Leonard and I had another sitting for the portrait yesterday afternoon. I
am enjoying these sessions but the drawing process still feels quite unnatural
and it can be difficult to bear at times. Leonard sits at an angle to me, constantly
flicking his eyes sharply between me and the top of the drawing board that
balances rather precariously on his lap. Occasionally he will stop drawing and
thrust out his arm, close one eye and take a measurement using the end of his
pencil - all he needs to do is stick his tongue out of the corner of his mouth
and the caricature of the mad artist would be complete! The sessions are generally
relaxed and our conversations are very animated at times, but once in a while
he will fall abruptly silent, furrow his brow in deep concentration and there
is a tense atmosphere in the workroom. I keep absolutely silent when he enters
into this state of mind, fearing to interrupt him like a patient at the mercy
of a surgeon with a sharp scalpel. Every so often he will stand out of his
chair and walk over to me to adjust my clothing or take a measurement and, although
Leonard’s measurements are rarely intrusive, some precise measurements never fail
to make me uneasy. For instance, when he comes close to my face I continue to
stare at the wall behind him as though I am sitting for an eye examination and try
to ignore the fact that he is holding the tip of a very sharp pencil only a few
millimetres from my eyeball.
We have established a set routine from the
moment that I arrive at the house: we begin with a brief chat before commencing
work during which Leonard drinks a mug of herbal tea (or a small Armagnac if
the weather is particularly cold outside) while I acclimatise myself to the
temperature in the workroom, then I remove any additional clothing such as
jumpers or cardigans (or head into the bathroom to change my entire outfit if
necessary) while Leonard cleans his mug in the kitchen sink, feeds Hooter to
keep him out of our way and returns to the workroom with a jug of water and his
biscuit tin full of assorted lengths of charcoal, pastels and pencils. I will
then (begrudgingly) leave the comfort of the armchair and take my place on the
red plastic school chair in the centre of the room and Leonard will set about
positioning me so that we can continue from our last point of reference.
The ten minutes or so that we
have before starting work permits only a polite discussion of the weather and popular
news stories, but since our conversation in church a week or so ago I have been
attempting to steer Leonard once again towards the subject of Jesus and magic. Writing
about Elmfield House and our portraiture sessions is all very interesting, but
I need far more juicier material to keep my reader entertained! Unfortunately Leonard
has been avoiding this subject with an admirable degree of dexterity and so yesterday
afternoon, fearing that he would not mention it again, I decided that a direct
course of action was necessary. I asked Leonard about the exotic locations that
he has visited during his photography trips and mentioned - quite blatantly and
in a clearly contrived manner - that I had heard that some tribal communities have
a fear of photography because they believe that a camera can magically capture
the soul of a man in a photograph.
“Well, indeed, they may well
have considered me to be a magician,” he replied, taking his mug and the last
sip of his tea.
A guarded hesitancy crept
into his words at that point and he stood to take his mug into the kitchen,
thereby bringing our conversation to an abrupt end. I thought that he had
masterfully avoided the subject once again and I had lost the opportunity to
press him further on the matter, but then he came back into the room, placed
the jug of water on the floor and said “I expect you want to know details, the
reasons why his opponents branded him a magician, don’t you?”. I nodded my head
and grinned in response, but rather than indulge me straight away he bent
forward in his chair, prised open the biscuit tin at his feet, selected a
pencil and started to scrape away at the pencil with his penknife. Taking my
cue to begin work, I removed my cardigan and walked over to the red plastic
chair in the centre of the room (which, for a punishingly-shaped school chair,
is surprisingly comfortable).
Leonard began by explaining that Jesus’ followers - both ancient and
modern - defend Jesus from his opponents’ allegations of magic by highlighting
the fact that the Gospel writers do not record any instances of Jesus engaging
in elaborate magical rituals and, on the contrary, he most often performs his
miracles using a simple spoken command. Although Leonard did not dispute this
observation, he was quick to point out that an appeal to the spoken word is not
an adequate defence against the practice of magic and, on the contrary, it may
place Jesus under even greater suspicion of using magical techniques.
He said that the ancients believed that both the written and spoken word
contained a mystical energy that was capable of producing miraculous effects
and this confidence in the miracle-working power of words is evident in both
the Old and New Testament: the book of Genesis opens with God creating the
world through a series of spoken pronouncements and the Gospel of John begins
with ‘in the beginning was the word’. The early magicians considered words to
be equally as powerful as, if not superior to, the physical techniques of
ritual and the shape and sound of a word was credited with equal importance as
its meaning, often to the extent that the success of a magical ritual was
dependent upon the correct pronunciation of the words or sounds written within a
magical text. It was therefore essential that the words contained within a
magical text were preserved in the language in which they were first written
and translating these words into other languages was resisted. Unfortunately,
as Leonard pointed out, this tradition of resisting translation has led to the original
meanings of many ancient magical words being lost over time and their magical
significance is no longer recognised in the modern age, however he said that a small
number of magical words still survive in their original form and they are still
recognised as magical words to this day.
I listened intently as
Leonard scratched away with his pencil on the surface of the paper. He didn’t look
up once from his drawing board, which made me wonder whether he was sketching
me or whether he was simply doodling, but then he paused, stared at the nib of
his pencil, threw it back into the biscuit tin and selected another short
stubby pencil.
“Let me give you an example of
this," he said as he continued to draw, “tell me some magic words that you
remember from your childhood…”
I searched my memory for
something suitable and replied “Hocus pocus? Alla-kazam? Abracadabra?”
“What is the meaning of the
word ‘Abracadabra’?” he asked.
“I have no idea.”
“And yet you consider it to
be a magical word?”
“Well, maybe when I was a
child, not so much these days…”
“Why not so much these days?”
he pressed.
“It’s difficult to believe in
the magical power of words as an adult…”
“Really?” he interrupted, “what
about the word ‘Amen’? How many adults believe in the magical power of that
word?”
I smiled. Point taken.
Taking ‘Abracadabra’ and
‘Amen’ as examples, Leonard said that whether we truly believe in the magical
power of words or not, we still recognise ‘Abracadabra’ and ‘Amen’ as magical
words today and they have therefore successfully made the transition from
ancient word of power to modern word of power. However he said that these are
‘the lucky survivors’ because most archaic words of power have become incomprehensible
gobbledegook over time and we would not associate them with magical activity if
we encountered them in either an ancient or modern text.
Leonard then turned his
attention to the Gospel stories and he explained that Jesus may have used
several words when performing healings that were widely recognised by his
contemporaries as magical terms, but unless he said ‘abracadabra’ or another word
that is still considered to be a magical word today, his terminology would not
strike the modern-day reader as suggestive of magical activity. At that point I asked outright whether Leonard
was implying that Jesus used magical words when performing his miracles, to
which he paused and sat back in his chair, then reached up to a nearby shelf
and fetched down a bible. It was the largest bible that I had ever seen; a huge,
dusty King James Version that would stop a lorry in its tracks (Leonard will
only use the KJV for his bible study because he says that modern versions
‘water down the translation into an unidentifiable and shameful mess of
apologetic, pseudo-cool and political correctness’ and, having considered the
evidence, I am inclined to agree with him).
Thumbing through the pages,
he squinted through his glasses to check the verse numbers and then passed the
bible to me and asked me to read Mark 7:32-37 and identify the word that Jesus
uses to heal the deaf-mute. I scanned through the passage until I came across
the word ‘ephphatha’. I had encountered this healing story many times before in
my studies but for some reason I had entirely overlooked the peculiar nature of
this word until Leonard brought it to my attention.
Leonard said that some of the
healing commands that are spoken by Jesus are simple imperative commands and -
since many psychologists and biblical scholars agree that the illnesses cured
by Jesus may have been simply hysterical disorders - if an individual’s illness
is merely psychosomatic then a sharp authoritative command directed at the
patient could instigate or reverse a psychological process, which in turn could
bring about the cure. I understood the rationale behind this and I was willing
to accept it as a reasonable explanation for how Jesus’ healing miracles were
achieved, but that was until Leonard pointed out that the deaf-mute in Mark 7
is deaf and therefore Jesus’ spoken command cannot have prompted a
psychological reaction. Leonard also pointed out that the word ‘ephphatha’ is
transliterated into Greek from an Aramaic word meaning ‘to open’, so the deaf-mute
may have been unfamiliar with the meaning of the word even if he had perfect
hearing. In this particular case the efficacy of the healing command cannot
have been dependent upon the word being heard by the patient and it appears the
word itself possessed healing properties that directly instigated the cure.
Taking the bible from me, Leonard flicked through the pages again and
handed it back to me opened on a different page. He asked me to read the account
of the healing of Jairus’ daughter in chapter five of the Gospel of Mark in
which Jesus brings a young girl back to life using the (yet again Aramaic) command
‘Talitha Koum’, which the author of Mark somewhat self-consciously translates
for the reader as ‘little girl, I say to you arise’. Leonard asked for my
opinion on this Aramaic command and again I answered that the strangeness of
the phrase had not been evident to me before. Leonard smiled and he said that the
other Gospel writers clearly considered this phrase to be a little too strange
for their liking too, as the author of Luke simply replaces it with the Greek command
‘child, arise’ and the Matthean version removes the healing word altogether.
Leonard proposed that Matthew and Luke scramble to explain or omit these
peculiar healing commands because they imply that Jesus used foreign - and
possibly magical - words in his healing ministry. “And yet,” I enquired, “the
author of Mark has no problem with the inclusion of these strange words in his
Gospel?”. Leonard acknowledged my observation and he answered that the author
of Mark may have included these commands in his Gospel because he believed that
Jesus’ words had a magical function in these instances and he was familiar with
the importance of preserving magical words of power in their original language.
Alternatively, the author of Mark may not have considered the words to be
magical himself but he felt obliged to include them as such due to the fact
that they were well-known magical formulas that were commonly associated with
Jesus’ healing ministry. Leonard said that if the commands that were spoken by
Jesus were unfamiliar to his audience and/or the people thought that Jesus’
words possessed an inherent magical effectiveness, then these words may have
been adopted by the witnesses to Jesus’ healings and exorcisms who were eager
to perform the same miracles themselves; a sort of do-it-yourself miracle kit,
if you like. Hence the popularity of these particular words amongst the people may
have forced the author of Mark to consider it unavoidable and necessary to
include them in his narrative, regardless of any personal objections that he
may have had to their inclusion.
I
had not paid attention to these healing commands before and they had seemed so natural
and unobtrusive when I encountered them in my undergraduate classes, but, as is
often the case when your attention is drawn to a matter that you have accepted willingly
and without question for some time, the longer that I studied these words, the
more they popped out of the page at me and the more I questioned my
understanding of them. And, if I am honest, the more they began to resemble
magical words, much like ‘abracadabra’. I was seeing these Gospel passages in a
completely new light and I was disappointed that I had not questioned the meanings
of the words before. If our discussion yesterday afternoon has taught me one
important lesson it is that I am painfully naïve at times and I should look
deeper into subjects when they are presented to me rather than blindly accepting
them at face value. After all, there is no harm in re-evaluating evidence that
one has previously – and perhaps mistakenly – accepted as truth.
