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El Greco and Philip: The Transcendent Crystal that Rises out of the Blood Philip also, like Columbus, saw himself as an apocalyptic judge, serving god and having the power over life and death according to the dictates of his faith. A painting by El Greco of Philip II, called the "Dream of Philip II" pictures what the Royal cataloguers called a "Glorification" of Philip. But actually it pictures in symbolic, diagrammatic form, the actuality of the relationship of knowledge and power to atrocity. In this painting, Hell and earth are on the same level, implying that there are only two realms: heaven, the world of knowledge and truth on the one hand, and earth which is no more than an extension of hell. Immediately behind Philip, there is a gaping mouth of a dragon or demon- the Mouth of Hell- and in this devouring mouth, men and women suffer apparently deserved and frightful torture. Philip has his back to them and could care less: they are merely Moors, Jews, Indians or sinners. In the background people seem to be fleeing from a lake of fire or blood as if the apocalypse were already occurring. Philip himself is completely indifferent to the suffering, and even somehow the enforcer of this suffering. His face is benign, neutral, and disinterested, though perhaps slightly ecstatic as he contemplates his function as the divine representative of a bloody minded god. Above Philip, floats the serenely Divine Name of Christ, like a Platonic insignia, clear, crystalline and pure, like the eternal Word or the final sound of the golden apocalyptic trumpet. The divine name of Christ rises like a transcendent crystal out of the blood of those Philip had murdered.. Numerous, bloodless and earthless angels float around the divine name, reflecting well the otherworldly delusions of grandeur that allowed Philip to feel righteous, even as he murdered the innocent Jews, Moors, Ottomans, and Indians. The angels look at Philip and point to the Divine Name. Philip is aware of them, of his mission and his Manifest Destiny. The god concept functions here as an enabling mechanism that allows and to a degree, even helps organize and create atrocities., just as the Bhagavad Gita helped Himmler murder Jews in the Camps. The painting reveals the mentality of the Spanish atrocities and how they grew out of the central beliefs of Western culture. El Greco gave the painting to Philip in the hopes that it would secure him prestige and royal patronage, apparently. It did neither. But the painting well reflects both the self righteous sadism of Philip, as well as the Byzantine and Platonic idealism of El Greco, whose Platonist mysticism, seeking the transcendent luminosity of the other world, could both justify, glorify and seek the patronage of a King who used the blood soaked silver and gold of the New World to create more corpses of Jews, Moslems and Europeans in the old world. Gold and silver were Philips right, as the defender of Christ, and the killing of Native Americans was just and good, because it was done for the glory of god. Stannard quotes the saying of Cotton Mather and other religious Puritans that the Native Americans "must be pursued like wolves..[until] they are consumed" or exterminated. He notes that the genocidal project of the Puritans, and one could add, the Spanish, was advised and supported, even whipped up, by religious leaders, and that political and military leaders, indeed the "whole white nation... followed these minister's genocidal instructions with great care. It was their Christian duty as well as their destiny".[1] |