PART 1
When Serge Leone made his Spaghetti Westerns in the
Spanish desert of Tabernas he brought the cowboys back to the place where they
originated. There are two cowboys of course, the one in
reality that left Spain as a meseta cowhand to become a plains cowboy forming
the ranching tradition of America, or Spanish conquistadors who re- introduced
the horse to America, where they must have seemed superhuman to the natives,
this powerful image of a man in control on horseback. They sat round campfires
in male fraternities according to codes of male behaviour, a curious mixture of
manly sweat and honour, with an uneasy relationship to women.
The other cowboy is the one created by stories made in
Hollywood, stories that were designed to entertain and instruct and elevate,
manuals for living in a new nation with the right values and heroic lone cowboys
fighting for Right and Law and Order or women’s honour in a chaotic hostile
environment. They were the storytellers’ cowboys of myth and fiction, ideal men
like Buffalo Bill from the Wild West Shows who embody the transference from the
wilderness to civilization.
These frontier stories also originate in southern Spain
when that country was a frontier for medieval Europe with similar mentality and
landscape. Their heroic image was also a man of power on horseback with spurs
and arms, a knight in “shining armour” (it must be shining) facing adversarial
combat, nomadic, defending the Right according to a code of conduct, engaged in
strange adventures, respecting women and children etc. These stories were also
very far from the reality of the medieval European knight who had no respect
for women, who was brutal with bloodlust, like Simon de Montfort massacring
heretics like the Cathars. How strange
that contrast must have seemed. The real knight was a feudal tenant in military
service to an overlord, often illiterate and certainly not the refined knight
of the courtly tales that emerged from this desert of Tabernas spreading up
into the barbaric Europe of the Dark Ages by wandering minstrels, or hugging
the Atlantic seaboard with Celtic monks travelling between monasteries, a
connection still evident in the
promontory called St Patrick near Rabita adjacent to Almeria where the locals
have always celebrated St Patricks day fiesta on March
17th. Like
the cowboy, there is disparity between the knight of reality and the knight of
the stories.
So where did these stories come from and why have they
returned with Serge Leone?
They came with the mystical tradition of Ibn Masarra,
an 8th Century Persian scholar who reached the Tabernas desert after
extensive travels assimilating the wisdom of the ancient classical world from
the texts of India and Central Asia to the discoveries of Greece and Rome,
learning that had been lost and suppressed by early Christianity in the Dark
Ages. From the 9th-12th Century these teachings were
disseminated throughout the Moorish kingdoms of Andalucia from the Tabernas desert
centres of Pechina and Almeria, a harsh barren landscape of mountain, sand and
palm trees in the colours of red and yellow ochre reminiscent of Arabia or the
Sinai.
This tradition helped to create the progressive Moorish
kingdoms which were the envy of Europe with their irrigation systems of
acequias, windmills, waterwheels and hydraulics for fertilising the land, their communal baths with toothpaste and
flushing toilets, their knowledge of Chaldean astronomy for navigation by astrolabe
etc, Arabic numbers including the zero to ease calculations, the game of chess
from India via Persia, singing- in- the- round carols (“Zajals”) and romantic
pre-Islamic Bedouin love poetry sung to a new invention of Ziryab which became
the “guitar”, strange to western ears with its Persian notations now familiar
as flamenco, songs that the troubadours took to France on the lute. There were
paradise gardens with pools for reflection, palaces built to such geometric
perfection even the spellbound Catholic monarchs couldn’t destroy them but
occupied them instead (Alhambra).Granada had law courts and a mental hospital
with a system of psychology long before the rest of Europe. So this part of
Spain was a trading synthesis for goods and ideas in a period of
Enlightenment.
Ibn Masarra also developed a spiritual psychology, a
manual for personal fulfilment which was embodied in stories retold with
varying degrees of accuracy and understanding. Without translation skills these stories were often
mismanaged and altered for Christian consumption, stories we now know about
knights in polished “shining” armour, about devoted service to a Lady, round
tables and quests, games of contest like jousting or chess usually between
a black Muslim and a white Christian
knight, systems of colour that change from green to red to white to black as in
the alchemy of Al-Khemi, revolving octagonal castles and disappearing chalices, dragons
and unicorns, supernatural beings...all
the ingredients of later Arthurian Romances like “Parsifal”.
These teaching stories formed a manual for living where
the knight journeyed to discover his own soul in the world, penetrating an
outer landscape in order to penetrate the interior of his being, using a
structured method called tarikah, the “way”, not unlike those methods recorded
in the Indian Upanishads where the goal is the realisation of one’s own nature
through consciousness, re-orientation and transformation. This method did not
focus on the problem of sickness, but on the nature of health, where work on
the Self was not narcissistic but about creating a balanced society for
everyone’s benefit. Sadiq says,”This is the work. Start with yourself, end with
All. Before Man, beyond Man, Transformation”.
Tarikah involved the visualisation of imagery based on
a systematic discipline called “tawil” or “symbolic understanding”, not unlike
the system used by Jung; Light, the mirror (Almeria means mirror) , water,
Reflections, the boat(see extensive boat imagery in Alhambra), keys and shadows
etc. Every outer form (zahir) had an inner significance (batin), a system that sometimes
led to claims of “gibberish” after Geber, the alchemist whose writing seemed
incomprehensible, (as some might find this study!). Later these stories were
mocked but also secretly acknowledged by Cervantes in the rusty armoured Quixote,
his absurd quest with windmills and infatuation for Dolcinea. But to others
they had a clear logic in a developmental system, so the stories operated on different
levels.
Ibn Masarra formed orders of chivalric knights living
in desert communities, warrior knights fighting to civilize the outside world
and harmonise the inside world, restoring order in both places. It was an image
dating back to pre-Islamic models of Bedouin “knights of the desert” with their
mystical pantheistic love poems reminiscent of the Upanishad writers, both ascetics.
(Here is one, Saida; “He is watchful. His love has excited my heart to
recollect him. The night follows day, the lofty mountains, the oceans of water,
the stars and moon, the daily revolving sun – all and whatever lead back to himself
which is Real. This is true, that is false. The soul is, and there is nothing
else.”)
Ruins of these
communities can be found near the modern towns of Pechina, Almeria and Rabita. And
portrayal of their stories can be found on the high ceiling of the Kings Hall
in the Lions Courtyard of The Alhambra where you see knights playing chess with
ladies or on horseback jousting with hairy men, fountains and mythical animals,
and a strange scene of ten men sitting
in numerical formation at a cosmic table, men who concurrently represent
outward authorities and inward powers (see Suhrawardi, “The chant of Gabriel’s
Wing”).This figurative art was heretical and unique in Islam, hidden away in
the esoteric madrassa of the Nasrid palace where its significance was
transmitted to those initiated,
paintings in the style of byzantine iconography which in itself shows an
attempt at synthesis. Their location suggests their importance.
Other remnants are in the ideas Masarra left behind,
paramount of which is this method of synthesis itself, that ideas are best
assimilated, not censored, something considered dangerous and heretical to both
orthodox Christianity and Islam so it was disguised in allegories and imagery,
daring thoughts about real knowledge being experiential and to do with the
Self, a drama of the soul, not about dictated theoretical doctrine, knowledge
of a scheme based on tripology (as in the Upanishads/fairy stories where
“everything comes in threes) where its advised to steer the “middle way”
between extremes, like Parsifal whose name means “through the middle” ,ideas
about self vigilance (consciousness/awareness) constantly polishing the soul to
prevent the“ rust” of forgetfulness (
see Empedocles). History was taught as endlessly cyclic without progression, a
concept still discouraged by capitalism’s
belief in its own advancement, so moments of enlightenment can fall back
into barbarity without leading to inevitable evolution.
Beyond the clash of opposites was a Unity of Being
realised through an understanding of the Self, the soul as intermediate between
what we know of the world consciously (polished and reflective) and what we do
not know (the Unconscious/ God, unpolished and unreflective), so the task was
to “know thyself” in context. The soul was the battleground for the
heart/compassion to unite the Minds tendency to duality and imbalance. The
motivation was Love, Love of the Beloved, a condition which required self-surrender
in identification with another, this yearning of the soul for harmony, and best
illustrated as romantic love, a union of souls, eye to eye in a glance. These
ideals of courtly Love kept the knights straight. Whatever was encountered
outside was also an encounter inside in that Archetypal world depicted in
Persian art as “in the Light” but without shadow. These knights aspired to
become a shining reflective mirror, a polished armoured consciousness, living
according to strict codes of behaviour. It was dangerous work.
By 11th Century Ibn Arabi of Murcia had developed
these ideas into a spiritual psychology practiced all over Andalucia, a system that
Carl Jung acknowledged as influencing his own therapeutic method. It’s Ibn
Arabi who first uses the word “Archetype” as we know it. And like Jung, he
emphasizes the importance of the Feminine, that for any man fulfilment comes
through the feminine, outside and inside, what Arabi called “the essential
creative feminine”.”It’s in woman that the image of God is most perfected”, he
says in Bezels of Wisdom. He was being practical, not idealistic. His own guide
was Fatima bint al-Mufhanna of Seville, a woman in her 80’s. It’s hard to
imagine this kind of reverence for a woman in the misogynist medieval world. No
wonder it was considered heretical, as the misogynist Freud later considered
Jung heretical.
Jung was fighting his own battles on another frontier,
the frontier of a new method for a new paradigm, but he owed much to these
early heroic mystics who were the first explorers of the frontiers of the Mind.
His method of Individuation between the conscious and unconscious with its reconciliation
of opposites and reflective free-association (what Arabi calls “Active Imagination”
or reverie ,where consciousness meets unconscious) , his understanding of the
structure of the psyche as it struggles in alternating rhythms of division and
unity/ disorder and order, moving from the circumference of the Self to its
centre, this working on oneself with a skilled practitioner who knows the way
by its signs of Self and Ego, Anima and Shadow in energies of Transformation, Transference
and Projection, Synchronicity...... all this relates back to the spiritual
psychology of a unified vision practiced by Ibn Masarra and Ibn Arabi in their
sufi orders.
Whether cowboys or knights, a man on horseback is a
powerful image with his hand holding the reins of his power steady, in rhythmic
balance, like the mythical centaur whose head/intellect and body/emotions are
perfectly united. That’s the image of the charioteer in the tarot, a game of
cards/Life that was introduced to Spain from India, also the image of Arjuna
holding the chariot still in the midst of battle in the Mahabharata to hold
spiritual discourse with Krishna about matters of Order and harmony; things in
their rightful place, Good and Just and True. So it appears these stories are
neither of the East, nor of the West, but everywhere at the same time, there
for the telling.
The charioteers became knights and then cowboys in
their heroic journey westwards, leaping out of the stories and songs into
celluloid and then back again in Leone Westerns with their own distinctive
style derived from European Expressionist cinema, Noirs and the Hollywood
Western, synthesizing in order to produce a new form. Whether Leone the man was conscious of these
connections is irrelevant to the fact that Leone the artist was. That evidence
is in his western dollar trilogy, and in his archetypal “Once Upon a Time in
the West”. In his own way Leone was re-energising the tradition, or perhaps the
tradition was re-energising him.
...
