Sunday, August 19, 2007


The
Golden Gavel

My grandfather was an ornamental ironsmith. He created the gavel pictured here alm
ost a century ago. I’ve always loved its simple, powerful design and balanced heft. Gilded iron. His creative spirit, will, and skill are enfolded into its very materiality.

Iron is heavy and dense due to rigidly ordered, closely aligned molecules. Water, by way of contrast, consists of volatile, random molecules with lots of space between them. Smiths heat the iron to loosen up the rigid molecules. It becomes more malleable and therefore easier to work with.

Like iron, our thinking can sometimes be dense and rigid. It needs to be loosened up if we want to forge something new and better. The h
eating and hammering is an apt metaphor of the psychic processes entailed.

Blacksmiths: Magicians of Transformation
In many cultures, ironsmiths are also diviners, priests, and healers. They were often feared as much as revered for their skill in transforming inert metal through fire and force into tools and weapons for life and survival. For example, in Dogon myth, it was the blacksmith who brought fire to earth for the first time. Among many Mande cultures, blacksmiths are called

The First Sons of the Earth. They are associatedn always present at the forge: fire, air of the bellows, water, and earth. In this setting they are thought to harness the forces or energy of nature (called nyama) to transform materials of the earth into tools, art, and ritual objects"

This idea is also found in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Tubal-Cain is refer
red to in the King James Bible as a master artificer of iron weapons and tools. In the 1850s, the Scottish poet and songwriter Charles Mackay wrote his famous verse .

Old Tubal Cain was a man of might
In the days when earth was young:
By the fierce red light of his furnace bright
The strokes of his hammer rung;
And he lifted high his brawny hand
On the iron glowing clear,
Till the sparks rush'd out in scarlet showers,
As he fashion'd the sword and spear.
And he sang - "Hurrah for my handiwork!
... And the red sparks lit the air;
"Not alone for the blade was the bright steel made;"

And he fashion'd the first ploughshare!


The Great Hammering
In Alchemy there are several stages involved in transmuting a base metal into gold. The fourth stage - Sublimatio - has also been described as a great grinding down to rhinisima, refers to the micro filings that result. It’s this ultra fine powder, almost gas, which is key to the final step of transformation. This idea is also echoed in Norse Mythology. The Norse believed that Thor, the god of thunder and lightning, wielded a hammer called Mjolnir. It’s Indo-European root mel means to crush or grind. In turn, it’s related to the Latin malleus, for hammer, as well as the Latin mola, for mill.