"Was the author of the Book of Revelation really not under the influence, so to speak, of a being who was in conflict with Jesus Christ? of the 'Schatten', as it is called in psychology" C. G. Jung, "The Aion".
A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. 5She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.”And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.
Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.
Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:
“Now have come the salvation and the power
and the kingdom of our God,
and the authority of his Messiah.
For the accuser of our brothers and sisters,
who accuses them before our God day and night,
has been hurled down……
Revelation：12
On August 15, 2014, Assumption of the Blessed Virgin，I was baptized as a Catholic. Most people are baptized in the spring at Easter, but this was the only year that the baptismal service was also held in the summer. I had planned to attend a baptismal course with my fiancé at the time, but I went to the church he had chosen in June, just to see what it was like. While I was taking baptism alone, I had to attend a year-long study group, but the priest in charge at the time said he could fit me into the baptismal service in August. I asked my fiancé to let me in without asking for confirmation. At that time I didn’t know if it was an invitation from God or a betrayal, but I didn’t know that my relationship with him would deteriorate.
He intended to continue to love the Bible without being baptized, But I was convinced that he would come later, and I found myself with a bunch of lilies on August 15.
When the Bible reading began, “The temple of God in heaven was opened, and the …… woman was pregnant, but because of the pain and suffering of giving birth to a child, the …… dragon wanted to give birth to a child,” I turned my head and began to I had the chills when the reading started. is Revelation 12, the maiden, and the dragon. The dragon is said to be a heretical being and the woman is the Virgin Mary. This world of Revelation is the end of humanity and is depicted in cryptic prose and lyricism. In this chapter alone, This prefigures the dream of Joseph in Genesis 37, and the Bible itself writes about the beginning and end of the world.
The reason why I was so moved by the story is that the maiden and the dragon is a Jungian archetype, which I also dealt with in my work “Pagaea Doll”, in which I compared it to the dragon legends of East and West. Like the protagonist “Shoko”, I have been pursuing the “virginity of the imagination” since I was a child. As in the story of Borges, one can imagine and still resemble someone else. Without sympathy and admiration, the imagination is wounded, flattered, thirsty and lonely, aging and dying.
When I was painting in my teenage years, I sometimes thought that when I was free to create, I couldn’t find what I wanted to paint because I couldn’t find what I wanted to paint. The world I wanted to paint depends on my capacity to describe it, and I couldn’t even approach it. What I found out, what I might have known if I had studied philosophy, Hadd was already a pioneer in philosophers. It’s always changing my mind, searching for new discoveries. The time when the eye blinks, or the time to fall asleep, the opportunity is unpredictable and even the notebook is not ready. Without any time to think, drawing assignments arrive, study assignments arrive, and I waste my time on dreams.
When I finally said that I wanted to make a religious painting, the adults did not agree with me, and I set off on a journey to concretize myself, without financial means.
Jung’s “archetypes” are even deeper than Freud’s unconscious: C.G. Jung remarked that Jesus and Mary do not appear directly in dreams as much as church people do. The Sun is Jesus, the Lilies are Mary, and they exist as symbols in the field of collective unconsciousness. Freud did not deny this statement from his own, but said he was having problems with it.I would later learn that Freud was right. Jung’s work is laborious for a man as exhausted as his patient. Myth and faith may have been a fading influence of 19th century science, but even if Jung’s theory was correct, it was probably obvious that neither theology nor religion, or more specifically myth and fable, would become stronger in the 20th and 21st centuries, and that the masses would no longer understand them. That is why the “archetypes” are so isolated from their patients.
I was in primary school when I wrote the story of the dragon. I already had an idea for the story of Shoko’s childhood in “PangaeaDoll”. I knew the book of Revelation chapter 12 from a Bible I found in a Christian friend’s house. I didn’t know what it meant, but it fascinated me as a fantasy story about the dynamism of this wriggling dragon and the obsession with a maiden (the Immaculate Heart of Mary).
What do I want to show? I was looking for a place for the significance of the “something” that was born. Eventually I quit painting because I no longer wanted to be understood, and I lived in my writing. I will live for my existence, even though no one in particular asks me to. In order not to be crushed by others, my thoughts go beyond my language and my imagery and become even more passionate. An inexpressible pain in my chest, my soul dreams of rising. For such a man, the dragon was a symbol of uncontrollable ” Sensation “. It followed the maiden Mary as she fled from the clutches of King Herod. It was such a struggle to have faith or not to have faith. There was doubt and a constant shadow of the Bible. Such is the world of the unconverted. It was always ridged like a serpent and moved with a lot of heat.
The dragon who wanted to eat the maiden (Jesus) seemed to me to be a conflicted baptismal candidate itself. Especially the dragon of chapter 12, which followed Mary, may be so. The Baptist is also a pagan.
Nevertheless, after his baptism in 2014, the maiden and the dragon were not read until today, in 2021. Even the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary festival was not attended after this. Even though they participated in other ordinary Masses and ceremonies. They were not there. For a long time, I never regained the sense of baptism.Part of the reason I wanted to write another track, and also because I had already lost the dragon to my heart. I never thought about grief, a pagan symbol.
Every time I went to mass, I wore a white veil, but after my friend died, I wore a black veil. I began to remove the veil in time, and although I always carried a Bible, I no longer do.
The world I saw after my baptism was a world of grace and solitude waiting for me. The soul of an artist can only live in his work, and with that revelation in my heart, I had been hopeful, only to find myself on the edge of a cliff.
In 2018, I was standing in front of suicide.
Sound is said to be uninformed, and so is the existential nature of language. The tongue is a background of symbols, on which concepts exist. A concept has a meaning as a word, but it is synthesized by a series of words. The linguistic world is a composite one. Languages are not by themselves. Although you need someone to understand it, it is often not understood.
It was Christianity that clarified why words existed, as John’s Gospel says: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God”. Just as in Russia, where there was no clear language in the beginning, language was created as Christianity spread.
The language is isolated. But it is to God, it is the mystery of the word. and I didn’t feel so alone.
Many have said to me, “Why won’t you write free?”
I’ve been asked by many people, but I’ve never answered. I don’t feel lonely with this question any more, because I realize that I don’t need to answer it in particular. What started as giving up is already “freedom”.
The beginning was a painful “freedom”. Baptism did indeed give freedom. The surrogate mother who wiped the holy water dripping from my hair, the priest who celebrated, all those who surrounded me, we will never gather in the same place again. They will never come together again. The bouquet of lilies that I carried at that time is still blooming in my memory, although it has vanished already. The people I loved then, the people I left, the people I met, the sight I saw when I looked up, where I smiled towards, the characters of this moment, my emotions, will never represent my “now” again, they will never come into my sight.
For a long time I wondered whether I should accept this disappearance or leave it as a memory of my baptism again.
After seven years of hesitation, I finally looked back on this time.
Indeed, at the time of my baptism, my soul was joyful.
15 August 2021
