Or Ce N’est Qu’un Au Revoir
Well, I give up.
After a year of managing newsletters, with all work and no play making John a dull boy besides, I have finally reached the (temporary) end of my tether, and will still be doing them, but only once per month, at least for a while.
A regular job, work after work, working weekends and just generally too much to do in a day of too few hours… and besides, have stupidly embarked on an ambitious newsletter which has taken on not only a rhythm of its own, but quite enough material to make a slim but solid book. (Another reason to ease up on the pedal, as slim but solid books – real ones, for real publishers – are also part of my work-after-work.)
One fine day, I got thinking. Pards and Paranders, I thought, Monoceri and Manticores. And Charadrius and Cinnomolgus, Amphisbaena, Leucrota and Tragelaphus. And Bonnacons to boot. Medieval bestiaries are rampant with the most extraordinary creatures, but where is the Sphinx? That was the question I imprudently asked myself, resolving (equally imprudently) that I would look up a few things on the subject. I had no idea.
Should have known that sphinxes, riddles and the like were not to be meddled with. Naturally, I knew a little about Oedipus and the Theban sphinx (littermate of a most unsavory brood) and the large one in Giza (whose nose Napoleon had no more to do with than did Obelix) but I never suspected… criosphinxes, hieracosphinxes and “scorpion sphinxes”. Nor did I expect Sphinxes Farther East, Hittite sphinxes in Aleppo, Kratepe, or Carchemish . Or their cousins, the lamasu and šêdu in Babylon, Khorsabad, Suse and Persepolis. Nor to find them in the lost kingdom of Urartu, with the most enigmatic (and six-limbed!) sphinx statuette of all. Or that sphinxkind should be so closely related to cherubim. (No, not Tiepolo’s chubby cherubs, but terrible four-winged beings more akin to Pazuzu than putto.) Or the purushamriga of India, nor did I expect to find them east of China’s Great Wall. And there are ties to the tetramorphs, links to the Ark of the Covenant too. And not to forget the Kushites, the steep-pitched pyramids of Meroe (or Cestias’ in Rome, or is that just a coincidence?) and the Nubian sphinxes with lion’s manes and ears. Or Hatupset, with her singular coif borrowed from goddess Hastor. Or perhaps god-sister Sekhmet, – inverted: lion head, human body – does she have an Aurignacian ancestor from a prehistoric German cave? Speaking of gods, it wouldn’t do to forget the late-comer, Tutu, with his Greco-Egyptian demeanor, trampling his enemies. And the neighbours, far-flung cousins and nodding acquaintances: Ereshkigal, Astarte, Ahriman, Bes… they all deserve a place in the credits.
And those restless Phoenicians were involved, of course. Sphinxes embarked on the choppy blue Middle Sea, paws posed on the gunwales, ever so slightly seasick, longing for the shore. And go ashore they did. In Greece, Crete, Cyprus and Rhodes, in Spain and the Baleares, hobnobbing with the gods and creatures of the Celtic pantheon. Scarabs and coins, changing hands and changing purses to the very edges of the oikumene. Sphinxes in many lands, many languages, but always the same traceable DNA. (It’s a wonder they never made it to Atlantis; Plato neglected to mention them, more’s the pity. But then that doesn’t stop a few innovative – and crackpot – extrapolations, as you’ll see later.)
Like the Greeks, the Etruscans painted fetching sphinxes on their pottery, molded them in clay, fashioned them from marble. Then there is Rome of course. Sphinxes galore, if you look a bit, from Colchis to Colchester. Theban in form but not in function, not stranglers and riddle-posers but guardians and keepers of tombs. And the Egypt of the Ptolmeys – most curious sphinxes, who have travelled abroad and returned sporting wings. And medieval European sphinxes, tussling with 15th-century knights or peeking from misericords or capitals, sharing the scene with griffins, manticores, hippogryphs and harpies. There are sphinxes in the stonework, digging claws into the woodwork. Wandering carvers of wood and stone bringing faraway creatures to English country churches. Expanding Islam also carried sphinxes in its baggage; they do discrete encores from Moorish Spain to Persia. They even make an appearance in the first natural histories, along with unicorns, lamia and mermaids; there are Renaissance sphinxes, florid and elaborate, showing their best sides, chin in chest out, but it’s the ”rediscovery” of Egypt that sets it all off once again.
Seventeenth and eighteenth century travelers along the Nile find the faceless Sphinx at Giza a little dull, so they draw the features back in. Then emperors get involved. It must have been something Napoleon’s troops caught in Egypt, suddenly there are sphinxes everywhere in Europe, poking their siliconed busts at passers-by from gardens, pediments and peristyles as Egyptomania gripped the imagination and the sphinx achieved true ubiquity, being everywhere in general and ignored in particular. (The broody Corsican had a particular infatuation with the Sphinx, as attested by the crystal amulet he had made. Perhaps Jean-Léon Gérome’s famous painting isn’t so far from the truth.)
But no art movement took the intrinsic and uncomfortable ambiguity of the sphinx so dear to heart as the Symbolists and Decadents. The Victorians in particular were singularly obsessed with Egypt, and most sensitive to the lone and level sands stretching far away, movement that had started with the Romantics, and would end in the fits of consumption of the fin de siècle. Also, the image of a feminine figure, part woman, part feline, seductive and devouring, alluring and clawed, particularly appealed – a field day for Freud. (Conversely, the same period saw the publication of countless jolly and flippant travelogues, as the wealthy donned pith helmets and sailed up the Nile like so many Hercule Poirots. They also blithely carted thousands of tons of “antiquities” abroad.)
Khnopff and Kupka, Rosetti, Rops and Redon, the mysterious Moreau and many more, each took the lonely path to a tryst at the Sphinx’s lair, in a final and inextricable commingling of Theban and Egyptian, the riddles of the former, the mysteries of the latter, the pathos of both coupled with a certain unhealthy fascination with death. Pathos and death that go hand in hand in marble and granite in mausoleums and cemeteries worldwide, as well as casinos. Will I win in life or at roulette? Ask the sphinx. (Not that there’s any point, for both, you don’t know until you’ve played.)
And Oedipus, he wasn’t exactly a straightforward character either. And that riddle, it seems to come in many versions. Is the answer Pythagorean or just common sense? And the word “sphinx” for that matter; it has an etymology made of suppositions. Nor does the Sphinx at Giza have restful nights. Aliens carved it. It is ten thousand years old, not three. The erosion on it is caused by water. It has a secret chamber underneath to survive the Flood. Napoleon blew its nose off. No he didn’t. It was originally a lion statue. It was built by the Atlanteans.
But of course.
At any rate, what was initially a pleasant promenade in company of a familiar creature has turned into a marathon of sorts, a modest Odyssey of Origins & Evolutions with many ports of call in passing, but ultimately the Riddle remains.
And the imagery. A fabulous borrowing of appearances and motifs in every possible direction, as well as great flurries and flutterings of wings and even an occasional perilous embrace; really makes your head spin.
See you in a month’s time. With an answer or two perhaps. Or maybe a few more questions.
