Presentation 1 — Ankhs and Swastikas: A Collection

Dr C.A. Bartzokas · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 30 slides

Thirty slides, and the first half of a pair: the title slide calls it a collection, and that is exactly what it is — a picture gallery rather than an argument. There is no commentary on any slide. The presentation simply sets one image beside another and lets the recurrence of two shapes make the point, which is the point The Secret Doctrine makes at length in prose and which this section covers in writing under "Cross Is the Time-Honoured Symbol of Pre-Cosmic Divine Mind" and "Proposition 1: Blavatsky on the Cross and Fire".

The first fourteen slides follow the ankh. A plain black ankh on white opens the sequence; then a line drawing of an Egyptian deity holding staff and ankh, a painted tomb figure of a goddess with the sign in her hand, and a modern coloured ankhmandala with the sign at its centre inside a square of lotus and stars. From there the eye is asked to find the same shape elsewhere: a carved Akan fertility figure from West Africa with its disc head and outstretched arms, a bronze mirror laid beside a hafted adze, an Indian painting of two figures standing either side of a tree, a Borobudur relief, a woodcut of two dancers at a flowering tree, and three early printed and illuminated pages of Adam and Eve at the tree of knowledge, one of them from a Book of Hours. A folk-art panel of a tree between two birds closes the run. A divider slide reading "Swastikas galore" then opens the second half, and the same method is applied to the second figure: a deeply carved stone relief of interlocked spirals, an illuminated manuscript wheel, the tracery of a Gothic church window, a Korean temple in its wooded hills and the painted gable of a Korean temple roof, a prehistoric bird-form ceramic figure, two ancient coins, and two dense plates gathering gold discs, seals, brooches, a spearhead and Celtic and Indus designs. The last half-dozen slides bring the shape into recent times without comment: a New Year greetings card, a good-luck postcard lettered Light, Love and Life, a Russian thousand-rouble note of 1917, a stone elephant carrying the sign on its saddle-cloth, a satellite view of a barrack block built in that plan, and four modern games controllers arranged into the same four arms. The closing slide reads simply End.

View the presentation (PDF, 2.2 MB, 30 slides)