Presentation 5 — Yoni and Linga, Arani and Manthani

Dr C.A. Bartzokas · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 19 slides

Nineteen slides, and the title slide carries two pairs of names rather than one: Yoni & Linga above, Arani & Manthani below. The second pair is the Vedic fire-drill — the socketed block and the stick turned in it to kindle flame by friction — and naming it alongside the first tells you how the presentation intends its subject to be read: as the general figure of a vessel and a shaft, out of which something is produced. The written treatment in this section is "Proposition 1: Churning the Ocean of Milk" and "Proposition 1: Noah's Ark Is the Argha of the Hindus", the argha being the same vessel under another name.

The sequence opens away from India, with a line drawing of the arched sky-goddess bending over a shrine and its zodiac, and an old engraving of Mercury standing in a niche with his caduceus — both figures set inside a framing arch, which is the shape the last third of the presentation returns to. A Mughal garden miniature follows. Then come six photographs of the Indian form itself, plainly documented: a carved mukhalinga with a face worked into the shaft, standing on its base in a rock-cut shrine; a sanctum seen down a long arcade with the shrine at the far end; a weathered example lying on a cracked slab in the grass; a painted one dressed with lotus, fruit and the marks of Shiva; and a dim interior of a colonnaded temple hall. The presentation then moves west. An Irish high cross is shown in a Victorian watercolour, its ringed head and tapering shaft rising from a carved base with two figures seated beneath. Two photographs give the Omphalos of Delphi from different angles, the conical stone with its carved net of woollen fillets. A watercolour of a moored boat and its reflection on still water follows, and then a divider slide reading "Phallocentricities". After it: a shallow carving cut into a granite block, a labelled architectural diagram of a Romanesque church portal naming its parts — spandrel, archivolts, voussoir, tympanum, jamb figure, jamb column, colonnette, jamb pedestal — a photograph of such a doorway with its receding orders of columns, and a deep arched interior seen in perspective. The diagram is the only slide with any words on it, and it is there to give the comparison its vocabulary. The closing slide reads End.

View the presentation (PDF, 2.1 MB, 19 slides)