I was staying at Silvie's in Staffs. And I wanted to draw something, but there wasn't really any art contests in ET that I wanted to make an entry for (y'see, it often happens that I make a contest entry when I'm at Silvie's), so I wanted to just draw something. Now Silvie is a classicist, so there are a lot of things related to Ancient Greece and Rome and Egypt. So I was flicking through an old book called The Atlas of the Roman World, and I came to a photo of a sculpture depicting Antinous, emperor Hadrian's young lover who died in Egypt. He is depicted as an idealised youth holding flowers and fruit in the folds of his clothes. And I liked the sculpture, the pose and look of it, and decided to draw it - but I didn't realise that he's holding fruit until I looked at that bit carefully. And I got stuck. I didn't want to just downright copy the image (though that's what I started with, it was just a drawing exercise) but I couldn't think of what else to give him. I wanted it to be symbolic, I wanted it to be personal to me, I wanted it to be all cool and awesome, and so forth.

While I was drawing I was thinking about the TV-show Angel, which I've been watching a lot on DVD lately. And it has these characters, the Oracles, a male and female one. They are dressed in togas, and they have bronze skin with blue markings, and they are pretty cool. So I considered turning this guy into a being like that - but I still couldn't think of what he would hold, and I didn't particularly want to start messing the sketch up by drawing markings all over his skin. Also, though I did think that it'd be cool to colour it, I knew I wouldn't, being too lazy and stuffs. And drawing him as an Oracle would have required colouring in order to work well. So I tried to just think of anything that would be a cool sort of thing that he could hold that would make it all mystical and magical and stuff. And I blanked. So I Googled some things, looked things up in Wikipedia, etc... Basically, half-assed Internet research to the rescue.

And one thing I looked at was just a list of symbols. Religious, mystical, occult - all jumbled up together in alphabetical order. And one of the first ones in that list was Angel Moroni (Angel Moroni as a symbol is a man blowing a trump, almost every mormon temple has a statue of Moroni on top of its spire). Now I had thought of Moroni (as a person, not symbol) before, because he is always described as wearing white Roman-esque clothing - but he never really holds anything so that wasn't taking me anywhere. I mean, yes technically he does deliver things (gold plates, the Liahona, the sword of Laban) but he doesn't do that physically, he shows where they are hidden. Sides, all those things are made out of metal and would make the cloth look very different if the guy was holding them with the folds of his toga. And I don't even know what the Liahona looks like.

After giving the Moroni-avenue a think, I tried to think of anything else that would be Latter-day Saint -specific. And I thought of the deseret - it was pretty much the only thing I could think of. Deseret is mentioned only once in passing in the Book of Mormon - it says that when the Jaredites left for their promised land before the tongues were confounded at the tower of Babel, they took with them the deseret, the honeybee. Image-Googling that didn't give much help (though I did find out that apparently there is a Marvel character called Dr. Deseret who is a Latter-day Saint in an alternate universe where the South won the American civil war, and she is from a state called Deseret, which covers Utah and parts of Nevada etc... so that's kinda cool to discover). Since Image-Google didn't give much help I just went for pictures of bees and honeycombs and things like that instead, and tried drawing those in the folds, and eventually it worked (though I had to make them really big). Then I just thought I'd check if there is anything I could read about deseret, sort of to justify the drawing for myself, so I Googled for definitions etc... And I found stuff. Lots of stuff.

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The honeybee is everywhere. Like, it crops up in every mythology. It's important. Just Googling things and looking things up on Wikipedia alone made my casual look-around resemble a complicated research. I needed notes, and to write down links and names, I needed to cross-reference and look things up that were casually mentioned. It went from article to article, about the honeybee with the Jaredites, to the honeybee in ancient Egypt (which apparently no one anymore knows how to pronounce the hieroglyph, because it was so sacred that you weren't allowed to say it and it was always replaced with the red crown aka dsrt) to the symbolism of honey,and eventually to the story of - you guessed it - Aristaeus. And when I found him, I couldn't believe it. The Greek god of bee-keeping? So I looked at my drawing, then at the web-page with pictures of him and explanations - and I just couldn't believe it.

And this bee-thing... They manage to tie everything to it. Matriarchal rule in ancient Egypt, royalty of all sorts, migration of nations, resurrection, crop circles, provident living... And you hafta admit, the observable reality of everything bee-related is pretty strange. Like the idea that bees shouldn't be able to fly (this is of course total bunk, because the laws of aerodynamics don't apply to insect flight in the same way). But other things are true, like honey being the only food-stuff in the world that will not go off, the communal intelligence of the hive, the honeybee dance, the geometry of the honeycomb, the lack of evolution in beekind since dinosaur times... It makes you marvel, whatever your religious disposition.

I struggle to explain how interesting this all is. It's interesting because... it really happened. And I had no idea. I thought the whole beehive/deseret-thing was just some curious mormon-thing, y'know, "there's a cool word, we'll use it for stuff" - but it's a part of something bigger. There's a pattern. All of this might not be very significant - in fact it may just be one of those things where people just see coinkydinks because we as a species want to see them (yeah I recently listened to that Radiolab episode of randomness). But that doesn't mean it's not fun to pay attention to. And hey, I ended up learning a bunch of stuff and finding something very fascinating in the process.

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Anyhoo, Aristaeus. He was a god or a demi-god, and he taught humans many agricultural skills like cheese-making and bee-keeping. And one time all his bees died. He was told that Proteus could tell him why and how to fix it, but Proteus doesn't like answering questions, he has to be caught first. So Aristaeus caught him and Proteus told him to offer twelve animals as sacrifice so he did, and when he came back the next day, there was a swarm of bees inside one of the carcasses. Aristaeus took them home and those bees never got ill. It's got some interesting themes/references going on. For one, the story of Samson killing a lion that had honey inside. Also the medieval idea that flies/maggots/nasty things are born out of nothingness, that Satan plants them in dead things instead of being part of the natural order created by God (in contrast good things like bees would come out of a dead thing dedicated to the divine?) It's actually curious to note that bees are actually currently threatened. There is a mite that makes bees vulnerable to a virus, and this is actually a threat to systems of agriculture, as everything depends on pollination. Maybe someone needs to catch Proteus again to ask what the matter is this time...

So in the end this drawing is an example of "how to make a simple drawing really really complicated". But it's an interesting process I think, starting from simple appreciation of classical aesthetics, growing a personal value on to it, leading to research and increase in knowledge, and on to justification of the drawing.