The Tartars, who leave, at first sight, a feeling of tumultuous and confusing disorder are actually very structured and organized according to a double hierarchy. |
A first vertical hierarchy distinguishes the sins of men and those of society according to records.
1) ON THE LOWER REGISTER : INDIVIDUAL SINSOn the ground floor of the devil’s warehouse, the gallery of individual sins is a tasty anthology of human defects.
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2) the MEDIAN AND UPPER REGISTERS : COLLECTIVE SINS
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Here, even more clearly than on the lower floor, a new hierarchy superimposes itself, a horizontal one this time, with sins whose severity increases progressively as one moves away from Christ.
Temporal power is clearly shown with its kings, its emperors, and its soldiery and even a sovereign usurper, the Antipope ; he occupies the intermediate register.
Spiritual power appears on the upper register: it brings together holders of spiritual power such as a bishop, monks and heretics. This position replicates the social hierarchy of medieval Christianity where temporal power is expected to submit to the authority of spiritual power. But it may also mean that the moral responsibility for the fault of spiritual leaders who failed is all the greater!
Anyway, these collective sins, that is those committed as part of one’s social situation, in the performance of professional duties, are strictly distributed into the three categories of possession, power, and knowledge.
These collective sins are treated according to one of the period burning issues: here the world leaders are being punished, with an explicit reference to the Investiture Controversy, denunciation of forbidden weapons and criticism of money power. Here the flames are gone: we are among the living, in the present.
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- Powerful among the powerful, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V is represented as a naked king. He points the finger at Charlemagne, his alter ego, indignant at the presence –unfair in his his eyes- of this great sinner in the Residences*. (2) |
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- The antipope Gregory VIII (Bourdin of Uzerche) pierced by a spear from the mouth to the neck (the part that goes from the left hand of the demon to his mouth is gone). A winged devil snatches his tiara. (This antipope usurps both the temporal power in Rome and the spiritual power over all Christendom. But is Bourdin of Uzerche the only antipope represented on the tympanum? Who are the four clerks represented above Henry V? On this subject, see a hypothesis about this enigmatic quartet, in french) |
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- Another German Emperor, Henry IV (father of Henry V), twice excommunicated (by Gregory VII and then by Urban II) crowned by antipope Clement III, appears here uncrowned and a devil makes a reverse genuflection before him, a satirical parody of his false submission to Canossa. This is an explicit reference to the Investiture Controversy, with which the Gregorian reform is heavily concerned. (Read more about the Investiture Controversy, in french) |
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The demons, aping the soldiery of the warring armies, brandish a crossbow, a new deadly weapon prohibited by the 1139 Lateran Council because it transforms the nature of the fight, replacing the loyal body to body sword combat, by deceitful ambush. Four years later, in 1143, Innocent II would even threaten all manufacturers, dealers, and archers with excommunication and anathema, apparently without great effect... Yet, in Conques, the Benedictines intended to emphasize the battle of the Church to moralize the laws of war as much as possible: already in 1095, the Council assembled by Urban II at Clermont (the very place where the first meetings of peace were held in the middle of the tenth century, and where he preached the first crusade in november 1095) had had to reaffirm the difficulty to impose the principle of the peace of God prohibiting fights from Wednesday evening to Monday morning, as well as every day from Advent to Epiphany, and a hundred more days starting six weeks before Easter and ending one week after Pentecost. Does the fallen knight mean that these archers had violated these precepts? Anyway, here the military power is clearly denounced.
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The crossbower El ballestero Roll over image to see details |
POSSESSION: |
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- The draper is struggling with the she-devil Lilith. He is sitting on a piece of fabric which a devil is unfolding and devouring above his head. |
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- The usurer (3), the speculator, hung upside down, is coveting the purse in the cup, while the draper is pressing his foot on his chest. |
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On the upper register, the sins of those who hold the supreme authority of possession culminate: the master of money, the devil of money, and the clerics who hold the knowledge and the moral authority responsible for the sins against the Spirit. |
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- The Master of the world, money, stands at the top of the collective sins of power and possession. Here is the goldsmith, the (true) coin maker (4), he holds supreme authority. He carries in his hand the insignia of power: the punch. At his feet the crucibles where the gold is melted. A demon rejects his neck backwards to have him drink the metal, as Moses did with the Hebrews after reducing the golden calf to powder. (Exodus, 3: 20) The 1940 casting revealed that the money maker’s pen had a word on its reverse (CUNEUS). This mark in the corner, which today would be understood as "certified", authenticates its owner as the official servant of Mammon. The latter, taking him by the beard, is having him swallow the molten metal, just as Moses had the Hebrews drink the destroyed golden calf. One cannot serve both God and Mammon. (Mt 6: 24)
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- The heretics are shown with their books that suggest pervert teachings, misled, or falsified knowledge. Their moral responsibility is heavier than that of the draper, the banker, or the moneylender who only use money, and much more serious than that of the miser on the lower register. |
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- Finally here is the simoniac bishop, who sold the sacraments. Caught in the nets of the Devil (6), with its reversed and broken scepter, he worships Lucifer, the fallen angel. Simony is the worst sin for the men of the Church: it is a violation of the Spirit committed by the very people who should guide the souls. This is another explicit reference to one of the fundamental fights of the reform initiated by Gregory VII. (This sin combines the areas of knowledge, possession, and spiritual power). Just as we met notorious sinners who had been saved by their acts or their faith in the Paradise Residences, on the side of Tartarus, we find at least seven clerics, monks, priests, abbots or bishop (recognizable at their hairdo) who, although they were men of the Church have failed...
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The excommunicated emperors, the antipope, the coin maker, the draper, the usurer, the abortionist, the intemperate, the greedy, the slanderer , all ostensibly turn their back to Christ, and often plunge their gaze to the ground. |
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From the dead on the lower level, who are represented unconscious and apathetic and placed in the fire of purgatory, to the earthly world of the living, agitated protesters who are represented on the two upper levels of the present time (where the flames are logically absent), it is the fate of the "damnati" which is staged, that of the rejected ones, those subjected to the purifying trials of Tartarus. "Damnati" does not mean "damned", but "sentenced". The punishing sentences purify them and lead them to the liberating truth. Jacques Le Goff, in the "Birth of Purgatory" explains that "the time of the afterlife in the first third of the twelfth century is not penal, but penitential time".
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The test is a proof of truth. The flames of Tartarus do neither burn nor consume, but illuminate the souls of the tested ones. The man then regains consciousness: he recovers consciousness and rises under the very feet of Satan. The grace* coming from Christ "restores" him, his face becomes beautiful, serene, bright, almost glowing. (8) |
As much as hell means everlasting punishment, so does Tartarus* imply forgiveness. For the early twelfth century monastic thought, the judgment of God is the justification* of the sinner, the opposite of damnation. |
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(1) One may compare this image with the vision of Peter’s apocryphal Apocalypse: “Some were hanged by the tongue, they were slanderers, and below them there was a fire," Apocalypse according to St. Peter, c. XXII, quoted by Jacques Le Goff (La Naissance du Purgatoire, folio histoire, 2002, p. 54). ( Back to text) (Back to text)
(2) From the Tartarus of the living to the heavenly Mansions, individuals see each other in the same way as in Luke’s Gospel the bad rich man sees Lazarus in Abraham's bosom, from Hades: "In Hades, prey to torture, he [the bad rich man ] looked up and saw Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. Then he cried: 'Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip [...] and cool my tongue'.” (Lk 16 : 23-24) (Back to text)
(3) Is it the usurer coveting the purse put in the cup or, as we read all too often, a "drunkard" who regurgitates his drinking? To avoid gross errors of interpretation, one must admit that the studied object being clearly the reflection of a Christian view, it is essential to return to the symbols a meaning that is consistent with this ideology and not with the more or less Folk projections induced by our contemporary, secular, and even anticlerical moral conceptions. In this case, usury, widely denounced as immoral in the Bible is again condemned by the Second Lateran Council in 1139. The loan sharks were the first, says Jacques Le Goff, to benefit from the Purgatory in the thirteenth century. (See La Naissance du Purgatoire, folio histoire p. 54). But who does it bother among our contemporaries to see the banker, the speculator or the stockbroker, thrown into Tartarus by the monks of the Romanesque civilization? (Back to text)
(4) Money master or “counterfeiter"? This is the whole question! Certainly, with polysemy, a symbolic picture may have several meanings. But to interpret an image, it is necessary to ensure that the gesture corresponds to a scriptural substrate linked with the topic. So the Scriptures never speak of "counterfeiters" but of Mammon, the master of money, and that, let’s not forget, the first person to go to heaven with Jesus was the "Good Thief", maybe a penitent counterfeiter... (Back to text)
(5) Peter of Bruys was burned at Saint Gilles du Gard in 1131. (see page in french on heresies) (Back to text)
(6) Medieval imagery was in this case inspired in Hebrew sources: the Sheol’s nets are indeed mentioned in the Psalms (Cf. Ps 18: 6 and 116: 3) (Back to text)
(7) Como lo destaca Yves Christe acerca de Conques, se ponen en escena a "delitos concretos cometidos por personas que pertenecen a grupos sociales, y a profesiones específicos" ( Yves Christe, op. cit. p. 183) (regresar al texto)
(8) This image may be compared with:
- Meditation of Guigues II the Carthusian, reminding Paul's epistle to the Ephesians ( Eph 5: 14) :
"Awake, the trumpet sounds,
O sleeper.
Arise from the dead,
And Christ will shine on you" ;
- and with Luke’s Gospel:
"And then shall they see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory.
When things begin to happen, stand erect and raise your heads because your redemption approaches." (Lk 21: 27-28)
Could it be due to intellectual laziness that some saw him as a "lazy one" whom they imagine "punished" for this alleged vice? (Back to text)
(9) See Letter to the Romans (Rom. 3: 21-5 and 29). About the many connections between the tympanum and the Epistle to the Ephesians, see St. Paul's dedicated section (in french). (Back to text)
(10) This apathy of the tested ones, which contrasts with the torture inflicted to the damned ones in hell is characteristic of the iconography of Purgatory. Jacques Le Goff, describing the gestures in purgatory observes that " The tortured ones have no gesture initiative either they are in passive positions and situations; or they are subject to aggressive acts by the demons”. L’imaginaire Médiéval, Gallimard, NRF, 1991, p. 133) (Back to text)
Next chapter: 7) Architectural anomaly
