thailand.

Returning to the peak as a place of dissemination, the mountain is a place of revealed Will and cosmological [Order]. In Aztec thought, two deities meet at the peak of the celestial mountain, the highest heaven of Omeyocan, and establish the duality that flows down the mountain to the rest of reality, much like a river. At Mt. Carmel, Elijah met with the priests of Baal and revealed the supremacy of the God of Abraham. Christ disseminated the essential teachings of a Christian life during his Sermon on the Mount, just as Moses issued the Law from Mt. Sinai.

Those who misjudge themselves and believe themselves worthy of the challenge, or who have already succeeded, will find themselves cast down for their hubris, as Bellerophon from Olympus. This reveals the mountain is also a place of destruction, where the journey back down can break the foolish climber. Not even gods are safe from this ruin, as Coyalxauqui learned when her half-brother Huitzilopochtli flung her down from the serpent mountain Coatepec.

The Coyolxauqui Stone

Turning away from the ruin wrought by the mountain, we now focus attention to the mountain’s life-giving qualities. In this context, we encounter the transcendent quality of the mountain once again, as it defies easy categorization. As a place of Earth, the mountain and range default to feminine in many ways. Water collected from mountain springs and captured rain flows into life-giving creeks, streams, and rivers, sustaining life. But it cannot be ignored that the mountain is an upthrust of Earth, a phallus. The peak reinforces the phallic quality as a place from which the Will is disseminated; the slopes form a concrete parallel to the downward rays of light that shoot forth from the Sun. It is by the mountains that male earth gods characterize the heavens as feminine, as seen in Egyptian mythology, where Geb and Nut are depicted.

This male/female contradiction achieves its realized hypostasis in the mountain cave. As a simultaneous phallus and womb, the mountain cave is a revelation of the divine [Androgyne] in its roles as the First place of material Creation, in both senses of “first.” The mountain comes First in the chronological sense; the peaks of the mountains were the first to rise from the primordial ocean of Chaos, either thrust up under their own power in response to divine command or pulled up into shape by the hook of the Earth-Diver. It is also First in primacy, in significance and esteem, for the reasons previously described.

The mountain, with its numerous dimensions, finds many analogs in the Tree, the [Cross], the [Star], the [Staircase], and the [Ladder].

Tumulus Mound at Bin Tepe, Lydia, Turkey.
Believed to be the resting place of the Lydian king Alyattes, c. 560 BC

The mound is the mountain in miniature, indicative in Egyptian thought of matter in its indeterminate state (Chaos). It was from such a mound, the Benben stone, that the world first emerged from the waters of Nun (see Mountain entry). It was the place and substance that received the First rays of the sun (same use of “First”), and the divine Will flowed down from it into the Nun, ordering the endless Chaos into the world as we know it.

This axial quality of substance and place is retained among lowland peoples the world over, who availed themselves of natural mounds or built their own in the absence of nearby mountains. It was on these mounds that they conferred with the sacred, mediated the natural and supernatural, or elevated themselves in stature over their fellow man. They also served as places for artificial cave-building in the form of mound-tombs as gateways to the Earth-womb/underworld.

Augustine Volcano (Alaska) during its eruptive phase, 2006.

The volcano is a mountain of violent creation and destruction. Possessed of a spirit of fire, the volcano flows with new stone in liquid lava or enacts divine wrath in explosive pyroclastic eruptions. This dynamic flux between rest, flow, and catastrophe renders the volcano an emblem of passion.

The flowing volcano is a womb of fire, characterized by the Maori as a goddess tending the fire of the underworld, and it is from her that the trickster Maui performs the fire-theft. It has a similar feminine characterization, as the Hawaiians identified the unpredictable activity of Kilauea with the temper of the goddess Pele.

The character of volcanoes is more masculine elsewhere. Some tellings of the Greek fire-theft myth have Prometheus stealing fire not from Olympus but the workshop of Hephaestus under Mt. Etna. In Zoroastrian mythology, the dragon-sorcerer Aži Dahāka is trapped in the crater of Mt. Damavand. The Zoroastrians’ belief about the Damavand crater serves as one of the seminal identifications of Hell with everlasting fire, as it appears in the Christian religion.

Speaking of seminal, we cannot ignore the sexual analogy between volcanic eruptions and the male orgasm. This parallel is most dramatically expressed in the Maya Popol Vuh, in the story of the Caiman-ogre Zipacna. Zipacna boasted of being so strong he created mountains (as a volcano does), while his brother Kabrakhan (“Earthquake”) tore them down. In Zipacna’s story, the Hero Twins convinced him to climb into a cave (the womb of the Earth) in pursuit of a “crab” (a K'iche' Mayan homonymic pun for “clitoris”). Zipacna climbed into the cave on his back, gave a great sigh, and turned to stone. Since then, whenever Zipacna stirs and erupts, the earth violently shakes, creating new mountains.

Defeat of Zipacna

Structures of Earth

All man-made structures (save vehicles and orbital platforms) are places of Earth, dependent upon on the ground as their foundation. While all buildings have this affiliation, they are so colored by their use that it usually eclipses their elemental associations. In recognition of this, we limit our exploration to the general qualities of earthen and stone buildings, and in particular to megaliths, roads, pyramids, their affiliated structures, and sculpture.

A Maasai mud hut.

The typical mud structure is often associated with poverty due to its ease of construction and the impermanence of its materials. It is perceived as suggestive of the inhabitants’ deprivation or ignorance in a negative light, or their adaptability, resourcefulness, and non-attachment in a more positive sense.

Stone buildings rely on the permanence of stone to protect their occupants from the elements and foes alike. In funerary contexts, it suggests the eternal home beyond the veil of death.

Many stone structures are not habitations but places of specific action. Large, natural stones have formed natural altars for ritual and sacrifice. Still others were crafted into tables and benches. Some were said to declare the divine right of kings upon their coronation, the foundation identifying the king as the cornerstone of the nation (as did the Stone of Scone for the Scots up until 1296). Similar stone structures, whether natural or worked, were believed to bestow magical powers on those who engaged with them. For instance, the Blarney Stone was said to grant the “gift of gab” in exchange for a kiss.

These structures can be yonic, phallic, or serve as omphalos, identifying the local culture’s explicit axis mundi, as the namesake stone in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.

Omphalos of Delphi

These structures are valuable to the storyteller for both their practical use and as ruins. In the active, they orient your characters’ practical world, part of their normative (if sacral) routines.

In the inactive, stone devices and ruins express an informal liminality. They are no longer in use, acting as the bones of a bygone era that still shapes the landscape. They cross the boundaries of time, casting shadows longer than any who built them, and become mysterious locales that blend worlds without clear demarcation, much like a portal or gate.

The Dry Tree Menhir at Goonhilly Downs, Cornwall.

Through various means lost to time, Ancient people spent a great deal of time and effort moving stones of magnificent size across long stretches of land to erect them or stack them one on top of the other. They did this at sites of great significance to serve as markers, altars, and more exotic devices besides.

These monuments would appear singly (monolith) or in multiples, sometimes with a great deal of complexity in their arrangement. Archaeologists have identified four main headings for these structures:

Menhir - A vertical, standing stone
Dolmen - A horizontal stone, supported by two or more other stones (could be menhirs)
Stone Row - A row of standing menhirs.
Cromlech - A circle of menhirs, typically associated with sun worship.

Monolithic menhirs were often erected over the burial mounds of great men, invoking the immortal life force of the stone. The phallic quality of this sort of structure has been the subject of many jokes, characterizing these men as supremely concerned with their genitals. While a valid avenue for humor, it’s essential to remember that these men typically left offspring, and in ancient conception, the son was considered the flesh of the father. The erection (pun intended) of such a device cast a long shadow over a landscape populated and, at least in the near term, ruled over by the descendants of the buried. The influence of such a man’s sexual virility into the future was (and is) very real. Atomized modern observers would do well not to belittle the signifiers of their forebears’ biological success. The future does stand in the shadow of the king’s/warlord’s penis in the substantive implications of the device.

Moving on from the phallic monolith to more advanced arrangements of megaliths, we find the arrangements known as the stone row, exemplified by the Carnac stones, and the stone circle or cromlech, as seen at Stonehenge.

Kerlescan Alignment at Carnac, Brittany, France.

In all honesty, we do not know the function of most stone rows. There is much speculation that they were used to mark orientations between celestial bodies and other sites, to mark paths of ritual procession, or to mark the longevity of family lines by being erected at regular generational intervals. The reality, however, is that we don’t actually know. As a storyteller, you’re pretty free here to develop and enact your hypothesis.

The cromlech is more evident in its two purposes. First, it demarcates the boundary of a discrete space, as one of the functions of Stonehenge. Alternatively, they serve as supports for a single massive dolmen, creating a structure often referred to as an “altar tomb” or “portal tomb,” but more commonly known as a “dolmen.”

Stonehenge, as seen from the air.

To explain the more complex features of advanced megalithic structures, we turn to the most famous cromlech in the world: Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England. This magnificent stone ring served as both a place of worship and a calendar. With the gaps between menhirs aligned with key stars at relevant times of the year, the structure was used to map the cosmos and account for its movements. Stonehenge wasn’t just a monument; it was a machine, a clock of celestial patterns, making the heavens subject to human reckoning and elevating the builders and priests with godlike understanding.

The dolmens that sit atop Stonehenge’s menhirs assist in this task by closing the gaps between the menhirs. This frames the view of the observer in the henge, isolating the stars in view from the distracting majesty of the sky directly above. Isolating spaces of consideration in the dome of the firmament cuts out all distractions from the analysis of the relevant stellar orientation.

The enduring stone of the henge evokes the understanding of the immortal cosmos the builders wished to preserve for future generations, anchoring their understanding in heavy, unmoving rock. Stonehenge was an axis mundi, the fulcrum-navel around which the world turned in an ordered, predictable dance of cosmic light.

The storyteller should take heed of this relationship because cyclical change is as certain as stone. To conform oneself to the inevitable cyclical changes of the world is to find the essential stability beneath it all. Don’t be afraid to use such devices to orient your characters, as they can serve as effective, static analogs for the animate journey of character development.

Less impressive in quality perhaps but rivaling the megalith in stature is the Cairn and the Herm.

Cairn marking a mountain summit in Graubünden, Switzerland.

A cairn is a tall pile or stack of stones erected for a specific purpose. Often, these served as crude markers for shrines, burial mounds, or road markers. They were also regularly raised on the peaks of mountains.

In the recent Disney animated feature Moana (2016), the island tribe’s traditions required that each new chief carry a stone up the tallest mountain on the island and place it atop a cairn. This was not only emblematic of the longevity of the chieftain’s or tribe’s line but also a plea for protection and stability. As each generation made the island taller, it suggested that the island grew, and the larger the island, the more stable it was in the face of storms and other disasters. The safety of the island was thus tied (despite Moana’s self-evident status as female) with the phallic shadow of the line of chieftains. This hearkens back to our earlier observation of the masculine virility of the monolith, contextualizing it as an apotropaic device aligned with the concerns of tribal island dwellers.

More typically, cairns were visible markers for orientation. They marked the boundaries between ancient territories, roads, and even beaches for those traveling along the coast.

These same typical roles as waymarkers for roads, shrines, and territorial boundaries were shared with the later development of herma, or herms in the Mediterranean. Blocks of stone carved with the head or bust of a god or hero, usually Hermes, marked the trade routes, crossroads, forks, and shrines throughout the Greek world. Their placements and functions were identical to those of the more common cairn, with the addition of a more explicit apotropaic function, featuring likenesses or images of divinities and doubling as places of worship.

Herma of Demosthenes, from the Athenian Agora (Copy).
By Polyeuktos, c. 280 BC.

A storyteller would do well to note their shared features and differences. The functions of cairns and herms are practically identical. Cairns, cobbled together, have a little more room to maneuver into new functions (as seen in the sympathetic generational eruption in Moana). At the same time, a worked devotional object is identified with more concrete and well-defined magical action. The use of cairns and herms can tell the audience a lot about differences between cultures (or even the distinction between pastoral and urban in the same culture). Further, there’s a lot of opportunity for novelty in the composition of cairns and the representation in herms. Don’t be afraid to get outlandish and experimental!

Roads are an open structure of coming and going (as opposed to the closed threshold), an activity, a journey and not a destination. One may meet danger on the road, without the protection of walls or a roof over one’s head. It is a place of danger, but also enterprise and reward. The road is an opportunity to escape the everyday, sedentary world of the domestic and experience a structured adventure! It is the stage of coming and going, with the past behind the character and the future before them, and the glorious peace or drama of the now framed between.

The Appian Way in Appian Way Regional Park, Rome.

That is, if the purpose of the road is for the travel of persons. Sometimes, roads bridge places of sacral power. Well-built, paved roads connected cities in the pre-Columbian Americas for ritual processions of tribute and sacrifice at prescribed times of the year, rather than for commercial purposes.

Ley lines, paths between megalithic structures, are less often explicitly demarcated, or their demarcation has been lost to time. Some believe these paths to flow with [animatistic] power or mark the processions of faeries.

St. Michael's Ley

These ley lines have served as sources of depersonalized power in fantasy fiction, such as in Robert Aspirin’s novel Another Fine Myth (1978), where magicians build their homes upon their intersections to better draw upon them to twist the forces of magic or form bridges between worlds. They can also identify the function of arrangements of power, as in the borders and infrastructure of the nation of Amestris in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (2009), which formed the entire nation into a perverse transmutation circle.

The crossroads will be discussed briefly here as the meeting of ways. Two people going in different directions intersect here and collide, as Oedipus and his father, or the blues musician and the Devil. The more elaborate features of the crossroads as a liminal space will be discussed in our [Pentagram] article.

Crossroads

There are many options for the storyteller with roads and leys. Some are well-trodden, while others remain rough from disuse. We suggest that writers consider the road and the ley with a bit more attention. As a place of happening, it actively manifests elemental Earth as the framework for the journey, while mapping the space of the story.

Pyramid of Cestius, Rome.

The pyramid is, first and foremost, an artificial mountain. For all its many interpretations, this is the most important: an invocation of the verticality and stability of the holy upthrust Earth.

The earliest pyramids were mounds (see Mound entry above). However, while mounds can be natural or artificial, all pyramids are artificial. Pyramids are then best understood as artificial mounds rendered in regular shapes!

That shape? Triangular!

The triangle is the first regular polygon, making it emblematic of First Substance. It is by three sides, three points, three dimensions that something is made materially real.

There are other numerological considerations, which may have been intentional at the time of building or applied retroactively. The four faces of the Great Pyramids at Giza have been identified as indicative of stability. Some have read meaning even into the angle of the slope (though this compiler is inclined to think such considerations were the result of building methods or aesthetic sensibility rather than mysticism).

Pyramid of Khafre, built c. 2600 BC, Giza, Egypt.

The point is That Pyramids are primarily interpreted as triangular, whether they are smooth-sloped or step-tiered, and it is this dimension of their construction that receives the most attention in terms of meaning.

The artificial, geometric mountain is also evocative of the triangle as a representation of fire. While the use of the triangle as an emblem of fire in alchemy has no doubt been retroactively applied to the Pyramid by later occult observers, it’s not exactly off-brand. The pyramid was, in its time, regarded as a symbol of the sun. As artificial mountain, it elevated base Earth towards the heavens, transforming the construction into a transcendent staircase to the celestial. Further, the regular shapes of its slopes evoked the rays that shine forth from the sun god Re, transforming the chaos of Nun into the ordered universe of human experience.

As a transcendent construct that bridged the bottom and the top of phenomenological reality, the Pyramid quite readily translates into the later alchemical and Elementalist frameworks as the Earth-Fire, an expression of Totality. This also syncretizes with the Eye of Providence, an emblem of the ho theos, as discussed in our article on [gods and God].

Moving on from the fiery, the sexual dimension of the Pyramids is best explained through the Mesoamerican model of the Pyramid as a mountain-cave.

Pyramid of the Great Jaguar, Tikal.

The Pyramids of Egypt, as tombs, fulfilled the feminine role of devouring mouth and womb of immortality. Once the doors were sealed, however, the action of the living in the artificial cave was supposed to cease. Not so in Mesomaerica, where the summit of the Pyramid was a ritual house in active use.

Rather than a construction for the fertility of the dead into the next world (and the hope that it might transfer to the living in its shadow), the man-made mountains of the Olmec, Maya, Toltec, and others were sites for the reenactment of the creative dramas of the universe. By the sacrifice of humans at the tip of the world-phallus before the opening of the primordial cave, they recreated and thereby participated in the establishment of myths, wherein the gods were sacrificed to create the earth, the moon, the stars, and all the elements of the material world. The Mesoamerican Pyramid was the stage and axis of transcendent creative action, rather than a passive representation!

And finally, we must address an idiom, the meaning of which seems to escape too many people:

A Pyramid is built from the top down.

The meaning of this phrase applies to all human endeavors: it all begins with an idea.

The Eye of Providence, as it appears on the reverse of the seal of the $1 bill.

Considerations for Storytellers

These two differing outlooks on the role of pyramids provide a very different set of prompts for storytellers.

In the first case, as with the Pyramids of Egypt, they are monumental edifices that evoke a magnificent and mysterious past. Even in Cleopatra’s time, they were ancient. Being closer to the iPad than the construction of the Pyramids, the Egyptians of the Ptolemaic era looked back on the Pyramids the way modern Europeans look upon the works of Classical Greece and Rome.

Their structure is transcendent and solar, but their sealed tombs are a connection to the underworld, full of wonders and treasure that only compound the mysteries of monumentality and time. These Pyramid-tombs are places of secrecy, danger, and reward, a call to adventure like the hoard of a Dragon or a Giant with a dash of necromancy. In this formulation, the Pyramid offers the material wealth of buried kings, but also, in line with its structural transcendence, the power of ancient, secret knowledge.

In contrast, the active Pyramid of Mesoamerica models an approach to imitative (read: participatory) creative ritual in the form of sacralized violence, but also how one might re-interpret places other than the Pyramid. One character might encounter a challenger at a mountain crossroads, just before a cave, who parallels myth and alters the destiny of nations. Perhaps your character wrestles with and overcomes their personal Enkidu, and upon returning home with him, overcomes the baser nature of themselves and their people, and raises a city from a regional footnote to a superpower. Determine the mythology of your character’s culture to develop your own parallels and transform the mountain cave into a stage on which your character’s decisions shape the world.

Gilgamesh Fighting Enkidu by Wael Tarabieh (1996).

Obelisk of Sesostris I - 12th Dynasty, Middle Kingdom, at Heliopolis, Egypt.

Obelisks are tapered, rectangular pillars associated with the sun god, Re, possessing all the solar qualities of the Pyramid, albeit with a significantly smaller footprint and a greater relative profile. Sometimes, their pyramidal caps were polished to a mirror-like sheen or covered with a reflective material to capture and concentrate daylight. They were often erected as temple pylons, usually in pairs.

They were also used as funerary pillars, taking on all the phallic qualities of the funerary menhir-monolith with the ordered, penetrative properties of the sun.

This distinction between the rough and the regular parallels the structural division between the marker-cairn and the herm, making Obelisks an excellent way to distinguish between more metropolitian civilizations and the rough cultures of the frontier.

Sculpture of Kafre/Kephren, 4th Pharaoh of the 4th Dynasty, Old Kingdom, Egypt.

Sculpture is the art of shaping something real or imagined into immortal stone, elevating the represented thing into the realm of timeless power.

Sculpture renders something present. A lion sculpture placed outside a doorway changes the doorway to “where the lion is.” The bust of a deceased patriarch renders him a witness to the activities around him by placing him. This quality has apotropaic functions, but also civic, as public and private sculpture were heavily employed as referential props in Roman rhetoric.

This works even in miniature, without diminishing the presence in meaning, unless it is done in relation to something retaining its size, as in the (believed) satirical work Apollo Sauroktonos, attributed to Praxiteles. In this interpretation, the young (disrespectful characterization) Apollo is about to kill the giant serpent Python (belittled into a diminutive lizard).

Roman copy of the Apollo Sauroktonos of Praxiteles, 1st-2nd Century AD (Original 4th century BC).

The above lack of meaning attributed to decrease in size is not at all true for enlargement. Bigger is almost always better, literally enlarging the presence of the person or thing depicted. This is true of the Pharaoh’s head carved on the Sphinx, as well as the four presidential likenesses carved into Mount Rushmore. Statues of animals or persons that are larger than life render their persistent presence all the more remarkable.

One can also substitute the quality of materials for size when evoking the majesty of the represented. One should consider which is more magnificent: a life-sized jade carving of an emperor or his likeness magnified ten times, carved from the side of a mountain.

Storytellers would do well to keep this all in mind. This will be read into any scene that takes place before such a likeness, as the persona of an ancient emperor or an animal attribute of a divinity shapes the stage of your story’s drama, serving as a gateway guardian, a direct observer, or a bookend of the journey. In stories where magic is an integral part of the narrative, such a presence may be perceived as tangibly real. A powerful sorcerer may be able to see through and act through sculpted likenesses of himself or an attribute animal, with the potency of this action magnified through sculptural magnificence.

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