THE GOLDEN AGE OF AQUARIUS

 
It’s extraordinary how the ancient Mayans were able to know very different kinds of time, not just linear time that we are familiar with that flies like an arrow. They knew circular time, cycles of time that go back to 16.4 billion years ago.



Whenever a Golden Age comes as it did in the medieval period and now in the dawning Age of Aquarius, it’s about waking up from the age of lies and the land of lies that we have been living in. The lies we convinced ourselves of and believed in, and to waking up to the clarity of vision to enable us to see truth in the midst of today’s chaos and confusion. Not only to see truth but to become truth to practice truth so that everything we speak is truthful, everything we are is truth, and that’s coming into Beingness which is an internal fusion of humanity and divinity. A good example of doing that is when you discover Diego Velasquez monumental painting “Las Meninas” (“Ladies in Waiting”) considered not only the best painting in the Western world but also the most puzzling.  See the painting above.

My purpose here however, is not to speak of his work in toto but of the technical bravura as the prominent art critic Michael Atlee calls it, of the puzzling “Las Meninas” and its thematic relationship to many of his other paintings. It has a uniqueness as it is the only known painting in the Western world in which an artist has achieved with aesthetic mastery, the fusion of form and content. Its message propounds in subtle hues authentic democratic principles, making it a very modern work – way ahead of its time, politically and philosophically. It has caused most art historians scratching their heads as Michael Atlee points out.

The discovery of this puzzle is like the experience of emerging in glory from the 16th century golden age of the Renaissance (Rebirth of Learning). You have broken out of the hall of mirrors, out of the great illusion.

Diego Velazquez of Spain who was born in 1599, spent his formative years in a world awash in the full tide of Renaissance thinking, a time when Shakespeare of England and Cervantes of Spain were writing their great humanist works. If you do only a superficial search into the history of art, you will find “Las Meninas” on almost all the “best” lists. The reasons given are mostly of a technical order, extolling Velasquez’ discreetly intellectual art which as historian Enriqueta Harris states, is expressed in “superb color values and draftsmanship, showing unique skill in merging color, light, space, rhythm and mass in such a way that all have equal values.” All perspectives in “Las Meninas” have equal values. Manet regarded him as the greatest painter of all time, the painter's painter, even "the painter of truth." He had a greater influence on European art than any other artist, especially the Impressionists -- my favorite period of art. Notables unabashed in their admiration include Corot, Courbet, Goya, Sargent, Millet, Degas, Renoir, Francis Bacon and even Picasso who painted, according to art historians, over forty studies of "Las Meninas."

“Las Meninas” is a great painting because it is making a statement that all men are created equal in the eyes of the Creator. A declaration that is a truth as expounded by the Age of Aquarius where we have our embodiment now, the age of universal peace, harmony as a result of attaining Oneness of all men with the Source and All that is. The age of the perfected human who has attained beingness or still working to attain it after completing a great cycle of 26,000 years divided in two segments with 11,500 years each between Leo and Aquarius, through the precession of the Equinoxes, along with the solstices, lunar cycles bringing the changes of the seasons.

People are already beginning to look for their God within, at this time, and not in the sky, for answers they seek, instead of towards only money, possessions and other people. The corrupt foundations of a false society are starting to crumble. The time of crises is not the signal of the end despite the shattering of existing structures of the way we govern ourselves, but the beginning of a new cycle awakening to a bright new day, a luminous new way.

It is to my dear friend Maria Victoria (Mav) Rufino, a truly remarkable painter herself, I give credit for my recent discovery of the uniquely Aquarian 16th century painting of Diego Velasquez “Las Meninas“ that has long puzzled the art historians of the world. A group of Filipino- Spanish artists have invited her to work in tandem with them to make a uniquely Aquarian art show at the Ayala Museum on April 15, 2010, integrating the glory of the past Renaissance with the new Renaissance movement that is emerging now on many levels, including medical science and alternative natural healing.

As an Aquarian artist, Mav Rufino learns to plumb the depths of her psyche, as she releases unsuspected creative forces in her paintings of cosmic forces such as the sun, moon, scintillating nebulae and spinning galaxies. These images and concepts may be taking so powerful a grip upon her mind and psyche that she begins to feel more like their instrument than their originator. She has become a co-creator with the Creator. She has made significant Uranian breakthroughs in her Saturnian drive at consistently with great discipline and emotional serenity painting the skies, the clouds baring mountains, the rainbow, all aspects of the cosmos. I have often been awed by her galactic flair for revealing this miracle on Earth, a new golden octave, and yet in a puzzling way she would ask me like the fans of Velazquez, "What's going on here?"

In Aquarius, sign of group activity, she's the first Filipino painter I know who has gone into integrative art work with an international group of artists coming from the Prado Museum of Madrid. I see her work of subtly superimposing her luminous sun reigning above Velazquez’ little princess in this combined art work of Rufino and Velazquez, signifying the Oneness of all times and space. Why did they assign the great painting of "Las Meninas" to her? Or she chose it herself? Why a child?

For me it's about the New Myth, that's what struck me when Mav showed me her integrative painting newly framed just delivered into the lovely sala of her condo that Friday, March 26, 2010, being readied for the coming international art exhibit. She says: you are the first one to see it. By fortuitious accident I was there. So I feel inspired to write about it here, and I now address the Velazquez child Infanta standing without her "meninas" (or yayas) but only with her dog, appearing almost floating in a vast space of shimmering golden sunlight, painted by Mav Rufino:

Child of the Sun, as the Mayan oracle calls you, you are being called to wakefulness, to your place in the new myth. A great miracle is coming to earth, and the time is now. A new consciousness will be created by the children of the Sun as they ascend with the Earth to a new place among the stars. A new harmonic of light and sound, a golden octave, is being sounded on Earth...From hereon, your direction comes straight from the universe, as this is the path of innocence, the path of trust. Know that, like the pull of the heavenly bodies (see the integrative painting of Velazquez-Rufino on April 15 at the Ayala Museum ), love is neither taken nor given but discovered and allowed. No one is without love, for love is the force that holds the universes together. Surrender to love and awaken the child in you,

Expanding perception of what is possible, anything you have defined in a limited way is being transformed.

 Perhaps you have seen this expanded version of reality in moments of extreme crises, terrorism, human trafficking or modern slavery, natural catastrophies, tremors, tsunamis, drug experiences, deep meditations, severe depression, severe illness, or a near-death experience. After such moments, all things look different, the golden sun continues to shine upon you, and the potential of all possibilities emerges. A complex reordering of your world awaits you!

Back to Diego Velazquez of 16th century Seville, Spain: under the tutelage of artist Franscisco Pacheco in Seville where he enjoyed fame as an excellent painter, and amidst a heady humanist ferment, the young Diego Velazquez grew prodigiously to produce paintings like the astounding “Water Seller of Seville,” which are infused with the light of his ardent humanism. Very early on, Velasquez became a resolute democratic humanist, so narrates our art historian Atlee, a resolution strengthened when he entered the service of a profligate, dissolute King Felipe 1V where he lived, worked and painted for the rest of his life. There as Atlee has recorded and commented, he observed first hand the decadent lives of the supposed superior “noble” classes which he could not help but compare and contrast with the great suffering of the Spanish people he saw everywhere.

Spanish society was similar to pre-French Revolution society in France. It was structured in theory fused with Plato’s The Republic idea which formed the dynamics of Western kingdoms during the Medieval Period. In Plutonian scale, all animals were ranked according to the degree of perfection. By the criterion of rank, in this natural scale, he sometimes took the high degree of development reached by the offspring at birth. This resulted, he proposed, in eleven general grades with man at the apex and the zoophytes (animals) at the bottom, the zoophytes being invertebrate animals resembling plants. Spanish society came to be conceived of in terms of the religious theory of emanation, power emanated from the one at the top, a great staircase if you will, leading up to the heavens and thence to God

 . I heard it too that the ordinary Spaniard had an eye to a window in heaven where he imagines every living creature had a place, distanced from God according to his lights, i.e., his perfections or his lack, thereof. This lofty contiguity, according to our art historian Michael Atlee, naturally gave the philosopher king his “divine right.” Members of nobility came in descending order. The hierarchies went on down to the level where the least perfect were assigned -- like the deformed, the lame, the mentally deficient, the dwarfs, the slaves -- were ranked directly above the animals.

Painters were mere artisans in Spanish social hierarchy which was structured in the form of a pyramid. With our modern-day democratic “the level playing field” it is difficult to imagine the rigid social hierarchical system under which everyone lived at the time. It is the manipulation of this perspectivism in “Las Meninas” that beguiles the viewer, art historian Michael Atlee goes further, provoking the question: “What’s going on here?”

More coming from art critic Atlee: Velasquez gave his viewers the first unmistakable indication that he had abandoned the medieval vertical for the modern horizontal symbolizing equality of men regardless of rank and social stature in two large paintings he made to adorn the royal hunting lodge, causing the consternation of art historians. At that time the king Felipe IV must have been so absorbed with winning wars like colonizing the Philippines (check this out native historians) or defending his fortifications like Intramuros (fact is he did it through his minions in Mexico but not directly) that he didn’t notice what Velasquez was doing. Or he was too busy with more dissolute, worldly matters to bother about art history or philosophy. Velasquez was known to be strongly influenced by an obscure cynic Menippus, known as “the classical forerunner of Cervantes,” had satirized systematic philosophers and had expressed utter contempt for such conventional social values as beauty, social status, lofty notions of propriety, and wealth, especially if it was spent on art such as sculpture at that time and for this time we enjoy spending enormous money watching "moving sculptures on the ramp" called fashion shows with the desire of heaping upon us vainglorious adornments instead of setting aside some money on food for the poor.

Back to Velazquez: "the most noble, virtuous life was living according to nature, the necessary and sufficient way to find happiness." To Atlee, the other was the writer of Aesop fables who had influence on Medieval Spanish literature and on that of Cervantes. He was another Greek non-systematic philosopher whose homely fables brought philosophy back to earth, to everyday living, that taught our children lessons that speak of wisdom based on hidden esoteric ideas such as theology and metaphysics by "grounding" them. For those of us who are “ugly” and “deformed” he demanded that we be given the humane respect denied us. It is important to mention here, so goes Atlee, that both Menippus and Aesop were former slaves for one of Velasquez’ most unforgettable portraits is that of Juan de Pareja, his mulatto slave whom he had taught to paint. He endowed Juan with a princely presence in his painting, by adorning him with a fancy lace collar, a luxury item of adornment forbidden by the laws of the time, especially to someone of his social category.


In his art, Velasquez, following Cervantes’ before him, very discreetly turned his back on this social value system, painting on his democratic view one after another, until the rising tide of his fervent humanism is reached in “Las Meninas” in which he included himself just like Cervantes did in DON QUIXOTE. 

Here, Michael Atlee's arrow points us from Velasquez to Cervantes whose great work is the first modern novel which has been called the “Bible of Humanity.” In it, he goes: Cervantes speaks loud and clear for the humble and the oppressed, the peasants and the servant class, especially the peasant women. He gave Don Quixote‘s lowly squire the name Sancho which means “holy” as derived from the Latin “Sanctus,” The man from La Mancha then endowed the high sounding name “Dulcinea” on the humble peasant girl Aldonza. The Spanish people so loved Cervantes' story of Don Quixote's romanticsm that's treated in a humorous and witty manner that they built in their town plaza a monument in his honor. Dulcinea is a name derived from a literary expression of Aristotle’s notion of God, the Unmoved Mover. 

Both Cervantes and Velasquez, continues our art historian, abhorred the notion found in classical mythology and Christianity of intermingling the human with the divine. If the point is to be considered at all, says MichaelAtlee -– and I agree, for it resonates well with the New Humanity emerging after 2012 and beyond -- it advocates that the human IS divine. And it Is the I Am, as God is within man, not someone outside of him, for does it not say in the Holy Bible --that the Kingdom of God is within you? Not far away in the sky. In his paintings “The Adoration of the Magi” and – The Coronation of the Virgin” all of his “divine” figures appear to have stepped out of taverns, depicting them with great “human” qualities especially that of Christ.