Presentation 2 — Hermaphrodite Humanity: Four-Armed and Three-Eyed

Dr C.A. Bartzokas · Atlantean Realities Series · 12 slides · White Lotus Day, Athens, 14 May 2006

The second of the seven White Lotus Day presentations, and the one that ranges furthest across cultures. Its subject is the doctrine that earlier humanity was differently constituted — four-armed, three-eyed, and not yet divided into sexes — and its method is to assemble the images in which that form survives.

The Greek material comes first: paintings of the one-eyed Cyclops and of Polyphemus, and a black-figure vase. Two slides then set a biological frame alongside the mythological one — an anatomical engraving of a conjoined animal from the literature of teratology, and a photograph of the triops, the living three-eyed crustacean. From there the sequence moves east to the three-faced head of Shiva, a Tibetan thangka, a four-armed goddess seated on the lotus, a four-armed Vishnu, and a many-armed temple sculpture, before closing on Velázquez's Forge of Vulcan. The point is left for the viewer to draw: that the same anatomy recurs, in art separated by continents and millennia.

View the presentation (PDF, 1.9 MB, 12 slides)