Orgy in the Temple

After the two videos I posted last week, there were still a few iMovie features I wanted to try out... so I started looking for another offbeat idea that would lend itself to a two-minute video clip. And I found one.

Arthur C. Clarke’s short story “I Remember Babylon” was published in the May 1960 issue of Playboy magazine. Essentially it’s an early speculation on the possibilities of satellite TV (which didn’t exist in 1960 – the idea was pure science fiction). The story contains the rather silly idea that you could beam blue movies into people’s homes in the form of “a highbrow movie about ecclesiastical art”... if the art in question came from certain Indian temples, that is.

The story refers specifically to the Temple of the Sun at Konarak, although I’ve also included two temples from the Khajuraho complex where the action is even more outrageous (some of the acts depicted there are illegal – I’ve only shown the legal ones). The text isn’t very specific about the musical soundtrack, except that it has sudden changes of mood and tempo. That made me think of Mahler, so I used various snippets from the final movement of the Resurrection Symphony. That fits in with the “ecclesiastical” theme, too.

The movie in Arthur C. Clarke’s story is titled “Aspects of 13th century Tantric sculpture”. However, it’s not certain that the erotic temple sculptures at Konarak (modern spelling Konark) and Khajuraho really are connected with Tantric practices. There seem to be three possibilities:

• The images depict Maithuna – Tantric sexual union performed in a ritual context. This sounds great in principle... but it doesn’t explain the depiction of illegal acts (Either you can use your imagination at this point, or you can consult Wikimedia Commons).
• Rather than real world events, the sculptures are meant to depict the goings on in some other-worldly paradise. Brian Ruhe mentions something similar in his book Freeing the Buddha, which I referred to in Buddhism and UFOs: “The fourth heaven is Tushita Heaven, another very popular vacation spot. This is the heaven with the number one greatest amount of sensuous pleasures – sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll.” Konarak and Khajuraho are Hindu temples, not Buddhist, but the same idea may apply.
• It’s possible that the sculptures have no religious significance at all, or that they’re meant to depict “bad” rather than “good” things. It’s a fallacy to assume that any image in a place of worship must be an object of worship itself. Christian churches often contain images of the devil (such as this one at Rennes-le-Chateau), while the ubiquitous Sheela-na-gig is no less lascivious than the erotic Indian carvings. One of the highlights of Wells Cathedral in Somerset is a man with toothache – nothing especially religious about that. Mediaeval masons liked to have a bit of fun – as do their modern counterparts. The sculpture of an astronaut was added to a cathedral in Salamanca during renovations in 1992, while Washington National Cathedral has a gargoyle-like carving of Darth Vader.