Emission theory or as it is sometimes called extramission, extromission, or extromittism theory, is the proposal that visual perception is accomplished by beams emitted by the eyes. I was reminded of this when looking at an old poster for the International Hygiene Exhibition of 1911 and another series of corona virus connections started to form in my head. As I'm locked down and not allowed to go out and talk to anyone about these thoughts, I'm afraid they are coming out as a blog post again. There is a sort of method in my madness, I'm still trying to communicate something about how artists think. My thinking starts with seeing something and it is through analogy and metaphor that that initial perception grows into an idea for an art piece. You could look at what I'm doing as an aspect of artist's research as opposed to or in contrast to academic research, i.e. intuitively skipping from thought to thought, rather than objectively analysing data and verifying sources.
The International Hygiene Exhibition was a world's fair exhibition that was focused on medicine and public health. Hygiene centred around cleanliness was in 1911 still a very new idea, an idea that was at the time influencing many other areas of public life, not least art and design. It was one of the driving forces behind the Modernist obsession with clean white walls and uncluttered surfaces, germs could hide in decoration, but not on the clean, flat surfaces of abstract machined objects. It has been argued that the abstract art made for Modernist interior spaces was therefore made as a direct consequence of the new awareness of hygiene. It was only in 1847 that the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelwis when investigating childbed fever, found students who assisted in childbirth often did so immediately after conducting autopsies. He instituted a strict hand washing policy, and deaths from childbed fever very quickly diminished. A few years later, another physician, John Snow realised that London outbreaks of cholera seemed to be clustered around a particular water pump, on removing the pump handle, the spread was instantly contained. He had already recommended that water be "filtered and boiled before it is used" But Snow's 'germ' theory of disease was not widely accepted until the 1860s, when the work of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch became more widely known. Pasteur had placed a drop of blood from a sheep dying of anthrax into a sterile culture, and allowed the bacilli to grow. He repeated this process until none of the original culture remained in the final dish. The final culture produced anthrax when injected into sheep, showing that the bacillus was responsible for the disease. It was Joseph Lister that worked out the implications of these discoveries and in the 1860s he introduced the idea of sterile surgery, using carbolic acid as an antiseptic to sterilise surgical instruments. As you can see from this very short introduction to the need for cleanliness in hygiene, by 1911 the idea of invisible germs had taken hold, (it was not until the 1940s that the electron microscope was developed and a virus was seen for the first time) and the existence of a powerful but unseen agent was now seen as a reality that could be effectively dealt with by sterilisation and cleanliness.
The word 'hygiene' like many made up words comes from the Greek, and entered English via France in the late 17th century. Hygeia was the Greek goddess of health, daughter of Aesculapius the god of medicine. Statues of Hygieia were during certain rituals covered by women's hair and articles of clothing, but to what effect I'm not sure. She is also often depicted feeding a large snake, a creature she no doubt inherited from her father.
Because of the new focus on cleanliness, the great hygiene exhibition of 1911 was sponsored and organised by the German businessman and wealthy owner of the company that manufactured Odol mouthwash, he was of course eager to educate the public about advances in public health procedures, especially if they included mouth hygiene.
The word 'hygiene' like many made up words comes from the Greek, and entered English via France in the late 17th century. Hygeia was the Greek goddess of health, daughter of Aesculapius the god of medicine. Statues of Hygieia were during certain rituals covered by women's hair and articles of clothing, but to what effect I'm not sure. She is also often depicted feeding a large snake, a creature she no doubt inherited from her father.
Hygeia goddess of health
Aesculapius the god of medicine always carries a staff entwined by a snake. The significance of this is complex. Partly a symbol of renewal, or rejuvenation, (snakes shed their skin) it is also a symbol of life and death, healing implies illness, this ambiguity reflected in the ancient Greek word 'pharmakon' meaning both 'drug' and 'poison'. Snake venom was often prescribed at the time as a healing elixir, something that might have been a little like the use of peyote or ayahuasca, vomiting and hallucinogenic experiences purging both the mind and the body. The old 'snake-oil' salesmen were still in existence at the end of the 19th century, a common belief in many cultures was that snakes boiled in oil, formed the basis of a powerful cure all remedy.
Staff of Aesculapius
Because of the new focus on cleanliness, the great hygiene exhibition of 1911 was sponsored and organised by the German businessman and wealthy owner of the company that manufactured Odol mouthwash, he was of course eager to educate the public about advances in public health procedures, especially if they included mouth hygiene.
Our present obsession with sparkling teeth is still served by Odol, and if you look carefully at the label you can see a radiating gleam of freshness, a sparkle that people now want to enable them to take smiling selfies and which is used to advertise the whitest of white teeth. That educational investment into oral hygiene that the wealthy owner of the Odol company took back in 1911 has really paid dividends.
Solar deities, sun gods and sun worship can be found throughout recorded history. Even Christmas Day being on the 25th of December is on that date because early Christians needed to replace the festival of Sol Invictus with a celebration of their own. The rays of the sun were seen by neolithic peoples in Britain and Ireland as being very special, and on certain days they would be seen to enter sacred sites as moments of spiritual illumination. Witness the continuing mythic power of Stonehenge in England and Newgrange in Ireland.
Rays of the sun penetrate Newgrange
Invisible rays pass through us all the time, Euclid and Ptolemy both claimed that vision worked by little flames exiting the eyes, traveling on rays, scanning objects in the visual field, and traveling back to the eyes to report what they had detected. (Somewhat like Superman's heat and x-ray vision) This would seem to me to be little different to Jack Kirby's idea of the Fantastic Four being penetrated by cosmic rays, these invisible rays affecting their body chemistry in strange and fantastic ways, metamorphosing them into new super beings.
The origin of Marvel Comic's the Fantastic Four
Invisible penetration by rays is miraculous and transformative; something that radiates out from supernatural beings or entities. At the moment of the Annunciation, Mary is in effect made pregnant by God. In the painting by Fra Angelico below, God is represented by the sun, the rays of which penetrate Mary. The Feast of the Annunciation is on the 25th of march, an approximate date for the northern vernal equinox, nine months before Christmas Day, the ceremonial birthday of Jesus.
Once Mary is changed by God's penetration, 'the immaculate conception'; she is herself elevated into the status of a divine being and she can also emit transforming rays.
The Annunciation: Fra Angelico
Once Mary is changed by God's penetration, 'the immaculate conception'; she is herself elevated into the status of a divine being and she can also emit transforming rays.
Mary as the mediatrix, or mediator between humans and the divinity
Rays of light appear to radiate from Mary's hands, an alternative extramission theory, touch from a distance, one that has also been seen in comic books. If the good and pure can radiate healing energies, evil villains can too, Dr. Doom radiating destructive energy from his hands, another comic-book human altered by cosmic rays, but this time with a mind focused on destruction.
The eye in the poster for the hygiene exhibition, is meant to represent the all seeing eye; 'the Eye of Providence'. Based on the idea of the all-seeing eye of God, the rays of light emanating from the eye in the past represented the eye of God watching over humanity, in this case the poster is now meant to suggest hygiene has replaced divine providence. Science superseding religion as humankind's saviour, is now watching over humanity and it is the role of business to provide the necessary services and goods to ensure that these benefits are made available to all.
The Eye of Providence as printed on the American dollar bill
Emission theory, or the idea that seeing is accomplished by beams emanating from the eye, continues to exist as a powerful idea, although proven by science many years ago to be a redundant theory, it still works as a concept and lies behind many of the ways we think about things intuitively.
Emission theory is as a concept closely tied to the idea of the sunburst. Invisible rays spread out from a defined centre. God has been described many times as the centre of a sphere, as in this typical ancient explication; “God is an infinite sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.” God and the sun were for thousands of years and across many cultures one and the same thing. Science tells us that the universe explodes into existence from a single point, a big bang, the effects of which we inhabit now.
A graphic representation of sunburst
A graphic representation of the mutation and spread of a virus
Graphic representation of the big bang
God sees everything, the all seeing eye's extramission vision like Superman's, can pass through everything, but if one invisible entity can do this perhaps others can too. Our greatest fear at the moment is corona virus, the invisible demon is spread amongst us, not so much by rays emanating from the eyes but by invisible droplets coming from a sneeze.
In science the great unknowns are at the moment dark matter and dark energy, we have been living amongst these things from the beginning of time, the known universe we now know to only be about 5% of what is out there. We are constantly penetrated by the dark rays of unknown forces, in the past we used various religious or spiritual understandings to cope with the fact that death sometimes arrived out of nowhere, and whoever we were we could not avoid it. The present corona pandemic is just one tiny moment in the long history of our interrelationship with a dangerous natural environment, that has nevertheless also been an environment that we have grown up in and with which we are inextricably entangled. It is as good as it is bad. Like the light rays from our sun, darkness can spread out from a centre, this darkness can be mental as well as physical, but however it manifests itself it is part of life and we should embrace it.
Dark energy emanates out from a centre
Schematic representation of a corona virus
Two images from a recent series of my own drawings
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