This article accompanies the fable
Dreaming the Virgin Mary



The Divine Elevator


If religious architecture evokes the pathway to and from Heaven, there are lots of stories and paintings about it too: Jacob's Ladder, angels visiting earth (Genesis 28), distant clouds in the sky seen from Mt. Carmel, Dante's Divine Comedy, William Blake... Up/down...

In Christianity, the Annunciation, the Ascension, the Assumption (or Dormition), the Immaculate Conception, and of course in Jewish Kabbalist theology the 10 Sefirot, all involve the Divine Elevator. In apocalyptic theologies the Rapture derives from ancient beliefs about the descent of the Sophia (see Matthew 24) and it's hard to think of Intelligent Design any other way (see John 1). It's beams of light, emanations, the breath of God, with a few clouds thrown in...

Titian's Assumption of the Virgin (1516-1518) is in Venice, that most Byzantine of cities. Note the dome and golden mosaic effect at the top as Mary ascends toward the light.

It is sometimes said that these metaphors are not to be understood spatially but I disagree. These metaphors are vertical. For horizontal metaphors, here...

The style persists through the Baroque period in the next century. Below is Bernini's The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1645-52), in Rome. That is Saint Teresa of Ávila on the right, an angel on the left. Although it is hard to see in the photo, Teresa is levitating on a cloud and while the dome is now out of sight, golden rays reach down to caress her.

Although Bernini intended it as a serious mystical work, cynics have read orgasm into her pose - see the closer image below. They are both right. There is no way to get around the associations that come with the word ecstasy ("Estasi") and so the more interesting question here has always been: What are the links between ecstatic religion and sexual desire?

Photo credits: Peter Viktor Jurik (middle); Napoleon Vier (bottom).