Shadow puppets are a kind of living hieroglyph, not etched into stone or punched onto clay, but spun out of Light and imbued with breath and motion.
#Religious chinese shadow puppetry skin#
It performs a text that is actually a dance of the naked, translucent parchment skin-a skin that has not yet been tattooed and pinned down with letters, words and verses, which subsequently freeze into sheets of written scriptural canon. The shadow puppet figure itself is a kind of bridge between the world of dis-embodied spirits and the physical world that we inhabit in our hard, opaque bodies. Given its primacy in the very fabric of the physical universe, it is perfectly logical for both mystics and puppeteers to make use of Light (and its antonymic, Shadow) as a metaphor for human existence. In this straightened manner, the once-pure Cosmic Light trickles into the mouth of the dense, material caves where we, Plato’s prisoners, are chained, no doubt watching dim re-runs of the greater reality-show. This awesome energy force (constituting the living fabric of the Divine garment, or excitable photons traveling at 186,000 miles per second, depending on your belief set) has been stepped down many, many octaves before ever reaching the opaque confines of our particular neighborhood of the space/time continuum and registering on our feeble eyes.
But these two accounts of the first moments of Creation seem to concur that the Universe and all it contains is a composition of various sub-frequencies and textures of Light. In truth, there is not a whole lot which mystics and scientists can agree upon. Yet even today, several dozen billion years after the fact, the energy imprint emanating from those first fiery moments of cosmo-genesis still reverberate throughout the Universe as a faint background hum of radiation that can be detected by our most sensitive radio-telescopic instruments. As eons passed, the omni-directional radiation gradually simmered down to the velvety blackness of near-vacuum and the production of light photons became localized into the massive clumps of hydrogen and helium, that became the first stars. Thousands of years of expansion passed before the newborn cosmos had cooled enough so that hyper-energized quarks could begin to link up and congeal into hydrogen atoms. During this period Space itself glowed brilliantly in every direction and from every point, so that not a trace of shadow existed from one end of the Universe to the other. Expanding explosively in ten or eleven dimensions (depending on who’s counting,) the unified forces of Space/Time/Gravity split apart and unfurled to fill an area the size of the solar system in less than a second-an unbelievably dense and burning ball of plasma, hotter than the interior of a star. From the innermost center of the flame sprang forth a well out of which colors issued and spread upon everything beneath, hidden in the mysterious hiddenness of Eyn Sof…It could not be recognized at all until a hidden supernal point shone forth under the impact of the final breaking through.1ġ0-47 seconds after the Big Bang (according to contemporary cosmologists) an unimaginably fierce, roiling pinpoint of energy sprang into existence out of the emptiness of No-Space/No-Time. Only after this flame began to assume size and dimension did it produce radiant colors. …Within the most hidden recess a dark flame issued from the mystery of Eyn Sof, the Infinite, like a fog forming in the unformed-enclosed in the ring of that sphere, neither white not black, neither red nor green, of no color whatever. In the Zohar (“The Book of Splendor,” a 13th century Jewish Kabbalist treatise,) there is a compelling description of the emergence of this primal Light into the realm of the physical: This radiance percolated down from the highest planes of existence, illuminating the entire newborn Universe even before sun and stars had been created. In the beginning (according to biblical sources) there was Light, emanating from the very first creative utterance of the Divine architect.
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