Review of “Stigmata”…

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The film Stigmata (1999) presses a whole lot of my buttons. At the time it was originally released, I had been researching my own novel built on broadly the same premise:  a globetrotting protagonist hunting down miraculous statues and people claiming to have duplicates of Christ’s stigmata (though that’s basically where the similarities ended). And so I was fascinated to see how the film-makers went about bringing this to life.

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Even though the story and script (by Tom Lazarus, the not-quite-so-famous brother of Paul Lazarus III, director of Westworld & Capricorn One) didn’t itself think far out of the [confession] box, something magical happened in the art direction and cinematography: the use of colour, focus, light, time, sets, costume, and even make-up were all exemplary. For me, watching Stigmata was at times like being artfully collaged to death, machine-gunned with photographically (and geometrically) perfect moments: a tick on a piece of paper, Patricia Arquette lying underwater, a blood drop in a pool, blood being drawn, a blood centrifuge – all elegant, spare, swift, and focused. I highly recommend the film to anyone purely to enjoy its five-star visual treatment.

As a writer myself, however, I think the film’s problems stemmed right from the initial plotting – basically, having a priest-scientist (Gabriel Byrne) investigate the stigmata being suffered by a young atheist-hairdresser (Patricia Arquette) beneath a Vatican conspiracy managed by his control-freak boss (Jonathan Pryce) never worked as a setup for me… all too staged / stagey. The walls between the characters stopped the emotional side of the film from developing in a satisfactory way: I also didn’t much like the St Francis of Assisi (arguably the most famous stigmatic?) resolution, but you’d have to see that for yourself to see if you agree or disagree.

Watching this film a decade on, it feels a bit dated: could it be that the Da Vinci Code (and its flood of [make]-me-[rich]-too ripoffs) made the whole notion of devastating-secrets-that-would-topple-the-Church-were-they-to-be-made-public seem lightweight? And I kept wondering: was Holy Blood Holy Grail ultimately to blame?

Regardless, the film set me thinking about the kind of ur-story towards which Tom Lazarus was reaching, with his ancient Aramaic codex (based loosely on the Coptic Nag Hammadi Gospel of Thomas) triggering high-stakes factional infighting within the Vatican, with the supernatural subtext that The Truth Will Out (even beyond death).

Yes, it’s undoubtedly a cliché: and the overarching literary / cultural template at play is pretty easy to sketch out:-

  • concealed message left by an ancient (implicitly perfected) person, that requires…
  • deciphering and translation by (extremely proficient) domain experts, to expose…
  • long-held lies behind contemporary doctrinal messages, which are supported by…
  • powerful present-day conspiracies trying to maintain the (morally untenable) status quo.

Historically, does this sound familiar? After all, it is not vastly different to the entire back-story of the Renaissance (particularly during the Quattrocento). There, you had people scouring the known world for lost or concealed messages left by the Greco-Roman civilizations, to be deciphered by humanist scholars for their presumed wise (and frequently contrarian) messages.

And so I would argue that HBHG-style searches for enciphered traces of a ‘real Jesus’ are arguably little more than back-projecting our present-day cultural insecurities onto early Renaissance cultural insecurities – their search for lost classical wisdom was no different. One irony, though, is that things like the Turin Shroud (which I blogged about here and here) offer us glimpses of an entirely parallel kind of lost Christian history, far beyond the conceptual reaches of most contemporary conspiracy theorists.

What I personally fail to understand, though, is how this whole wonky ‘enciphered anti-doctrinal message’ meme has managed to endure the centuries as a literary conceit. Even my new best friend François Rabelais satirized this none too subtly in Chapter 1 of Book 1 of his alcohol-obsessed Gargantua and Pantagruel:

The diggers struck with their picks against a great tomb of bronze… Opening the tomb at a certain place which was sealed on the top with the sign of a goblet, around which was inscribed in Etruscan letters, HIC BIBITUR, they found nine flagons, arranged after the fashion of skittles in Gascony; and beneath the middle flagon lay a great, greasy, grand, pretty, little, mouldy book, which smelt more strongly but not more sweetly than roses.

Rabelais goes on to offer (“with much help from my spectacles“) his translation of the “Corrective Conundrums” found in that stinky little tome, all of them nonsensical and presumably meant to resemble some kind of vaguely prophetic quatrain-based literary genre popular in France at the time (Nostradamus fans, take note):-

The year will come, marked with a Turkish bow,
And spindles five and the bottoms of three pots, […]
This age of hocus-pocus shall go on
Until the time when Mars is put in chains

So… even though this concealed-text plot pattern was a hoary old chestnut by 1530, can anyone really explain to me how come it continues to drive a low-brow literary industry nearly five centuries later? For me, the big mystery here centres on the apparent lack of cultural progress: does Dan Brown’s success actually prove that we have learnt practically nothing in half a millennium?

Consider that your cipher mystery for the day… 🙂

Nostradamus quatrain cipher…?

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In retrospect, it all seems bleakly inevitable: that enigmatologists would move on from the lardy Bacon-stuffed margins of Shakespeariana to find new hunting grounds. Personally, I thought Nostradamus scrabbled pretty hard to find rhymes for his verses, but a new book claims these were all just a cover story, and that it was no more than an enciphered journal.

“Rise to Consciousness” (2008) by Michal Deschausses claims to decipher the truth hidden in Nostradamus’ work, allegedly revealing a story about “one strong woman” in the far future who seems to resemble… Michal Deschausses?

I-1
Some publishers will assist with offering the knowledge in this Century. In pure reason they will rush her through it. The bout the year of her death secures vast knowledge through the age and the verses will release facts which people will hardly believe.

Could it really be that Nostradamus’ quatrains (strictly speaking, “vers commun”) enciphered a “multi-lingual” secret message? Or is it simply the case that you can, just as Leo Levitov famously did for the Voynich Manuscript, “decipher” just about any given text-like thing into an entirely parallel “polyglot oral tongue”, a stream of Romance language fragments from which you can read basically any message you like?

For reference, Nostradamus’ Century 1 Quatrain 1 is probably an “evocation of the Delphic Oracle, after Iamblichus’s De Mysteriis Aegyptiorum“: and goes like this:-

Estant assis de nuict secret estude,
Seul reposé sus la selle d’aerain:
Flambe exigue sortant de solitude,
Faict prosperer qui n’est à croire vain.

The two are connected, errrm, how? Anyhoo, because Michal Deschausses has been good enough to include her deciphering methodology as an appendix, I’ll probably end up buying a copy and having a look. But having seen Levitov’s book, I won’t be holding my breath.

Now… we’ve had hundreds of years of people claiming that Nostradamus’ verses predict every d&mn thing in the news, from the end of the world, to war(s) in Iraq, and even (most recently) to Barack Obama and his running mate:-

Born of obscure and dark family,
Of white and black of the two intermixed.
The dark one biding his time,
Before the Empire changes.

But… hold on a minute: “Born of obscure and dark family” is a line from Century V Quatrain 84, “Of white and black of the two intermixed” is a line from Century VI Quatrain 10, “The dark one biding his time” appears just to have been made up, while “Before the Empire changes” is a line from Century I Quatrain 43.

So, Nostradamus bloggers have supposedly got themselves excited about three lines moved waaaaay out of context with a filler line added in to form a supposed verse about Obama. Oh, really?

OK… let me try for myself, restricting the search to a high-speed sleective scan through Century I:-

Lost, found, hidden for so long an age,
In the future by headless idiots
That which shall live without having any sense
submerged, killed, dead through brainless idiocy

Profoundly predictive, don’t you think? 😮

Review of “The Mercurial Emperor”…

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Peter Marshall’s (2006) “The Mercurial Emperor: The Magic Circle of Rudolf II in Renaissance Prague” takes a sideways look at everyone’s favourite mad Holy Roman Emperor, by using those around him as a kind of slightly wonky mirror. The choice of who makes the cut is a bit arbitrary in places: John Dee (who never came close to gaining Rudolf’s favour) gets rather more coverage than I think justified, however much some Voynicheros happen to like him. 😉

By using the Imperial court to cast light on the man in the middle, it is reminiscent (and perhaps consciously so?) of John Christanson’s “On Tycho’s Island”, which does much the same thing for Tycho Brahe (who features here too, of course).

Even though Marshall does sometimes feel compelled to thicken up his text with Wikipedificatory asides, overall you can’t help but enjoy the ride – it’s a basically good book. What you end up with is a feeling for Rudolf’s overall character arc, from his ultra-stiff Spanish upbringing, through the alchemical / astronomical / allegorical golden years, to the slow-motion showdown with his bluff soldier brother Matthias (which Rudolf lost, if you didn’t already know).

For me, the biggest takeaway I got from the book came from the raking light it cast onto Rudolf’s relationship with art. His collection of paintings was not, as Warburgian historians formerly liked to believe, imbued with Neoplatonist symbolic power, their artists digging deep into the cultural psyche to tease out deeper archetypes from myth and legend, which only heroic modern ‘symbologists’ (*ack* *spit*) could ever decode. Oh, no: it’s far worse than that; and perhaps worse even than Charles Hope’s art historical cynicism would put it. I think Rudolf’s all-star proto-Mannerist painters spent their time constructing his Imperial Internet pr0n browser: the vision that is conjured up for me is of them feverishly thumbing through their emblem books (etc) finding stories that prominently featured young women, and then ‘artfully’ arranging them on the canvas for maximum fleshly exposure. Shame on me for even thinking it, but ultimately Rudolf’s gallery reeks more of “Beavis and Butthead Win The Lotto” than anything else. Uh huh, huh. *sigh*

But I digress. 🙂

Marshall’s book did have one complete laugh-out-loud moment for me, which made my wife chuckle too (no mean feat). The engraving on p.151 depicts Nostradamus in a magic circle, conjuring up a procession of future kings of France for Catherine de Medicis in a “magic mirror” (not much to do with Rudolf II, but a fun picture all the same). I looked at it and thought – that’s not a mirror, that’s a bloody big plasma TV he’s got there. But perhaps you disagree?

Nostradamus showing off his widescreen TV to the Queen of France

Enjoy! 😉