In 2003, an enormous landslide between Gezing and Pelling, two urban centers in west Sikkim, cut the major state highway between the West District and the capital for days. Houses were destroyed, a number of their inhabitants hospitalized, and power and water supply was cut off. Food and rations supplied from the Indian border town of Siliguri were delayed, and deliveries to nearby villages dependent on Gezing market paused. Local Buddhist communities did not see this only as a symbol of state negligence and apathy towards road maintenance, which it was, but also considered the broader reasons behind the disaster.1

• 1
  Sikkim is a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual state in northeast India. This article focuses on Buddhist communities, and specifically discusses Lepcha (also known as Rong in Lepcha language, or in Bhutia, Mon) and Bhutia (also known as Lhopo) residents of west Sikkim. The Lepcha people are Indigenous to the region and have a distinct language and cultural tradition. The Bhutia, or Lhopo, are held to have arrived from eastern Tibet in the thirteenth century, and presided over the Namgyal dynasty that ruled the kingdom between 1642 and 1975, when Sikkim became part of India. Bhutia language has many similarities with classical Tibetan, and uses Tibetan script. Here I will use the terms “Lepcha” and “Bhutia” for accessibility, as they are the most widely used in contemporary Sikkim. There are a number of other cultural and ethnic groups that practice Buddhism in Sikkim, and there are regional variations in Buddhist practices. Different ethnic communities in Sikkim also often participate in religious and cultural traditions outside of their own immediate community, so while this paper does focus on a specific locality, it should be noted that other non-Lepcha and Bhutia and non-Buddhist residents have also participated in the ritual traditions and cosmological systems described in the article. A full consideration of the dynamics of this participation is beyond the focus of this piece. For more on the dynamics of religion in Sikkim in other districts and areas, see anthropologist Anna Balikci’s Lamas, Shamans and Ancestors: Village Religion in Sikkim (Leiden: Brill, 2008) and political geographer Mona Chettri’s Ethnicity and Democracy in the Eastern Himalayan Borderland (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017).

This sang ritual is known as the Riwo Sangchö (Tibetan: Ri bo gsang mchod, The Mountain Smoke Offering), and it is now practiced in Tibetan, Himalayan and Inner Asian Buddhist communities around the world.1 Its performance in Sikkim has a special dimension for Sikkimese Buddhists, however, because the Riwo Sangchö is held to have been directly inspired by the landscape of the Hidden Land. In this article, I will explore the narratives connected to the history of the revelation and performance of the Riwo Sangchö in Sikkim, its connection with the landscape, and the significance of its localness for understanding multispecies relations in contemporary west Sikkim. This study contributes to discussions across religious studies, political geography, and anthropology about how transdimensional relations between humans, animals, spirits, plants, and other elements of the world are changing during the Anthropocene. In particular, my article makes two contributions to broader conversations: firstly, to the study of ritual as a site for understanding historical and cultural change in the Himalayas, and what it tells us about diversity in Himalayan Buddhism; and secondly, to discussions in political geography about layers of “built” environments and how they interact.

By thinking about the localness of this ritual, I do not mean to suggest that the Riwo Sangchö is an inherently environmentally friendly ritual that is only efficacious in Sikkim or has the same aims as contemporary environmental movements; I am also not arguing that the Riwo Sangchö can be understood in this way in other places it is practiced. Instead, my focus is on what narratives connected to the Riwo Sangchö tell us about how Sikkimese communities understand the history of their relationship with the land in which they live, and how contemporary performances of the ritual continue to facilitate inter-dimensional communication between humans and other beings resident in the landscape. To achieve this, I engage with work by a number of anthropologists and religious studies scholars of Tibet, Inner Asia, and the Himalayas, including Gillian Tan, Cathy Cantwell, and Jared Lindahl to think about how ritual, and especially sang, can function as a history, and more specifically here, environmental history; and also how ritual can provide insight into local understandings of environmental ethics. I then provide an overview of the Riwo Sangchö and its “recovery” as a pure vision for Lhatsun Namkhai Jikme in Sikkim, before considering its contemporary uses in both mitigating and responding to environmental change. I draw on close reading of classical Tibetan-language Buddhist sources related to Riwo Sangchö and my experience growing up in Sikkim in a Buddhist community in west Sikkim, as well as my experience carrying out scholarly research there for nearly three decades. My research in the Pemayangtse region has included participation in and observation of a wide range of Buddhist and Indigenous ritual life, and discussions with local ritual specialists and laypeople in Bhutia, Lepcha, and Nepali languages.

Considering the local history of Riwo Sangchö provides us with significant insight into how diverse religious sources and practices, including ritual, contribute to another level of the “built environment” of Sikkim as discussed by political geographers Duncan McDuie-Ra and Mona Chettri.2 Since Sikkim opened for tourism after its absorption into the Indian nation state in 1975, it has experienced enormous environmental change as urban centers have emerged from the forests and paddyfields of the landscape.3 While McDuie-Ra and Chettri’s research focused on the use of concrete in construction in contemporary Sikkim, I argue that the ritual regime of communication facilitated by the Riwo Sangchö is another historical example of constructing the environment and building a landscape. This process was not a straightforward case of the “Buddhacization” of the landscape, but instead represented a negotiation between Buddhist and Indigenous cosmologies, where the landscape that included the trees and mountains exercised agency.4 Acknowledging the role of Sikkim’s ecology in the shaping of this ritual is significant for understanding diverse and complex attitudes towards discourses of development in contemporary Sikkim, and in this article I add a religious studies perspective to critical discussions by political and cultural geographers including Chettri, McDuie-Ra and Mabel Gergan.5 It also serves as an example of how understanding local material and ecological histories can enrich our appreciation of the specific contexts in which rituals develop. Current developmentalist discourses often marginalize local perspectives and responses. Tracing the history and use of Riwo Sangchö provides us with an insight into environmental management and interaction from a Sikkimese Buddhist point of view, and poses as intervention to ahistorical narratives of ritual life.

• 1
  In this article, Riwo Sangchö, Denjong Nesol, and the names of other rituals are italicized for consistency as they are based on specific ritual texts. Types of ritual, such as sang offerings, are not italicized, since they are broader practices that may have many specific ritual iterations and texts in which they are enacted.
• 2
  Duncan McDuie-Ra and Mona Chettri, “Concreting the Frontier: Modernity and its Entanglements in Sikkim, India,” Political Geography 76 (2020): 2.
• 3
  For more on the history of tourism in Sikkim, see Maitreyee Choudhury, “Community Development and Tourism: The Sikkim Experience in the Eastern Himalayas,” in Mountains of the World: Community Development between Subsidy, Subsidiarity and Sustainability, Proceedings of the World Mountain Symposium, 30th September—4th October 2001, Interlaken, Switzerland. Berne: Swiss Development Cooperation, 1-13.
• 4
  For more on the Buddhacization of landscape in Sikkim’s sacred geography, see Anna Balikci-Denjongpa’s important article “Kangchendzönga: Secular and Buddhist Perceptions of the Mountain Deity of Sikkim among the Lhopos,” Bulletin of Tibetology 38, no. 2 (2001): 5-37.
• 5
  McDuie-Ra and Chettri, “Concreting the Frontier,” and Mabel Gergan, “Living with Earthquakes and Angry Deities at the Himalayan Borderlands,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 107, no. 2 (2017): 490-98 and “Disastrous Hydropower, Uneven Regional Development, and Decolonization in India’s Eastern Himalayan Borderlands,” Political Geography 80 (2020): 102175.

The Riwo Sangchö belongs to a category of ritual known as sang throughout the Tibetan, Inner Asian, and Himalayan world.1 It is widely understood and practiced as a rite of purification, where the fragrant smelling smoke (sometimes rendered as incense or fumigation) is understood as both cleansing and as nourishment for the many unseen inhabitants of the landscape. In his classic study of sang, Tibetan studies scholar Samten Karmay traces the history of smoke offerings back to pre-Buddhist history on the Tibetan plateau and its use in a variety of settings, including lay, religious, Bon, and Buddhist, as a rite with many potential uses, but especially associated with purification.2

One of the elements of unchanging tradition related to sang is that certain materials are collected to make sang due to their perceived efficacy.3 Tibetan religious studies scholar Chapbel Tseten Phuntsok stresses that specific types of materials are required for efficacious sang to be made. He writes,

The major ingredients for incense burning are fragrant trees and herbs, such as cyprus, juniper, rhododendrons and tansy. Those who are stylish concerning their incense ingredients add white and red sandalwood, aloewood, saffron, nauclea cadamba and others. The flour used in incense burning called Sang tsam (bsang rtsam) is made from barley flour mixed with butter and those who are stylish concerning the Sang tsam add the three whites (milk, butter and curd), the three sweets (honey, sugar and jaggery) and the powdered medicines. Having mixed them up, they put these into the incense fire. Also the first offering of wine and tea and offering water for purification are sprinkled on the incense fire.4

These materials are associated with purity, in contradistinction with materials that are deemed to hold or produce grib, ritual pollution. To demonstrate the relationship between purity and pollution in Tibetan societies, anthropologist Gillian Tan has outlined how different types of smoke are perceived. She emphasizes how smoke (Tibetan: du ba) is necessary for life among Tibetan pastoralists, but some smoke is problematic due to its association with forms of pollution. This type of smoke includes tobacco smoke, which is widely represented in historical accounts as a negative, defiling substance that “emits a smell that displeases the deities who subsequently act out their displeasure by striking calamities and wars on to humans.”5 This smoke is distinct from sang, which is a positive and powerful substance used for offerings.

Tan goes into more detail in another study. In a case study from Minyak, eastern Tibet (Tibetan: Khams Mi nyag), she outlines how sang creates “smoky relations” that bring about transformation for Buddhist nomadic communities. This is possible due to sang’s liminal existence that is “simultaneously material and non-material” and thereby breaks down dualities.6 She writes that “. . . entities are not only fortified or augmented by the smoky relations of sang but are also dependent on them for continued existence. Because smoky relations are an ongoing practice, and influence both human practitioners and worldly deities, the relationship may be more specifically articulated as a mutuality of becoming and un-becoming.”7 Her focus is on burning offerings to worldly deities that are susceptible to emotions and are capable of conferring both positive benefits and creating obstacles for their human co-inhabitants. She outlines how a local incarnate lama performed a sang offering on an area of pasture as part of a process of maneuvering “to call in a worldly deity from another place” to replace a deity that had previously fled the region after polluting acts occurred during the period of early Chinese influence in the region.8

Tan’s investigation of sang provides insight into the significance of smoky relations for interspecies communication, but also significantly affirms the importance of recognizing specific local contexts for considering the efficacy of the sang ritual. Religious studies scholar Jared Lindahl also discusses how sang offerings in Mongolia to mountain deities there are significant in the Mongolian landscape as an example of the ritual process through which local gods have been displaced by Buddhist pantheons. To him, these Mongolian sang rituals are exemplars of Buddhist dominance over Indigenous beliefs and appropriation of the Mongolian landscape.9

These context-specific examples provide important interventions in the field of Tibetan Buddhist environmental ethics. In popular stereotypes, Buddhism is often depicted as a “green religion,” with writers arguing that Buddhist concepts such as the interdependence of all things naturally lend themselves to an environmental ethic.10 Tibetan studies scholar Tenzin Atisha has argued that Tibetans were historically deeply concerned about the interrelationship between “all plants, animals, as well as the ‘non-living elements of the natural world’,” and that this concern was manifest in rituals including sang offerings.11 Tibetan studies scholars Toni Huber and Emily Yeh have critiqued these claims as ahistorical and as examples of contemporary politicized re-imaginings of the past to present a favorable image of Tibet to global audiences.12

However, religious studies scholar Cathy Cantwell provides nuance to these arguments in her critical analysis of the Earth Ritual (Tibetan: sa mchog). In her 2001 article, Cantwell argues that while the Earth Ritual cannot be understood as an environmentally friendly ritual according to contemporary understandings, it can be seen as part of a broader form of specifically Tibetan Buddhist environmental ethics. In the Earth Ritual, human desires are used to “bring about transformation in the practitioner’s experience” through violent Tantric visualization in which the Earth Goddess is first acknowledged and then “tamed” (Tibetan: ’dul ba). But this taming is not a straightforward taming. Cantwell argues that reciprocity between the earth and the practitioner is crucial as, if it were not, there would not be the necessity of periodically renewing this relationship by reenacting the ritual. In the ritual, “the environment is seen as a potential Buddha-field,” but this is not a case of the superimposition of a Buddhist artificial world. Instead, here the natural world’s attributes are re-defined, the self-other dualism between the practitioner and their world is dissolved, and instead the opposition of nature and culture, or human and not-human, is removed.13 As Tan has also argued, these rituals connected with landscape provide the opportunity for alternative interspecies relationships to emerge. These ritual traditions, along with other forms of narrative related to the ecology of a place, allow us to recognize a unique form of Buddhist environmental ethic that is historically situated.14

In this article, I will develop Tan’s and Lindahl’s insights on “smoky relations” to consider how the history of the influential sang ritual the Riwo Sangchö can be seen not only as a form of environmental ethics, but also environmental history. Historian Johan Elverskog has more recently argued that environmental histories of Buddhism have historically ignored the expansionist and exploitative attitude of Buddhist institutions towards the environment around them, and that environmentalist movements among Buddhists are all modern and demonstrate change within Buddhist institutions.15 In my analysis of the history of the Riwo Sangchö in Sikkim, I connect the promulgation of the Riwo Sangchö in Sikkim to the development and human exploitation of ecology in the state, as it was used in the building of Buddhist institutions that drew on materials drawn from the forests and mountains. However, rather than an extractive economy, whereby the Riwo Sangchö is performed to facilitate human expansion, I argue that the offering demonstrates the reciprocity highlighted by Tan and Cantwell, echoing the mutuality noted by folklorist Kikee D. Bhutia in her discussion of human-chökyong yullha zhidak relations.16 This reciprocity is demonstrated by the use of the Riwo Sangchö to both prevent and make recompense between humans and nonhumans when disasters occur. The Riwo Sangchö entails a giving back into the environment through smoke offerings, and often accompanies other types of environmental action that emphasizes mutuality, as opposed to exploitation.

• 1
  Forms of Buddhism found throughout Tibet, Inner Asia, and the Himalayas are diverse and too often lumped together as “Tibetan Buddhism,” due to their shared use of the classical Tibetan language. In this paper, I try to be specific about the type of Buddhism and where it is practiced in order to differentiate between various vernaculars; but also acknowledge the shared forms of practice between these Buddhisms.
• 2
  Samten Karmay, “The Local Deities and the Juniper Tree: A Ritual for Purification (bsang),” in The Arrow and the Spindle: Studies in History, Myths, Rituals, and Beliefs in Tibet ed. Samten Karmay (Kathmandu: Mandala Book Point), 380-412.
• 3
  Ibid., 405-6.
• 4
  Chabpel Tseten Phuntsok, “The Deity Invocation Ritual and the Purification Rite of Incense Burning in Tibet,” Tibet Journal 16, no. 3 (1991): 26. Minor edits for consistency of style by author.
• 5
  Gillian Tan, “Differentiating Smoke: Smoke as duwa and Smoke from bsang on the Tibetan plateau,” Anthropological Forum 28, no. 2 (2018): 130.
• 6
  Gillian Tan, “Smoky Relations: Beyond Dichotomies of Substance in Tibet,” in Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond, eds. Phillipp Schorch, Martin Saxer and Marten Elders (London: University College London Press, 2020), 146.
• 7
  Ibid., 147.
• 8
  Ibid., 151.
• 9
  Jared Lindahl, “The Ritual Veneration of Mongolia’s Mountains,” in Tibetan Ritual, ed. Jose Cabezon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 226.
• 10
  An influential example of work that develops these associations between Buddhism and environmentalism is Stephanie Kaza and Kenneth Kraft, eds. Dharma Rain (Boston, MA: Shambhala, 2000).
• 11
  Tenzin Atisha, “The Tibetan Approach to Ecology,” Tibetan Review 25 (1991): 9-14.
• 12
  Toni Huber, “Green Tibetans: A Brief Social History,” in Tibetan Culture in the Diaspora, ed. Frank Korom (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1997), 103-19 and Emily Yeh, “The Rise and Fall of the Green Tibetan: Contingent Collaborations and the Vicissitudes of Harmony,” in Mapping Shangrila: Contested Landscapes in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands, eds. Emily T. Yeh and Chris Coggins (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014), 255-78.
• 13
  Cathy Cantwell, “Reflections on Ecological Ethics and the Tibetan Earth Ritual,” The Eastern Buddhist 33, no. 1 (2001): 113-19.
• 14
  A recent work that develops the idea of spatially situated ethics in the Himalayas is Karine Gagné, Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019).
• 15
  Johan Elverskog, The Buddha’s Footprint (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).
• 16
  Kikee D. Bhutia, “‘I exist therefore you exist, we exist therefore they exist’: Narratives of Mutuality between Deities (Yul-lha gzhi bdag) and Lhopo (Bhutia) Villagers in Sikkim,” Folklore 75 (2019): 191-206.

How does the ritual demonstrate this? The Riwo Sangchö itself is quite a short text, and can be performed as a short or long ritual. In west Sikkim, sang is offered on a daily basis in the morning and in the evening to cleanse domestic residences. Additionally, the Riwo Sangchö is often performed to purify an area, particularly during auspicious days of the Buddhist lunar calendar, in support of other ritual activities, or during childbirth, when people are sick or following death. It may also be performed to prevent, or in response to, misfortunes broadly construed, related to health, economic stability, and social relations.

Undertaking the Riwo Sangchö begins with the preparation of 108 ingredients, including different types of pine and juniper trees and other pleasant-smelling substances (the longer list is discussed below).1 Branches of trees are gathered and made into kindling for the fire, and pine tree branches are gathered for offerings, a day in advance to clear out insects. This preparation is undertaken by lamas or laypeople, and the materials will be assembled in a clean place above the area that needs to be cleansed. Ideally, this will be on a hill or the top of a building in a sangbum (Tibetan: bsang bum), a repository with openings designed to be used for smoky offerings. Top quality wood, free of insects, that produces good charcoal is gathered and set on fire by the propitiant, who will often remain beside the fire adding substances and tending it.

At the beginning, the lama, or ritual officiant presiding over the Riwo Sangchö will recite the refuge and lineage prayer of Lhatsun.2 He or she will then invoke “om ah hum” three times and sprinkle purifying water on the fire, which can also serve to calm the flames. Once the fire has burned into charcoal, the sang materials are added, starting with green juniper which is cut and added to the charcoal. Other ingredients such as the three whites and three sweets (discussed above) are slowly added until the smoke begins to billow out of the fire. The sang has a strong smell. It makes the eyes of the residing lama and the people in attendance prickle, and sometimes even leads to sneezing or coughing. The lama then begins the prayer, standing or sitting near to the fire but not so close that the smoke prevents them from reading their text. Some lamas will do a simple recitation of the prayer; others will accompany their prayer with a bell (Tibetan: Dril bu) and small hand drum (Tibetan: Da ma ru). Lay propitiants may stand near the lama during this process, or may be occupied helping tend the fire or making refreshments for the people gathered there to join the lama in the offering.

• 1
  I am currently compiling a list of these 108 ingredients for future publication.
• 2
  In this article, I will refer to these figures as lama for consistency, though other scholarship on sang has noted that sang rituals are also performed by laypeople. In west Sikkim, laypeople prefer to invite lamas either from their own family or one of the local monasteries to perform the Riwo Sangchö. In Sikkim, most monasteries are made up of lay Tantrists (Tibetan: sngags pa སྔགས་པ) who have varying level of ritual expertise. The most experienced ritual experts may also be scholars or meditation masters, and they may or may not be incarnates (Tibetan: sprul sku སྤྲུལ་སྐུ་). Women can also perform this ritual, but here I refer to “he or she” since most lamas in Sikkim identify as male.

The prayer of Riwo Sangchö takes the form of an offering to unseen beings with an aspiration for them to reach enlightenment and for obstacles to be cleared. The text invokes all the different classes of beings, from those at the top of the Buddhist universe model such as Buddhas, gurus, and yidams, down through the beings of the six realms to demons and negative spirits.1 Finally, the ritual offers a dedication for the welfare of all sentient beings. The text may be recited several times (and may even go on for an entire day) depending on the situation. At the end of the text, the lama allows the sang to burn off slowly, while smoke pervades throughout the local environment, across the horizon, and across the world, representing all the beings who should benefit. At times, additional prayers may also be recited at the end of the text with further dedications for all beings. Eventually, the lama departs and the smoke burns down into a pile of ashes. The ashes either remain in the sangbum, or are collected and scattered in a clean area by the lay sponsors or the lama’s assistants.

• 1
  The classical Tibetan text of this ritual is published as Lha bstun nam mkha’ ’jigs med, “Ri bo bsangs mchod,” in Rig ‘dzin srog sgrub (Delhi: Chos spyod dpar skrun khang, 2000), vol. 1, 829-34. A full translation of the ritual text is available at Lotsawa House, https://www.lotsawahouse.org/tibetan-masters/lhatsun-namkha-jigme/riwo-sangcho.

This colophon alone does not tell us much about the local history of the specific ritual text of the Riwo Sangchö. However, other sources provide us with more information. The History of Sikkim is a unique historical source composed by the ninth king of the Namgyal dynasty of Sikkim, Thuthop Namgyal (Tibetan: Mthu stobs rnam rgyal) and his wife, Queen Yeshe Dolma (Tibetan: Ye shes sgrol ma), while they were under house arrest by British authorities in 1908. The text was written as a response to what they perceived to be misrepresentations of Sikkimese history and culture in the British-sponsored Gazetteer of Sikhim that was compiled by H.H Risley and published in 1894.1 The History of Sikkim is based on compiled manuscripts and oral sources about the kingdom of Sikkim’s history as it was understood by the king and queen. The early history in particular emphasized Sikkim’s status as a prophesied Hidden Land and goes into extensive detail about the visit of Lhatsun Namkhai Jikme to “open” the Hidden Land. Since during his visit he also enthroned the first king of the Namgyal dynasty, the king and queen’s concern for recording this part of Lhatsun’s narrative is understandable, as it reconfirmed their legitimacy as sovereign rulers.2 However, the narratives of The History of Sikkim are also important for relating the received history of many elements of Buddhist practice in Sikkim in the early-twentieth century. The section on Lhatsun is a vivid example of this. In the book, the narrators relate that when Lhatsun first arrived in Sikkim, he came from the north to a place called Chukarpangshung (Tibetan: Chu dkar spang gshongs) in the border between Tibet and Sikkim.3 There,

. . . the Lepcha Tekong Salang (Tibetan: Mon The kong za lang) came to receive him. Later when Lhatsun was opening the door to the sacred place, Mon Tekong Salang gave him a thorough introduction to Traktongrong (Tibetan: Khrag ’thung rong), Phagmorong (Tibetan: Phag mo rong), Lhari Nyingpug (Tibetan: Lha ri snying phug), Taden Yangsangpug (Tibetan: Rta mgrin yang gsang phug), Dechenphug (Tibetan: Bde chen phug), and the other great caves, as well as many other sacred places. This led to the compilation of the guidebook (Tibetan: gnas yig) [to the sacred landscape]. Tekong Salang lived for three hundred years and his throne remains at Lhari Nyingphug; his footprints are imprinted at Thagthongrong, and the bamboo and tobacco plants [that he planted] are still there, along with his grave.4

Tekong Salang’s presence and role in Lhatsun’s “revealing” of Sikkim is not mentioned in the colophon. However, his significance to Lhatsun, and their collaborative process, is further affirmed by his presence in the popular folk song, the Denjong Chakrab (Tibetan: ’Bras ljongs chags rabs, The Establishment of Denjong). The relevant verse declares,

How fortunate and gratifying that the keeper of the Hidden Land, there was a keeper of the Hidden Land,

How fortunate and gratifying that the keeper of the Hidden Land was Tekong Salang, that keeper of the Hidden Land . . .5

In this song and The History of Sikkim excerpt Tekong Salang is called the “Keeper” of the Hidden Land, and his guidance of Lhatsun directly results in the compilation of Lhatsun’s guide to the sacred places of Sikkim, which suggests a collaboration as opposed to domination. This collaboration demonstrates the Indigenous Lepcha cultural influence on the development of Sikkim’s “built” sacred Buddhist geography. Interestingly, by the seventeenth century Lepcha communities already had an agricultural practice known as “slash and burn,” in which controlled fire was used in preparing land for cultivation. Bongthing, ritual specialists that practice Indigenous Lepcha traditions, also use burned offerings. Both Buddhist and Indigenous rituals incorporated smoky relations. The meeting of Buddhism and Indigenous traditions is not unique to Sikkim. It has been characteristic of Buddhism’s incorporation into the cultural geography and politics of the Himalayas for more than a thousand years. Treasure traditions (Tibetan: gter ma) that are held to have been hidden by Guru Rinpoche and later rediscovered and revealed by his students (such as Lhatsun) have been particularly important as a way to bring together different perspectives of the landscape and to make political claims over territory.6

This local influence is also present in the list of deities and spirits who are invoked in the sang ritual text. In the Denjong Nesol rite (Tibetan: ’Bras ljongs gnas gsol; English: Earth Propitiation) that is also believed to have been revealed by Lhatsun Namkhai Jikme, there is an additional section that elaborates on how sang should be offered, and more specifically, to whom. The list of beings incorporates both members of the Buddhist pantheon and Indigenous spirits. It sorts the beings of Sikkim into three categories: the deities at the top of the landscape, the spirits in the foothills, and the spirits in the valleys. The text states that sang can clear “external, internal and secret” obstacles for all of the demons, spirits, and gods (Tibetan: bdud, mtshan, lha) of those places.

• 1
  H.H. Risley, The Gazetteer of Sikhim (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1894).
• 2
  Tashi Tsering, “A Short Communication about the 1908 ’Bras ljongs rgyal rabs,” Bulletin of Tibetology 48, no. 1 (2012): 33-60.
• 3
  For additional detail on the historical context and chronology of these events, see Mullard, Opening the Hidden Land.
• 4
  My own translation, Mthu stobs rnam rgyal and Ye shes sgrol ma, ’Bras ljongs rgyal rabs (Gangtok: Tsuklhakhang Trust, 2003), 52.
• 5
  The lyrics to this song are provided in Bhutia and English in P.T. Gyamtso, Denjong Sunglu (Gangtok: Denzong Lhomen Kiduk, 2009), 20-22. Since the published version found in this book omits a number of verses, here I offer my own adapted translation with the lyrics I was taught as a child that featured Tekong Salang.
• 6
  For more on how Treasure revealers participated in this process in nineteenth-century Kham, see Alexander Gardner, “The Twenty-Five Great Sites of Khams: Religious Geography, Revelation, and Nonsectarianism in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Tibet,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 2006.

Above all the deities is Dzonga (Tibetan: Mdzod lnga) the mountain deity who presides over all of Sikkim.1 After him comes Pawo Hungri, the Great Demon Dharma Protector (Tibetan: Bbud bstan chen po dpa’ bo hung ri), followed by the twenty-one worldly vow holders. In the valley, there are one hundred and nine lakes, including Rigzin Latso (Tibetan: Rig ’dzin bla mtsho), Jampal Latso (Tibetan: ’Jam dpal bla mtsho), Tadring Latso (Tibetan: Rta mgrin bla mtsho), Yangdak Latso (Tibetan: Yang dag bla mtsho) which are all home to deities of the place (Tibetan: sa bdag), Naga spirits associated with water (Tibetan: klu), lords of the trees (Tibetan: gnyan), and Tenma Goddesses (Tibetan: Bstan mar). There are also lakes where deities associated with the Phurba Kilaya, female spirits and worldly deities are resident, along with lakes associated with Taksa (Tibetan: Trag shad), Maning (Tibetan: Ma ning), and all the eight classes of demons and wrathful deities. The lakes can be sorted into three general categories: the upper white milk lakes are residences of the gods; the middle red blood lakes are residences of tsan spirits; and the lower blue medicinal lakes are associated with lower beings. All of the important sacred sites including the sacred caves of Orgyan Dechenphug (Tibetan: O rgyan bde chen phug), Khandro Sangphug (Tibetan: Mkha’ ’gro gsang phug), Lhari Rinchenphug (Tibetan: Lha ri rin chen phug), the monastery of Pemayangtse (Tibetan: Pad ma yang rtse), the royal palace of Rabdentse (Tibetan: Rab ldan rtse), and the waterfall of Pagmorong (Tibetan: Phags mo rong) are home to chökyong yullha zhidak. The Denjong Nesol text lists all of them, and then states that the sang will reach “the four directions and eight cardinal points” to satiate all the chökyong yullha zhidak with smoke from the “king of trees,” the pine.  This type of ecological detail situates the performance of the Riwo Sangchö within Sikkim’s landscape. Along with details about the history of Lhatsun’s revelation of the ritual details, the role of the Riwo Sangchö in other rituals such as the Denjong Nesol demonstrate its significance for Sikkimese communities, even as it has been widely adopted throughout Buddhist communities on and around the Tibetan plateau and in Inner Asia.

• 1
  Dzonga is also known as Kanchenjanga, the third highest mountain in the world (spelt variously as Kanchenjunga, Kangchendzonga, Khangchendzonga), or locally as Kanchendzonga (Tibetan: Gangs chen mdzod lnga གངས་ཆེན་མཛོད་ལྔ་). Balikci-Denjongpa provides a detailed overview of Dzonga in her article “Kangchendzönga: Secular and Buddhist Perceptions of the Mountain Deity of Sikkim among the Lhopos.”

Gathering the materials for sang offerings with good intention is especially important for ensuring favorable outcomes. In Sikkim, sang is prepared using mostly widely available materials; historically, it has also been associated with key moments in Sikkimese history. Without offering sang, Lhatsun could not have proceeded into Sikkim from the mountain passes; it directly facilitated his ability to open the Hidden Land and set in motion Sikkim’s Buddhist history. Most importantly, Lhatsun’s offering of sang acknowledged the presence of the local spirits of the landscape and their significance. In Sikkim today, people continue to seek the blessings of these transdimensional beings before any major activity that might disturb their environment, and also to apologize and make reparations for their behavior.

These offerings are necessary in Sikkim’s rapidly changing landscape. In the last century, Sikkim has seen enormous changes as urban centers have sprouted up on the sides of its steep hills, replacing forest and agricultural land, and shifting water sources. These changes have been especially obvious in Sikkim’s West District. The region has seen huge development in infrastructure over a very short period of time to facilitate tourism focused around the mountain vista of Kanchendzonga. Historically, west Sikkim was important as the center of the Buddhist sacred landscape, and the site of the capital of the Buddhist Namgyal dynasty that ruled the state from 1642 until 1975. However, after the capital moved to Tumlong in north Sikkim in the nineteenth century and British influence in the state increased with the development of the post of the Political Officer, west Sikkim’s infrastructure did not develop. Instead, Gangtok became the state’s urban center and has become an enormous, sprawling concrete metropolis. In the early to mid-twentieth century, west Sikkim became known for its agricultural abundance and, since tourist permits to the border state were hard to come by, only a small group of trekkers and guests of Gangtok elite ventured westward. This changed after Sikkim was absorbed into the Indian Union in 1975. In 1990, the state eased restrictions on tourist movement and communities in west Sikkim began to build hotels, roads, and other infrastructure to cater to tourists.1

• 1
  It should be noted that as of 2020 foreign tourists are still only permitted to visit Sikkim for a period of two months after obtaining an Inner Line Permit (ILP).

Taking Permission

As the built environment of Pelling has changed radically, so too have local people’s relationships with the chökyong yullha zhidak and other unseen residents. In order to prevent disruption to the local spirits, Buddhist residents are careful to continue their ritual maintenance of reciprocity in Pelling. Most importantly, before hotel construction begins, aspiring hotel builders will invite lamas, mostly from Pemayangtse, to undertake consecration (Tibetan: rab gnas) rituals.

This consecration is known as Sa da lu nyen (Tibetan: sa bdag klu gnyan), or the Offering to the Lord of the Soil, the Nagas (Tibetan: klu) and the Local Spirits. The name itself represents the different classes of deities and spirits present in the landscape, referring to the soil (sadag), any water sources (lu) and other materials (nyen, who are often rendered as gods of the trees). Before beginning the rite, lamas are invited to consult on whether the place is appropriate or not for construction. This acts as a kind of spiritual Environmental Impact Assessment in lieu of building permits from the state, where lamas will check if there is any lord of the land (Tibetan: sa bdag po) who may be present there. Places that often have lords of the land present include water sources, such as wetlands, marshy areas, and streams; this land is often structurally unsound and prone to erosion, but it is also the residing place of naga spirits that need to be left alone, lest they are angered and bring illness to human residents. At times, spirits may manifest as large rocks or boulders, and moving them or blasting them with dynamite can bring illness and misfortune to human builders. Doing a thorough check for any unseen residents is therefore very important before undertaking the consecration rite.

The consecration rite is reciprocal in its structure. After offering Riwo Sangchö several times to purify the place, the lama will then propitiate the local spirits and offer them gifts. These are materials such as water and minerals, and are enclosed in a bumpa (offering vase) and buried in the soil. This gift is intended to consolidate the relationship between the local spirits and prospective human residents, creating an environment where a building can last and its human residents prosper. This offering is also given to Kanchendzonga and the other deities of the land, who can always “cut funding” or create other obstacles to humans if not propitiated appropriately. At the end of any building project, the Khimsa Tashi (Tibetan: Khyim sa bkra shis; English: Auspicious New House) ritual is undertaken, where lamas are again invited and give offerings to the spirit of the place.

Making Reparations

In the last twenty-five years, Pelling has seen many consecrations as new hotels have multiplied in the landscape. However, these consecrations have not been enough to compensate for the significant environmental changes that have taken place. In the early 1990s, an enormous landslide at the Hungri (Bhutia: Hung ri) stream, which flows under the cliff that is the base of Pelling town, was seen as evidence of the displeasure of the nonhuman residents of the town. At the time, the revered Tibetan-Sikkimese lama Yangthang Rinpoche (Tibetan: G.yang thang rin po che, 1930-2016) was a resident of Pelling. He pronounced that the landslide was not a natural disaster, but instead had been created through the unforeseen impact that hotel building and other forms of “development” had brought to Pelling. Additionally, he said that the construction of hotels had been undertaken in places where lu, or naga spirits associated with water, were resident, and that the mismanagement of septic tanks, dirty water and other types of waste were agitating other spirits, the lu and nyen. He prescribed an annual performance of Riwo Sangchö to rebalance this and to give offerings to all of the deities and spirits. The Riwo Sangchö was performed along with the making of offering vases that were buried below hotels on the top of the Hungri cliff and along the adjoining ridge. Local Buddhists expanded on this directive and began a tradition of doing an annual Denjong Nesol for the area that rotated between the residences in Pelling until the 2010s, when it was re-homed in the Singyang Mani Lhakhang, a temple near Pelling.

The landslide in 2003 was another example of the impact of urbanization, as the growth of Gezing, the district capital, led to businesses and farms moving into new areas where there were previously no human residents. More recently in 2011, another significant landslide took place at Sangha Choeling monastery (Tibetan: Sangs sngags chos gling) above Pelling. In that year, a local contractor began road construction up to the important Sangha Choeling meditation center in preparation for a giant statue of the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara to be built there. After some heavy rain, the road that had been dug out collapsed, sending down rocks and mud all the way to the Rimbi river. It narrowly missed Singyang village. Distraught local community members again went and requested advice from Yangthang Rinpoche; he instructed them to conduct a large Riwo Sangchö ritual to apologize to the spirits resident in the Dorje Phagmo Lhakhang at the monastery, who were angry because of the use of dynamite in the road construction. The rituals went on for three days and after that, despite the challenging terrain, the road was eventually completed. In 2018, the Avalokitesvara statue was opened to the public—following a presentation of Riwo Sangchö, of course.

In these instances, the Riwo Sangchö functioned to repair transdimensional relations and re-establish reciprocity between local human and nonhuman residents in the Pelling area of west Sikkim. Mabel Gergan has recently discussed how state-led development projects (especially hydroelectrical dams) have led to new stresses on human inhabitants in Sikkim, and how disasters in Sikkim’s landscape are understood in local cosmologies as warnings from the deities about inappropriate human conduct. Ritual practices and narratives have responded to these changes and the anxieties brought by them, which “displays that cosmological worlds have room for flexibility and openness.”1 Acknowledging the layers of these practices and cosmologies allows us to think about environmental change beyond simplistic paradigms of loss, and to imagine alternative ways for seen and unseen beings to live together in the environment of the anthropocene.2 The Riwo Sangchö and its accompanying prescriptions allow for residents in the quickly growing urban tourism hub of Pelling to consider human-environment relations and responsibilities in alternate ways, and also have cautionary effects in discouraging humans from over-development. In this way, this latest use of Riwo Sangchö represents another moment in transdimensional reciprocity in Sikkim’s landscape.

• 1
  Gergan, “Living with Earthquakes,” 496.
• 2
  Ibid., 491.

As the eastern Himalayas undergo rapid environmental change, new sources and alternative readings of cultural resources including rituals can provide us with a different way to understand environmental histories of the region, and to recognize both what is no longer present and new emerging formations. The Riwo Sangchö is a ritual exchange that facilitates smoky relations between humans and spirits resident in landscapes around the world. But its initial history, as inspired by the landscape of Sikkim, provides insight into the complex materiality (and, at times, immateriality) of Sikkimese religion and ways that Sikkimese Buddhist communities have historically negotiated environmental change. Originally revealed by Terton Lhatsun Namkhai Jikme in the seventeenth century, the Riwo Sangchö was used in his project to open the “Hidden Land” of Sikkim as part of a process of inscribing and interpreting the land of Sikkim for Buddhist inhabitants. This was no passive process, as the land was home to transdimensional inhabitants. The Riwo Sangchö facilitated connections between humans, nonhuman animals, spirits, and the other beings and forces that inhabit the enchanted Himalayan landscape. But this enchanted landscape has changed over time. “Development” of infrastructure that consolidates Sikkim within the Indian nation by facilitating the movement of tourists, goods, and services has also ramped up exploitation of the land. The Riwo Sangchö is used by Buddhist communities in contemporary Sikkim to acknowledge the enormous changes brought by road construction, septic tank installation, hydroelectric dams, deforestation and other projects that benefit some humans, but not all human communities or other inhabitants of the multispecies environment.1 In examining the layers of history and practice of the Riwo Sangchö, my intention has been to highlight not only the local history of a ritual practice, but also the layered connections of that practice as a form of multispecies communication and acknowledgement through history. The resilience of such as practice points to an alternative way of conceiving of multispecies interaction in the Anthropocene, and historically contextualized directions for making new opportunities that benefit beings across dimensions.

• 1
  As an another example of how Riwo Sangchö has been used to adapt to new challenges, see my article on its use during the Covid-19 pandemic. Bhutia, Kalzang Dorjee. 2021. “Cleansing the Sacred Habitat in the Time of Coronavirus: Buddhist Sang Rituals in Sikkim in Response to the 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic.” Environment & Society Portal, Arcadia, no. 1. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. http://www.environmentandsociety.org/node/9192.

I offer my deep thanks to the human and non-human inhabitants of Sikkim, including the chökyong yullha zhidak, and to my family for their support, advice and photographs. I dedicate this article to my late father, Sangchen Pemayangtse Dorje Lopen Sindrang Yab Gomchen Chewang Rinzin, for sharing his wisdom about smoky relations with me. I also offer gratitude to Geshe Wangchuk la for insightful discussions about sang, and Gezing Mani Lhakhang Doling Yab la, Dr. Emily Floyd, Dr. Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa, Dr. Mona Chettri, Dr. Mabel Gergan, Dr. Rebecca Hall, Dr. Jana Fortier, and two anonymous reviewers for MAVCOR for their helpful suggestions and for sharing of sources. This research was generously supported by an ACLS/ Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Research Fellowship in Buddhist Studies, and my thanks to Professor Nancy Levine and the Department of Anthropology at the University of California Los Angeles for their support.

In 1876, Moses Jacob Ezekiel (1844-1917), the first Jewish American artist of international stature, sculpted the world’s first woman, to which he gave the unconventional title, Eve Hearing the Voice (Fig. 1). This life-sized bronze portrays a nude Eve after she has been tempted by the serpent, eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, and at the moment she suffers God’s rebuke. The naturalistically modeled Eve theatrically averts her head and painfully attempts to hide her face in the crook of her left arm, which partially covers her bare chest. She crosses her legs awkwardly, attempting to conceal her nudity. At Eve’s feet, the serpent coils menacingly around the rock upon which she cowers, and Eve’s bowed head looks downward at her tempter. Ezekiel took great care to delineate the textures of the serpent’s scales, just as he lavished attention on the thick hair that cascades gracefully down Eve’s muscled back and spirals over her face, down to her left breast (Fig. 2). These details, and Eve’s palpable despair, obscure the most novel feature of the sculpture: Ezekiel fashioned Eve, the only female nude he ever produced, without a navel.1

• 1
  For a short but excellent exhibition catalogue, with the most analytic assessments of Ezekiel to date, see Alice M. Greenwald, ed., Ezekiel's Vision: Moses Jacob Ezekiel and the Classical Tradition, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: National Museum of American Jewish History, 1985). See also David Philipson’s dated but crucial article, “Moses Jacob Ezekiel,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 28 (1922): 1-62.

As a fellow American expatriate in Italy, Ezekiel very well may have visited Powers’s Florence studio and viewed versions of Eve there. At the very least, he was likely to have seen photographs of them, and perhaps even heard about the sculptures from friends in Cincinnati, the city from which Powers stemmed and Ezekiel lived for a number of years, retaining strong ties. Always aiming for novelty and authenticity (as least as he perceived it, and here vis-à-vis a precise reading of the Hebrew Bible), Ezekiel departed from the norms by conceiving an agonized, as yet unrepentant Eve without a navel.1

• 1
  In a letter to sculptor Edward Valentine, Ezekiel modestly points to Eve’s novelty: “It has at least the merit of originality among its many faults.” Letter from Moses Jacob Ezekiel to Edward Valentine, May 1, 1876, Valentine archives, Richmond, Virginia. John A. Phillips traces understandings of Eve’s story in western culture from biblical times to the present in his intellectual history, Eve: The History of an Idea (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984).

Ezekiel crafted Eve early in his career, when he was particularly attracted to biblical matter and before he became famous across the western world for his portrait busts and large public monuments. As a boy in Richmond, Ezekiel first made work of a biblical nature, turning to those narratives that he knew best. He executed a large drawing in crayon titled The Revolt of the Children of Israel in the Desert and the Stoning of Moses (ca. 1857), one of only a few childhood works mentioned in his memoir. His earliest amateur efforts as a sculptor include Cain Receiving the Curse of the Almighty (ca. 1857) and Moses Receiving the Law on Mount Sinai (ca. 1857). Ezekiel’s submissions for a prize from the Royal Academy of Art in Berlin, where he studied for two years, were biblical in theme: an allegorical bas relief titled Israel (1873, lost; 1904 smaller replica, Skirball Museum, Cincinnati), which earned him the award, and Adam and Eve Finding the Body of Abel (ca. 1873, lost). Later he modeled several more biblical works, including but not limited to a marble torso of Judith (ca. 1880, Cincinnati Art Museum), a lost bust of Esther (ca. 1890), and at least three sculptures of Jesus: a reclining Christ in the Tomb (1896) donated by a patron to the Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-Consolation de Paris, built in remembrance of a fire that claimed the lives of 130-some people at an annual charity event; a bronze torso showing Jesus bowed with a heavy beard and pronounced crown of thorns (ca. 1886-89, Cincinnati Art Museum); and another bronze torso (after 1891, lost), mentioned in Ezekiel’s autobiography, made as a gift for Lady Sherbrooke, who placed it in her home in Surrey.1 Christ in the Tomb and the extant bronze torso also aimed for authenticity; Ezekiel presented Jesus with Semitic features.

Jewish holidays, traditions, and learning suffused Ezekiel’s life. His Orthodox grandfather petitioned the Virginia Military Institute, where Ezekiel trained as the school’s first Jewish cadet, to grant his grandson a furlough to come home for the High Holidays and Passover—unprecedented requests that were approved.2 In a letter to his mother from Berlin, the young sculptor writes of missing his family, particularly during the High Holidays.3 Even after his parents moved to Cincinnati and affiliated with Reform Judaism, Ezekiel remained observant. Living in Italy as a bachelor for over forty years, a much less auspicious environment to practice Judaism than with his family in Richmond or Cincinnati, the cities of his youth, Ezekiel kept the Sabbath and attended synagogue frequently.4 When news of his mother’s death reached him in Rome, Ezekiel sat shiva in his studio, and went to morning and evening minyan. In correspondence home to his father, Ezekiel wrote of studying the Zohar and Kabbalah, and Ezekiel goes out of his way to note in his memoir that his father owned all of Moses Maimonides’ writings. Other written material further demonstrates the sculptor’s command of Hebrew scripture.

Certainly there is nothing specifically Jewish about a lack of umbilicus, and over the ages rabbinical commentators did not weigh in on Eve’s navel. Rather, it is Ezekiel’s careful textual reading, lifelong fascination with the Holy Writ, and connection to Jewish tradition that set his sculpture apart from his non-Jewish predecessors. To be sure, Ezekiel’s enduring sympathy for his religiocultural heritage, and keen awareness of both the sacred book and Jewish thought, is demonstrated by some of his works’ iconography, including Eve without her bellybutton.

Ezekiel’s sculpture of Eve was greatly appreciated in its own day. In 1904, Eve Hearing the Voice was exhibited at the St. Louis World’s Fair, where it won the Silver Medal. A smaller replica in marble was ordered in 1884 by John J. Harjes (partner of J. Pierpont Morgan), who gifted the piece to Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany in 1902.5 Soon after, the Emperor placed the piece in the Bildergalerie (Picture Gallery) in Potsdam, a building near the Sanssouci Palace in Sanssouci Park.6 A different patron, a banker named M. M. Lowenstein, also purchased a marble Eve.7 Cast in gilded bronze, a small statuette of Eve was modeled at some point; this may be an Eve that Ezekiel gifted to his friend, physicist Alfonso Sella, on the occasion of his marriage.8 Ezekiel, and his sculpture of Eve, were so venerated that American novelist Mary Agnes Tincker based a character on him in her book, The Jewel in the Lotus (1884). That fictional sculptor worked in the ancient Roman thermae and was laboring on sculptures of Judith and “a large pallid Eve [who] shrank away from the curse, one perfect hand pushed out.”9 Dutch author Carel Vosmaer also based a character in his novel The Amazon (1881; English edition 1884) on Ezekiel. The artist in that story similarly lived in the Baths of Diocletian and was hard at work on a sculpture of Eve “crouching on the ground in shame, and huddling herself together as if to hide her figure, her one hand seeming to ward off Adonai, who has come to demand an account of her deed.”10 Vosmaer, like Tickner a non-Jew, almost surely learned the word “Adonai,” one of the Hebrew words for God, from Ezekiel during his visit to the artist’s studio. Yet again, Ezekiel demonstrates his Jewish perspective—and unabashed revealing of it in Catholic Rome—as well as his knowledge of the Hebrew Bible, in which God is referred to over four hundred times as “Adonai.”

Ezekiel’s oeuvre mostly comprises large-scale monuments, portraits, and biblical works, many noted here. Eve Hearing the Voice deserves special attention as much for its one-time celebrity as for the fact that it is, by all accounts, the first known sculpture of Eve by a Jewish artist, and in both iconography and name significantly deviates from the standard produced by Christian artists.

• 1
  Ezekiel, Memoirs, 298.
• 2
  Letter from Moses A. Waterman to VMI Superintendent Francis H. Smith, August 21, 1862. Moses Jacob Ezekiel papers, MS-0010, Virginia Military Institute archives, Preston Library, Lexington, Virginia. Letter from Moses A. Waterman to VMI superintendent Francis H. Smith, April 10, 1864, in ibid.
• 3
  Letter from Moses Jacob Ezekiel to Catherine Ezekiel, August 27, 1869, reprinted in Ezekiel, Memoirs, 456.
• 4
  Letter from Virginia DiBosis Vacca to Zebulon Hooker, February 10, 1950. Moses Jacob Ezekiel papers, MS #44, box 1, folder 6, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio.
• 5
  Catalogue of Mr. Henry C. Ezekiel’s Private Collection of Sculptures and Pictures (Cincinnati: Traxel Art Company, 1930), 13; “Art Notes,” New York Times (April 19, 1903): 8.
• 6
  Author, personal conversation with Silke Kiesant, Ph.D., Curator, Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation, Berlin-Brandenburg, February 9, 2021. In 1929, the marble Eve was moved to a theater in Potsdam, which was destroyed in the last days of World War II, along with everything in it. The marble was a little less than four feet tall, in comparison to the bronze at four and a half feet.
• 7
  “Sir Moses Ezekiel,” Cincinnati Enquirer (November 30, 1913): B8.
• 8
  Small statuette mentioned in Catalogue of Mr. Henry C. Ezekiel’s Private Collection, 13. Gift to Sella discussed in Ezekiel, Memoirs, 419.
• 9
  Mary Agnes Tincker, The Jewel in the Lotos (London: W. H. Allen and Company, 1884), 216.
• 10
  Carl Vosmaer, The Amazon (New York: William S. Gottsberger, 1884), 69.

Sociologist Daniele Hervieu-Leger has written that religion is “a chain of memory,” implicitly drawing on existentialist thought to articulate how religion functions for communities. In a world in which change is near-constant and meaning is at best abstract, religion can offset a resultant ennui. Hervieu-Leger posits that, by cloaking themselves in specific religious “traditions” and a religious “history,” people find a validating identification with a faith community. She writes, “Continuity acts as the visible expression of a filiation that the individual or collective believer expressly claims and that integrates him or her into a spiritual community assembling past, present, and future believers. The heritage of belief fulfills the role of legitimizing imaginary reference.1 " Put more simply: communities of faith understand their present in relation to a religious history that they believe to be true and authoritative. Though one might debate whether this is the primary function of religion or just one of its many functions, there is little denying the importance of religion’s ability to provide narrative framing for our lives.

What happens, then, when part of the religious history a person believes in turns out to be incorrect? A dissonance is created that must be addressed through new interpretations of past, present, and possibly the future. A revised history may combine with imagination to create a very different chain of memory. As Hervieu-Leger writes, a reinvented chain is formed through a “process of selective forgetting, sifting and retrospectively inventing."2 She sees this process of reinvention as part of what keeps religion flourishing. This article explores early indicators of a reinvented chain of memory unfolding in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—a faith that is itself grounded in a concept of historical restoration—due to a new public understanding of its history of polygamy.3 Specifically, I consider the example of contemporary visual art that interrogates and rearticulates memories of historical Mormon polygamy as one link in this new chain.  

• 1
  Daniele Hervieu-Leger, “Religion as Memory: Reference to Tradition and the Constitution of a Heritage of Belief in Modern Societies,” in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 256. I extend my thanks to Christopher D. Cantwell for pointing my attention to the work of Hervieu-Leger.
• 2
  Daniele Hervieu-Leger, Religion as a Chain of Memory (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 124. Admittedly this line of questioning deviates from Hervieu-Leger’s intellectual project, which is more concerned with the fragmentation of collective memory, but her work speaks to it nonetheless.
• 3
  The full, official name of the religion is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Church asks that other common monikers, such as Mormon and LDS Church, not be used, instead suggesting the shortened names “Church of Jesus Christ” or “restored Church of Jesus Christ.” Because these recommended shortened terms are highly polemical I do not use them.

The practice of polygamous marriage was one of ultimate concern for some Mormons of the mid- and late-nineteenth century.1 Joseph Smith, founding prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, received divine revelation about polygamous marriage and gradually introduced the idea to an inner circle of Church leaders in the 1830s and ‘40s, during which time Smith himself covertly married dozens of women. The teaching became more public starting in 1852 under Smith’s successor, Brigham Young. Theologically, the eternal destiny of Mormon men was linked to earthly acts of marriage and procreation, and polygamous marriage assured them heavenly exaltation of the highest order. By extension, polygamy also brought salvation for the wives who were eternally sealed to them.2 Because the practice was enacted in many different ways, with wildly varying numbers of people involved in the marriages and all manner of housing and financial arrangements, it is not possible to broadly characterize what the experience of polygamy was like or how practitioners felt about it. Diaries and other records left by Mormon women of the era attest to both positive and negative experiences with polygamous family structures. Men, too, seem to have felt conflicted: in the face of persecution, some men quickly walked away from their additional marriages while others risked extensive legal penalties in order to maintain their commitments. Even when the Church officially stopped sanctioning new polygamous marriages in 1890, a position it more forcefully reasserted in 1904, so deep was the belief in polygamy that a portion of the membership refused to abandon plural marriage.3 Some polygamous families, for instance, moved to Mexico to maintain their practice without persecution, while others broke away to form sectarian Mormon communities that continued to engage in polygamy.4

For more than a century the LDS Church downplayed its polygamous past, minimizing the role the practice played in early Mormon history and discouraging discussion of it. As historian B. Carmon Hardy noted in 2007, “A review of Mormon sermons, public statements, and art over the last hundred years gives the impression that plural marriage had little significance in the Latter-day Saint past . . . Official Mormon inattention to the subject is glaring."5 Polygamy remains an uncomfortable topic for many Church members, functioning broadly as a form of cultural shame that they would prefer to move beyond. Former Sunstone news editor Hugo Olaiz has commented, “We 21^st-century Mormons cultivate the art of forgetting our polygamous past,” adding an incisive question: “When members of the media mix up Mormons with polygamy, are we upset because we perceive them to be distorting our religion, or because they are throwing a spotlight on an aspect of our religion we desperately want to forget?"6 Similarly, historian Will Bagley has written that typical members “do not like to be reminded that the doctrine remains a central element of Mormonism’s revolutionary theology and devoutly wish the world would forget about this abandoned practice."7 Yet the Church appeared to change its stance on discussing polygamy in 2014, signaled by the publication of several new articles on the LDS  website exploring the history of plural marriage, and which acknowledged that Joseph Smith had somewhere between thirty and forty wives by the time of his death in 1844. The official position now acknowledges polygamy as a historical reality that was received as prophecy and was therefore divinely sanctioned for a limited period of time, but the Church sharply distinguishes itself from present day polygamy-practicing groups that claim an identity within the LDS tradition.

The official acknowledgement of the extent of Smith’s polygamy came as a surprise to many of the faithful. For some, the information was a catalyst for reconsidering the implications of religious history, and a surge of discussion took place in various online forums. But public acknowledgment did not erase the stigma or make the new information easy to digest. Historian of religion and politics Neil J. Young attempted to describe the dissonance created, writing, “the LDS Church in the twentieth century actively suppressed the history of polygamy in Mormonism’s religious identity and cultural memory. This entailed glorifying the traditional heterosexual family unit in Mormon theology and culture, coupled with negative depictions of sexuality."8 A simple position change, he suggests, could not begin to unravel the vast impact that downplaying polygamy had made over time on peoples’ conceptions of gender relations and the role of women in the Church. Furthermore, it was unclear how average Mormons would process the confirmation of information that some had previously regarded as dubious. Underscoring this situation, Carol Lynn Pearson’s 2014 survey of more than 8000 current and former Mormons found that polygamy, both as a historical reality and as a future possibility in the afterlife, continues to be “hiding in the recesses of the Mormon psyche, inflicting profound pain and fear.”9 But perhaps this also indicates the conversation is being pushed to a precipice, allowing members to begin thinking about the unthinkable in order to work toward resolution by means of a reinvented chain of memory.

Many contemporary scholars of law, religion, social history, and other fields have undertaken research on aspects of nineteenth-century polygamy. They have sought to understand it both in its original context and as a cultural institution with structural ramifications that stretch into the present. But as Pearson’s survey indicates, for the Mormon faithful there are emotional aspects of the legacy of polygamy that have not been entirely captured by these academic texts. Mormon history acts as a collective memory that binds the faithful together, so a rupture of that history is akin to a cultural trauma, requiring both cognitive and affective modes of processing in order to make sense of it in the present without simply objectifying, essentializing, or fetishizing it.10 This is where artistic forms can begin to fill a void, providing a milieu in which cultural taboos and complex responses to them are able to find expression. Furthermore, visual art that rediscovers and reimagines historical polygamy is rightly considered part of what religious studies scholar Christine L. Cusack has called “art activism.” Commenting on works created by Mormon women, Cusack writes that, “artistic expression . . . becomes a strategic method to document alternative ways of belonging, remembering, and (re)shaping religious life.”11 Contemporary art that focuses on historic polygamy is activism not only because of the interpretations it may offer about the practice, but because even the act of highlighting stories of nineteenth-century polygamous women is not unilaterally accepted as good. There are some who would say that putting any attention on the polygamous wives of Smith reifies arcane gender roles and spiritual subservience as envisioned by the prophet, and to celebrate them is to celebrate that hierarchy. They would argue that a truly modern project would keep conversations about these women dead and buried and would instead create new ideals for Mormon women.12 In contrast, others consider it an important project to unearth the stories of Smith’s wives. They say that these women should rightfully be given places of reverence as pioneers of the faith and, to some extent, sacrificial lambs. Additional perspectives that neither ignore nor revere them also emerge through the art, complicating any single understanding of the women by offering a multitude of interpretations.13 The art, therefore, is not simply a neutral reflection on history, but rather is an entry point for interrelated conversations about the roles of history and memory in understanding religion and about the role visual art can play in altering and challenging that collective memory.

• 1
  Most early Mormons who abided this teaching actually practiced polygyny, which is the marriage of one man to multiple women. However, prophet Joseph Smith and several other high-level leaders married many women who were themselves already married, in which case the women were engaged in polyandry. For that reason, the term “polygamy” is the most efficient term for referring to the complex array of marriages that occurred in the first half-century of the religion, and is used throughout this article.
• 2
  According to teachings at that time women could not achieve heavenly salvation without such a marriage, and men’s potential glory in the afterlife grew exponentially larger with each sealing. Polygamy was only ever practiced by a minority of LDS Church members, though its prevalence varied geographically. Notable treatments of the history of Mormon polygamy include: Kathryn M. Daynes, More Wives Than One: Transformation of the Mormon Marriage System, 1840-1910 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001); Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2002); Christine Talbot, A Foreign Kingdom: Mormons and Polygamy in American Political Culture, 1852-1890 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013); Doing the Works of Abraham: Mormon Polygamy, Its Origin, Practice, and Demise, ed. B. Carmon Hardy (Norman, OK: Arthur H. Clark Company, 2007); “Plural Marriage in Kirtland and Nauvoo,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, October 2014, https://www.lds.org/topics/plural-marriage-in-kirtland-and-nauvoo?lang=eng.
• 3
  Church president Wilford Woodruff issued the Manifesto in 1890, which stated that Mormons should follow federal law regarding monogamous marriage and cohabitation. A Second Manifesto was issued in 1904, indicating that both performing and entering into polygamous marriages were excommunicable offenses. Though both declarations taught members not to engage in any new polygamous marriages, neither indicated that polygamy ceased to be an applicable concept for the afterlife.
• 4
  For more on the trajectory of polygamous Mormonism in Mexico see Barbara Jones Brown, “The 1910 Mexican Revolution and the Rise and Demise of Mormon Polygamy in Mexico,” in Just South of Zion: The Mormons in Mexico and its Borderlands, eds. Jason H. Dormady and Jared M. Tamez (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015); for more on sectarian polygamous Mormons see essays in Modern Polygamy in the United States: Historical, Cultural, and Legal Issues, eds. Cardell Jacobson and Lara Burton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
• 5
  B. Carmon Hardy, afterword to Doing the Works of Abraham, 390.
• 6
  Hugo Olaiz, “Warren Jeffs and the Mormon Art of Forgetting,” Sunstone (Sept. 2006), 68.
• 7
  Will Bagley, foreword to Doing the Works of Abraham, 14.
• 8
  Neil J. Young, “Fascinating and Happy: Mormon Women, the LDS Church, and the Politics of Sexual Conservatism,” in Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the Twentieth-Century United States, eds. Gillian Frank, Bethany Moreton, and Heather R. White (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2018), 202-3.
• 9
  Carol Lynn Pearson, The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy (Walnut Creek, CA: Pivot Point Books, 2016), 7. Pearson’s study had methodological flaws, but the large number of people it included makes it useful nonetheless.
• 10
  See discussion of mass trauma and memory in Alison Landsberg, Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge (New York: Columbia, 2015), 7-10.
• 11
  Christine L. Cusack, “(Not So) Well-Behaved Women: Piety and Practice among Twenty-First-Century Mainstream Mormon Feminists,” in Postsecular Feminisms: Religion and Gender in Transnational Context, ed. Nandini Deo (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 133-34.
• 12
  See discussion by Joanna Brooks, “Mormon Feminism: An Introduction,” in Mormon Feminism: Essential Writings, eds. Joanna Brooks, Rachel Hunt Steenblik, and Hannah Wheelwright (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2018), 1-23.
• 13
  See discussions of these various positions in: Cusack, “(Not So) Well-Behaved Women,” 134-7, and Brooks, “Mormon Feminism: An Introduction.”

The LDS Church has long encouraged appreciation among its members for music, dance, theater, and literature, but visual art has been given comparatively scant attention.1 Until the latter half of the twentieth century the majority of visual art promoted in Mormon environments was functional, serving primarily to reinforce aspects of Mormon faith for believers. Artists who were Church members used a realist style to create works on themes such as Joseph Smith’s religious experiences, stories from the Book of Mormon, and the pioneer journeys to Utah Territory. Mormon convert C. C. A. Christensen (1831-1912), for instance, was commissioned to paint several temple murals, and is now most known for his series of large canvases illustrating Mormon history.2 Lee Greene Richards (1878-1950), who studied in Paris and later taught art at the University of Utah, was commissioned for portraits of Church leaders that now hang in numerous Church-owned spaces.3 At one time the Church even sponsored several men to receive formal training in France. Known as the “art missionaries,” John Hafen, Lorus Pratt, John Fairbanks, and Edwin Evans returned to paint several murals for the Salt Lake City temple.4 But the limited subject range and style of these and other Church-sanctioned artists—what some derisively label “Mormon art”—has been critiqued by many, including those who have unabashedly dismissed its artistic value. As early as 1959 a master’s student at Brigham Young University analyzed Mormon art and concluded that it was “commonplace,” “unimaginative,” and generally did “not exhibit qualities of significant aesthetic worth”; another thesis-writer more succinctly rejected Church-commissioned works as “kitsch.”5 Art critic Jane Dillenberger maintained that by the latter half of the twentieth century much of the visual art found in the Mormon public sphere was “illustrative, shallow, social-realist religious art” and therefore uninspiring.6 Yet there are also those who believe the LDS community has deeper artistic potential. Pushing in this direction, art historian Martha Bradley has called upon Mormon artists to break out of the entrenched utilitarian approach to art and use their talents to explore greater emotional depth. Only once work by Mormon artists begins to “reflect the spiritual lives of the people,” she writes, will it be able to communicate to broader audiences what this religious community “doubted and believed in, what they hoped for and were troubled by, and the ways they cared about one another.”7 Certainly, there were twentieth century Mormon artists who remained devout while also achieving widespread critical acclaim; such artists include sculptor Mahonri Young (1877-1957), painter Dean Fausett (1913-1988), and painter Joseph Paul Vorst (1897-1947). But the work that earned them praise did not overtly reflect aspects of their religious culture. In fact, further proving Bradley’s point, it appears that the majority of artists with a Mormon background who built successful careers in the twentieth century not only focused on secular subject matter but also left their faith tradition behind, while those whose work remained religiously-focused eventually faded into relative obscurity.8

• 1
  See discussions in: Peter Myer and Marie Myer, “New Directions in Mormon Art,” Sunstone 2 no. 1 (1977): 32-64; and Monte B. DeGraw, “A Study of Representative Examples of Art Works Fostered by the Mormon Church with an Analysis of the Aesthetic Value of these Works,” MA thesis (Brigham Young University, 1959).
• 2
  Jane Dillenberger, “Mormonism and American Religious Art,” Sunstone 3 (May/June 1978), 13-7.
• 3
  Delbert Waddoups Smedley, “An Investigation of Influences on Representative Examples of Mormon Art,” MA thesis (University of Southern California, 1939).
• 4
  Martha Sonntag Bradley, “Mormon Art: Untapped Power for Good,” This People 13 (1992): 20-26; Martha Elizabeth Bradley and Lowell M. Durham, Jr. “John Hafen and the Art Missionaries,” Journal of Mormon History 12 (1985): 91-105. The names of the art missionaries differ in various publications.
• 5
  DeGraw, “A Study of Representative Examples,” 36, 65; Lori Schlinker, “Kitsch in the Visual Arts and Advertisement in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” MA thesis (Brigham Young University, 1971). See also Paul L. Anderson, “Mormon Architecture and Visual Arts,” in The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, eds. Terryl L. Givens and Philip L. Barlow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 470-84. Anderson attributes this trend of functional art to the “disapproval of excessive display” brought into the tradition early on by its austerity-minded Protestant converts.
• 6
  Dillenberger, “Mormonism and American Religious Art,” 17.
• 7
  Bradley, “Mormon Art,” 26; see also Myer and Myer, “New Directions in Mormon Art.” Bradley now uses the surname Bradley-Evans.
• 8
  For more on this, see: The Mormon Artists Group, The Glen & Marcia Nelson Collection of Mormon Art, 2nd ed., (iBooks, 2015); Smedley, “An Investigation”; Myer and Myer, “New Directions in Mormon Art.”

In the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, the complexity of Mormon polygamy has begun to be addressed through visual means. Finally, artists—primarily women who come from an LDS background—are taking up the subject anew and exploring it through contemporary lenses of marital relationships, sexuality, and women’s self-determination. Leslie O. Peterson, Katie West Payne, and Angela Ellsworth, the three artists discussed herein, have each produced at least one major series of works dealing with the history of polygamy. Though stylistically distinct from one another, their work challenges viewers to consider both the experience of polygamy and its long-term impact.1 Their work may also serve as launching points for new patterns of thought and consciousness among the faithful because they use visual rather than rhetorical means to disrupt the traditional narrative, which means they speak to audiences on multiple levels. By extension, more widespread public exposure to these women’s art inevitably broadens contemporary discussions about the nature of polygamy and its social impacts.

• 1
  In addition to these three, there are other contemporary artists whose work has reflected on Mormon women’s history and, in greater or lesser degrees, polygamy. These include Valerie Atkisson, Rachel Farmer, Page Turner, Kelly McAfee, and Lane Twitchell. They are not included in the present discussion because their work is ideologically distinct in significant ways.

Leslie O. Peterson did not particularly consider herself a Mormon feminist, but in 2014 her artistic impulses unwittingly pushed her into the movement.1 Peterson, a lifelong Mormon who grew up in California, first began taking art classes with her son-in-law in 2012. Discovering that she had both talent and a passion for painting, Peterson experimented with various subjects including nature scenes, still lives, and portraits, and she started a blog where she regularly posted both completed and in-progress works. In the autumn of 2014 Peterson learned of the Church’s acknowledgment of Joseph Smith’s extensive polygamy. “It really, really upset me,” she later said, “I had known about polygamy years ago, but the Church made me believe that . . . maybe it hadn’t happened.”2 Her realization about the extent of the founding prophet’s involvement, with more than thirty wives, disturbed her deeply, and the fact that the Church had always known about it caused her to wonder what else the institution might be hiding.3 Peterson turned her feelings of shock and betrayal into art. Her first painting on the subject, Joseph and Emma and his Invisible Wives, features the faceless heads of nearly forty women surrounding the fully detailed busts of Joseph and Emma Smith. Some of the heads wear bonnets, and Peterson indicates age by both hairstyle and hair color. Joseph stares at the viewer while Emma looks slightly downward, but neither face has a recognizable expression. After Peterson posted the image online it went viral; Peterson had unknowingly stepped into the new, public conversation bubbling up about the history of Mormon polygamy. But Peterson’s rendition of the women also reflected her limited understanding: “I realized I didn’t know anything about them,” she recalled, “These women had become ghosts in our history, and we don’t teach or talk about their lives.”4

Feeling compelled to recover something of the lives of these Mormon foremothers, Peterson began to research. Foremost among her sources was the podcast Year of Polygamy, which focuses on the history of polygamy and the stories of Smith’s many wives, as well as the book it was originally based upon, Todd Compton’s In Sacred Loneliness.5 At over eight hundred pages, Compton’s book draws on an array of primary source documents to provide biographical sketches of thirty-three of Smith’s wives. Peterson used this material to create a small watercolor portrait of each woman. She worked from photographs taken when the women were in their older years, yet Peterson aimed to portray each wife as young and vibrant. Up until she began this series, her painting style had been primarily realist, but her “Forgotten Wives” series is deliberately naïve and stylized. Each piece is a bust-length painting in which the women have long necks and disproportionately large heads (Figs. 3 and 4). Many have a slight, closed-lipped smile and look straight at the viewer whereas others, such as the portrait of Helen Mar Kimball, have a sad or wayward look; the tears in Kimball’s eyes are intended to represent sorrow at being married to Smith at age 14. Through tiny details like this one, Peterson infused the paintings with references to each woman’s actual life, capturing an aspect of who she was beyond the vague identity of polygamous wife of the prophet. Her final method for acknowledging their individuality was to put each woman’s name on her portrait—in some cases her maiden name, and in others a married name that she used either before or after her marriage to Smith. Peterson herself describes the pieces as “rough,” adding with a laugh that she would have spent far more time on them if she had known how much attention they were going to receive.6 The series of thirty-four portraits, completed in early 2015, was ultimately exhibited at several different galleries in Utah and received favorable press coverage in publications including the New York Times and Huffington Post.7 Peterson also produced a composite poster of the images that became a popular item sold online.8 Critical response focused on the political significance of Peterson’s paintings. As art historian Nancy Ross told the New York Times, by recognizing the individuals, this series stands in contrast with so much of Mormon art in which men are portrayed in detail but “Mormon pioneer women are nameless and faceless.”9

• 1
  A Mormon feminist is one who identifies both with feminist aims of equality of the sexes and with the Mormon faith. The contemporary Mormon feminist movement dates to the 1970s, but earlier waves align with nineteenth-century developments like the leadership of Eliza Snow and the original publication of the Women’s Exponent. See discussion in Brooks, “Mormon Feminism: An Introduction.”
• 2
  Leslie O. Peterson, “The Art of Mormon Feminism,” Video recording of talk at Salt Lake Oasis, 32:52, December 11, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sixbimoHIeo ; Leslie’s Art Blog, October 2014, http://leslieopeterson.blogspot.com.
• 3
  Leslie O. Peterson, telephone conversation with author, October 29, 2018.
• 4
  Leslie O. Peterson, “Celebrating the Forgotten Wives of Joseph Smith,” Video, 5:55, June 14, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0QxpeNg9ZA. There continue to be discrepancies in the research regarding the precise number and identity of Smith’s wives, hence not all books nor artistic representations agree with each other.
• 5
  The Year of Polygamy, hosted by Lindsay Hansen-Park, began in 2014 as a weekly series for the Feminist Mormon Housewives Podcast, and its popularity caused it to continue into the present and expand beyond this original focus; Todd Compton, In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Press, 1996).
• 6
  Peterson, conversation with author.
• 7
  Jennifer Dobner, “Mormon Leader’s 34 Wives Inspire a Utah Artist,” New York Times, August 18, 2015; Carol Kuruvilla, “Joseph Smith’s Many Wives Come to Life in Mormon Artist’s Portraits,” Huffington Post, August 28, 2015, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/joseph-smith-mormon-wives-paintings_n_55df2b1fe4b08dc094869a8c.
• 8
  Her poster is reminiscent of the popular late-nineteenth century postcard that featured small photographs of Brigham Young and twenty-one of his wives.
• 9
  Dobner, “Mormon Leader’s 34 Wives.”

Peterson’s art about polygamy is primarily retrospective. It deals with recovering lost history, rather than struggling with what an afterlife populated with polygamous families might mean. Her intention was to learn the women’s stories and overcome her anger at the Church for what she saw as complicity in an extensive lie. But her work also challenges the collective chain of memory because she puts the faces of often clearly pained plural wives front and center. Furthermore, because she was interested in unpacking the unpleasant past through visual means, hers was also a new voice in the world of Mormon feminism. As Cusack notes, Peterson had joined the ranks of those women who had, for decades, been “challenging the erasure of women’s experience in Church history and negotiating embedded tensions around gender in Mormon culture, doctrine, and practice.”1 In trying to talk about the new realizations with her Mormon peers, Peterson put attention on a subject that was already taboo, and she found that initiating such conversations made people regard her as “edgy, or anti-Mormon."42 This is because, as one writer described it, “Peterson [was] not merely painting; she [was] testing the boundaries and politics of Mormon authoritative discourse.”43

Peterson unilaterally considers polygamy to have been a horrible way of life. “Some say it was a necessary sacrifice,” she explained in conversation with the author, “or that it was necessary to populate Utah, or that it showed our strength as a people.” But she disagrees. “These were great women in spite of polygamy, not because of it!”44 By recognizing their contributions as individuals, not just as wives, her art pushes back against what she perceives as the erasure of women from the history of the faith, and she suggests women can be significant in the present for their individual qualities rather than for their marriages. What is most significant about Peterson’s work was not that she offered particularly new ideas to Mormon feminism, but rather that she presented a different medium for ideological expression. Furthermore, the exposure her work received amplified discussion of the issue far beyond a Mormon audience.

Six months after her “Forgotten Wives” series was complete, Peterson returned to the subject of polygamy with Sisters in Zion. This family portrait, created in the same style, shows five of Smith’s wives sitting together in a formal pose with a portrait of Joseph hanging in the background. Unsmiling, they all look directly at the viewer. Subsequent pieces completed in 2015 and 2016 included brightly colored acrylic portraits of individual Smith wives with more visual context about their lives. In the portrait bearing her name, Fanny Alger, for instance, stands in a field, surrounded by flowers as symbols of her life and relevance to Mormon history. Flanked by portraits of husbands Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, the subject of Zina Huntington Jacobs Young Smith sits holding a picture of her beloved original husband, Henry. And, though her eyes are covered with a large cowboy hat that references the disguise she wore when marrying Smith, Louisa in 5 Tiny Graves wears a confident smile.45 Most of these more recent pieces were made on commission for collectors, but eventually polygamy fell out of Peterson’s creative repertoire. As she stated in late 2018, “I processed it and moved on,” adding that, as a part of moving on, she had also left the Church. “I guess you can’t call me a Mormon feminist anymore.”46

• 1
  Cusack, “(Not So) Well-Behaved Women,” 133.
• 42
  Peterson, conversation with author.
• 43
  Sonja Farnsworth, “The Art of Feminism: Forgotten Wives Remembered,” Sunstone 182 (Fall 2016), 31.
• 44
  Peterson, conversation with author.
• 45
  The title of this piece refers to the fact that all five of her children, who were fathered by her second husband Brigham Young, died in infancy.
• 46
  Peterson, conversation with author. Peterson sent an official letter of resignation to the Church in September 2018.

In a similar attempt to reveal the darker emotions in the women’s lives, through the window of Payne’s piece representing wife number twenty-nine, Rhoda Richards, a bittersweet passage appears on the back panel:

“In my young days I buried my first and only love, and true to that affiance, I have passed companionless through life; but am sure of having my proper place and standing in the resurrection, having been sealed to the prophet Joseph Smith, according to the celestial law, by his own request, under the inspiration of divine revelation.”1

Richards (1784-1879) was raised in the Boston area and followed several family members into the Latter-day Saint faith in the 1830s. In her late twenties she fell deeply in love and became engaged to Ebenezer Damon, but he died of sudden illness before they could marry. Richards essentially spent the next seven decades living a spinster’s life, being shuttled about to live with various family members and battling frequent health issues. And yet, along the way, she secretly became a polygamous wife to both Joseph Smith (1843), and to her cousin Brigham Young (1845). These unions are what Compton has called “dynastic matrimony,” in that they were not romantic, they were not made public, and they appear to have served as a method for linking specific families.2 In Payne’s piece, Richards is no longer a secret wife of the prophet. Symbols represent her two marriages and her extensive travels, and the front panel includes drawings of medicinal bottles that reference her ongoing health issues. But it is the section of text seen through the window that lays bare Richards’ private assessment of her own life, happily anticipating her eternal future while in the same breath conveying sadness at lost love. In these examples and others, the textual excerpts and the visuals work together to flesh out the forgotten life stories of Smith’s many wives.

What is most notable about Payne’s piece is its intellectual complexity. Even using the key card, an average viewer would not be able to understand all of the symbolism without additional explanation. Payne is comfortable with the fact that many people will miss some of her work’s significance; rather than feeding them answers, she hopes the pieces will act as a catalyst that pushes viewers to seek out the deeper stories. As with Peterson, the series was a means for Payne to process her own discomfort with the history of polygamy, and it was an emotional project in which she deliberately focused on damage done to the women’s lives. For instance, little is known about wife number nineteen, Flora Ann Woodworth, a teenage bride of the prophet. To represent her, Payne drew freely-flowing locks of hair. This referred to a time when Flora was so isolated by illness that by the time a sister wife was finally able to care for her, Flora’s “heavy raven locks were so matted together that it took [her] hours to comb them out.”3 Payne recalled this story with a crack in her voice. It was by consciously choosing to represent incidents that were painful to think about that she was able to sort through her feelings about polygamy’s effects on the lives of her Mormon ancestors and their descendants.

Payne attempted to humanize each woman by recounting her personal history. Yet because of the way the series is structured, the pieces are dependent upon one another, and the women remain tied together as part of a single narrative; they are trapped in a patriarchal structure even as their lives are exhumed. Furthermore, because most are only identified by a number designating her spot in the order of Smith matrimonies, their anonymity is perpetuated.4 If viewers feel discomfort from this or any other aspects of the series, the artist would consider it a success, because it would mean awareness about the past is being reinvigorated. Most importantly, she hopes viewers would see the folly in dismissing polygamy as something old and distant that has no bearing on Mormon women today. As Payne herself says in an inadvertent nod to the concept of the chain of memory, “We can only begin to move forward if we remember our heritage.”5

• 1
  The original source of this quote, which was reproduced in Compton, In Sacred Loneliness, 568-9, appears to be a letter that Richards wrote a year prior to her death.
• 2
  Compton, In Sacred Loneliness, 558-76.
• 3
  Helen Mar, as quoted in Compton, In Sacred Loneliness, 393.
• 4
  There are a few exceptions in which the woman’s name is embedded in the collage, but these are often difficult to read.
• 5
  Payne, conversation with author.

The artist with the most extensive body of work reflecting on polygamy is Angela Ellsworth, who was raised Mormon in Salt Lake City and later left the Church. Ellsworth, an art professor at Arizona State University whose work has been shown in venues around the world, has earned critical acclaim in painting and sculpture as well as performance art.1 Ellsworth first began exploring polygamy after hearing uncomfortable stories about her ancestors, one of whom was Eliza R. Snow, a wife of Joseph Smith who later rose to prominence within the Church.2 Smith’s first wife, Emma, was outspoken in her opposition to polygamy, and for that reason his extensive wife-taking was generally kept hidden from her.3 The tale that captured Ellsworth’s attention was one in which a newly enlightened Emma pushed pregnant Eliza down the stairs, causing her to miscarry.4 Ellsworth wrote that learning about this story “evoked my interest in not only my own lineage of polygamy (which existed on both sides of my family), but more specifically in women’s lack of voice.”5

Ellsworth’s 1993 MFA thesis, “The Pious or The Perverse? Two Women Within the Construct of Mormon Polygamy,” is thirty pages of text accompanied by a series of related art works. The text has a poetic quality to it, vacillating between a discussion of historical polygamy, which she describes as “institutionalized slavery,” and excerpts from different versions of the Emma and Eliza story.6 She distinguishes the life trajectories of the two women. After Smith’s death, Emma became estranged from the Church. She remarried outside of the faith, and eventually joined her son Joseph as a member of the non-polygamous Reorganized Church of Latter Day Saints. Eliza not only stayed in the polygamous life but became a prominent leader, serving as president of the women’s Relief Society from 1866-87 and penning a famous poem (later set to music) that speaks of the Heavenly Mother, the counterpart to the Heavenly Father in Mormon cosmology. Eliza’s published works, including diaries and poetry, document social history within the Church, but because she elided her personal feelings as she recounted these events, ultimately Eliza the person is just as absent from the historical record as Emma, who left no writings.7 As Ellsworth put it, Eliza “was regarded as a saint, precisely because she had no voice. Because Eliza’s personal narrative was silenced, she was highly respected.”8 Exploring the women’s polygamous situation through both writing and artwork allowed Ellsworth to “address the different ways in which restriction of female sexuality functions both physically and psychologically.”9

• 1
  Biographical information is compiled from: Seeing is Believing: Rebecca Campbell and Angela Ellsworth, Phoenix Art Museum (2010), exhibition catalog; Dress Matters: Clothing as Metaphor, Tucson Museum of Art (2017), exhibition catalog; and the artist’s website, aellsworth.com.
• 2
  Eliza Roxcy Snow, a poet who joined the Church in 1835, was sealed to Smith in 1842. Snow was highly respected for her leadership and today many consider her the prototypical Mormon feminist. Snow’s role and prominence within Church culture, however, is not the subject of Ellsworth’s art.
• 3
  Merina Smith, Revelation, Resistance, and Mormon Polygamy: The Introduction and Implementation of the Principle, 1830-1853 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2013), esp. chapters 3 & 4; see also Linda King Newell and Valeen Tippetts Avery, Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith (New York: Doubleday, 1984).
• 4
  Ellsworth acknowledges that this story is akin to an LDS legend, in that it has been recounted in numerous publications with details that change, and its historical basis is entirely uncertain. See an analysis in: Brian C. Hales, “Emma Smith, Eliza R. Snow, and the Reported Incident on the Stairs,” Mormon Historical Studies 10, no. 2 (Fall 2009), 63–75.
• 5
  Angela Ellsworth, “The Pious or The Perverse? Two Women Within the Construct of Mormon Polygamy,” MFA thesis (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey: 1993), 28.
• 6
  Ibid, 15.
• 7
  Ibid, 4-7.
• 8
  Ibid, 4.
• 9
  Ibid, 29.

All of these artists take the history of Smith’s wives as a central project, paying homage to the struggles they endured. Peterson has done this by highlighting aspects of the women’s lives unrelated to their marriages; Payne has done this by juxtaposing their achievements with their inner thoughts; and Ellsworth has done this by meditating on themes of bondage and freedom. Although these artists have engaged with the history of polygamy in different stylistic and ideological ways, it is notable that each focused particular attention on Emma Smith. This is because she is a figure of contradiction and is therefore the first puzzle to work through. Emma, who was both the first wife of the prophet and a woman who openly opposed polygamy, has become a touchstone of the historical practice for modern interlocuters, serving as both hero and anti-hero. All of the artists explore her resistance and attempt to grapple with her feelings. It is because of her conflicting positions on polygamy—her clear, vocal opposition to its practice within the Church, and her subsequent rigid denial that the practice ever existed at all—that Emma is the most troubling historical figure for these artists, and that fact is evident in the wildly different ways they render her.

Leslie O. Peterson portrayed Emma at least half a dozen times, always emphasizing her independence both from Smith and from the other wives. “She was one of our first feminists,” Peterson wrote under a sketch posted to her blog.1 In Peterson’s “Forgotten Wives” series Emma is beautiful, with porcelain skin, dark hair, and red lips. In a later version, Emma is adorned in a tiara and cape, her hair hanging loose, and although she looks like a young woman her surname is that of the man she married after Smith’s death. In a portrait that Peterson based on a photograph from the last decade of Emma’s life, she is shown with her adult son Joseph, and the rich colors—purple, gold, and burnt orange—along with her facial expression, suggest an inner serenity. She is beautiful, and she is interesting—these are the personal traits she carries with her. Through Peterson, a viewer sees Emma as a woman with her own identity, worth knowing for her own sake rather than as an extension of the prophet or in relation to the other wives.

Katie West Payne’s series ends, rather than begins, with the image of Emma (Fig. 9). Symbols represent her life story, a photo transfer allows Emma to look straight at the viewer, and a typewritten slip of paper reveals words that she spoke shortly before her death, emphatically and categorically denying the prophet’s polygamy. But through a window Payne invites viewers to see a different version of Emma’s thoughts. A second, rear panel shows an excerpt from an 1844 resolution authored by the women’s Relief Society, of which Emma was then president. In it, Mormon women declare they will “raise their voices and hands” against all licentious abuses of women, including polygamy.2 By ending the series with Emma and juxtaposing her conflicting statements about polygamy, Payne’s implication is that Emma was both victim and perpetrator, and should be recognized as such. 

• 1
  Leslie’s Art Blog, June 22, 2014, http://leslieopeterson.blogspot.com.
• 2
  The original document, titled “The Voice of Innocence from Nauvoo,” also bears Emma’s signature. This document is available online from the LDS Church History Library.

Angela Ellsworth’s work on polygamy shows Emma as the wife who demonstrated agency, whether it was through pushing a rival down the stairs or untying herself from that which bound her. For Ellsworth, Emma serves as the paragon of freedom, even as her later work also questions the extent to which polygamous marriage should be viewed as limiting. Because she has worked on this theme for nearly three decades, it is not surprising that Ellsworth has also moved into explorations of Mormon polygamy that go beyond the experiences of Smith’s family.

The visual art that focuses on Emma, perhaps more than any other, ignites discussion. It illuminates contested understandings of Mormon history and challenges us to see the present in light of the past. Philosopher Jacques Rancière, who has theorized the role of art in facilitating a public voice for those who have been marginalized—as Mormon women have been—writes: “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”1 Rancière suggests that a given society’s artists create political interventions when they use imagery to rupture a hegemonic discourse, allowing us to conceptualize things for which we may not have previously had words. Art, in other words, is a starting point for social change, including the reevaluation of religion.2 Certainly, the issue to which all of these artists speak is the place of women in the contemporary Mormon Church, and their work is birthed from the tension created by forbidden discussion of it. If the polygamous past is to find a more comfortable and useful place in the chain of memory that is Mormon history, Emma Smith is the starting point for its reexamination and rearticulation. Peterson, Payne, and Ellsworth are doing this and more, by claiming the right to explore polygamy’s history and the right to show the full spectrum of Joseph Smith’s many wives. They provide contemporary examples of the power of art to affect and transform religious memory.

The author expresses thanks to Leslie O. Peterson, Katie West Payne, and Angela Ellsworth for their contributions to this project, and to LDS Church History Library archivist Jeff Thompson for his assistance.

• 1
  Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum: 2004), 13.
• 2
  Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 18.

Women not only owned this kind of painting, but their engagement with them would have been understood in the colonial period to have been inflected by gendered experiences of the senses. Both the Spaniards and the Incas who preceded them in the Andes conceived of vision and hearing, the same senses which I argue The Nativity and The Sleeping Christ Child emphasize, as the senses that dominated human experience of the world.1 The Incas, for example, characterized sound as the primary medium of creation, while light (corresponding to sight) was the element that allowed the world to acquire its definitive structure.2 The European model that predominated in the colonial period established a gendered hierarchy for the senses in which sight and hearing were not only the most important senses, but they were also considered “higher” or “rational” senses and thus associated with dominant groups like men. Smell, touch, and taste, in contrast, were considered “lower” or “corporeal” senses and thus aligned with subordinated groups like women.3 This classification system was not, however, entirely immutable. As Constance Classen observes, the major social divisions of gender and social class or condition could change the ascription of standard social hierarchies of perception; a woman—although linked to “lower” senses by tradition—might represent the “higher” senses if she, like the nuns in most of the important convents of colonial Cuzco, possessed the visual skills of reading and writing, or the auditory skills for music.4

According to Geoffrey Baker, beginning in the seventeenth century, musical performance and teaching were key elements of feminine convent life in Cuzco. In the Franciscan convent of Santa Clara in Cuzco, for example, the nuns devoted considerable effort to the study of music in order to ensure that both plainchant and polyphony with instrumental accompaniment were regular elements of their religious ceremonies.5 The quality of the music was so important that the nuns hired music teachers in order to cultivate exceptional singers and instrumentalists.6 Musical ability also had a significant financial value within the convent; it could bring privileges to the entire community and afford advantages of higher status for individuals.7 The abbesses were, therefore, willing to make generous offers to talented novices regardless of their ethnicity or social status.8  Contemporary religious witnesses widely appreciated nuns’ musical activities, such as musical-theatrical performances in church or private music making in the locutorios or visiting rooms of the convent.9 Other musical activities included the performance of villancicos and of traditional plainchant and Latin polyphony in the Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours. In contrast the seventeenth-century chronicles written by the Franciscan Diego de Mendoza, the Dominican Reginaldo de Lizárraga, and the Carmelite Antonio Vázquez de Espinosa indicate that music played a lesser role in male monastic communities.10  The Franciscan, Dominican, and Carmelite friars do not seem to have attributed the same importance to musical talent or training as the nuns.11

Music was a symbol of pride for both the city of Cuzco and its convents. It was also a means for the nuns to make known their presence in the urban environment and to establish their status through the “higher” sense of hearing.12  Music became a means of self-expression and affirmation for religious women in a male-dominated society.19  Nuns also appealed to hearing in order to achieve an aural imitation of the magnificence of heaven as they imagined it.20   Within a context where music was so relevant, the nuns would have commissioned or acquired devotional artworks with sonic elements, such as The Nativity or The Sleeping Christ Child, so as to incorporate music into their more intimate moments of spiritual reflection and meditation.

• 1
  Constance Classen, “Sweet Colors, Fragrant Songs: Sensory Models of the Andes and the Amazon,” American Ethnologist 17, no. 4 (1990): 722.
• 2
  Classen, “Sweet Colors,” 723, 725.
• 3
  David Howes, Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 10. Constance Classen, The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination (London: Routledge, 1998), 66.
• 4
  Classen, The Color of Angels, 68.
• 5
  Geoffrey Baker, “Music in the Convents and Monasteries of Colonial Cuzco,” Latin American Music Review 24, no.1 (2003): 4, 7.
• 6
  Kathryn Burns, Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 106.
• 7
  Baker, “Music in the Convents,” 7. Juan Carlos Estenssoro, “Música y fiesta en los conventos de monjas limeñas, siglos XVII y XVII,” Revista musical de Venezuela 16, no. 34 (1997): 129.
• 8
  Antonia Viacha, an Indian novice in Santa Clara, who both performed and taught the bajón (dulcian—a woodwind instrument), was granted a reduction in her dowry when she took the white veil in 1708, Baker, “Music in the Convents,” 7. Doña Josefa María de Santa Cruz y Padilla, a talented singer, who was the niece and goddaughter of the Dean of the Cuzco cathedral, Alonso Merlo de la Fuente, was allowed to profess as “a nun of the white veil” without the payment of a dowry in 1676, Geoffrey Baker, Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008), 111.
• 9
  Baker, “Music in the Convents,” 4-5.
• 10
  Diego de Mendoza, Chronica de la Provincia de San Antonio de los Charcas [1663] (La Paz: Casa Municipal de la Cultura “Franz Tamayo," 1976), 42-43. Reginaldo de Lizárraga, Descripción del Perú, Tucumán, Río de la Plata y Chile (Madrid: Historia 16, 1987), 111-114. Antonio Vásquez de Espinosa, Compendio y descripción de las Indias Occidentales (Madrid: Historia 16, 1992), 597. Baker quotes these sources in “Music in the Convents," 10-11.
• 11
  Baker, “Music in the Convents,” 10-11. Luisa Morales posits that the nuns saw their wealth dramatically diminished everywhere in Peru during the nineteenth century, as a result of the laws dictated by the various governments. In consequence, musical activity decreased too. Morales, “New Findings on Musical Activity and Instruments in the Convent of Santa Teresa, Cusco during the Colonial and Aristocratic Republican Periods,” in Música de tecla en los monasteries femeninos y conventos de España, Portugal y las Américas , coord. Luisa Morales (España: Asociación Cultural LEAL, 2011), 91-108.
• 12
  Baker, “Music in the Convents,” 5.
• 19
  Ibid.
• 20
  Estenssoro, “Música y fiesta," 129.

The musical component of The Nativity with Musical Angels dominates the composition and immediately captures the viewer’s attention (Fig. 1). The canvas depicts baby Jesus at the manger with Mary, Joseph and a surrounding crowd of musical angels. Angelic choirs that praise and adore Jesus in the stable of Bethlehem constitute an old pictorial theme dating to the Byzantine period.1  In European Renaissance paintings, it is common to see a small group of angels singing and playing instruments close to the manger, although more elaborate ensembles of musician angels playing strings, woodwinds, brass, keyboard, and percussion instruments appear in artworks from Northern Europe representing the Virgin Mary nursing her child. In The Nativity, musician angels, positioned in two different registers occupy most of the pictorial space. The composition was copied from an engraving, probably by Hieronymus Wierix, originally included in the Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary published by Jan Moretus in 1609 in Antwerp (Fig. 5).2

• 1
  Amy Gillette, “The Music of Angels in Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Art," Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture 6, no. 4 (2018): 26-78.
• 2
  Officium Beatae Mariae Virginis Pii V Pontifex Maximus iussum editum (Antuerpiea: Ioannem Moretum, 1609), 568, Biblioteca Histórica de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, BH FLL, 3908. Another painting based on the same engraving has been published by Ananda Cohen Suarez, Pintura colonial cusqueña. El esplendor del arte en los Andes (Cusco: Haynanka, 2015), 63.

In order to depict heavenly music on earth, the anonymous painter not only copied the Flemish engraving, but also incorporated some of the musical instruments he was probably accustomed to seeing every day. Thus, he replaced one of the lutes with a common harp and the shawm with an oboe. He also added a few additional percussion instruments. From the top left corner down and in counter-clockwise order, his ensemble comprises a triangle, an oboe, a drum, a bass violin, a harp and a lute of sorts. That is to say, a six-strong instrumental ensemble that accompanies a vocal trio. This vocal trio should potentially be understood as composed of two sopranos and an alto, given the three angel singers resemble children and children’s choirs are typically made up of these two particular voice types. By representing all these instruments and voices together, the painter evokes loud, rich and blissful music, evocative of some of the villancicos composed for the liturgical celebration of Christmas, and thus the birth of Christ, rather than the more staid and traditional plainchant. In its pure form, plainchant was sung in religious services without any instrumental accompaniment.1  However, plainchant was often performed not in this pure form, but rather accompanied by an organ—an instrument not included in this composition. Since the painting is not a realistic representation of a musical ensemble performing, it would be difficult to find a repertoire written exactly for the group of voices and instruments represented in the painting. Rather than corresponding to a specific piece of music, the presence of music within The Nativity with Musical Angels is itself theologically significant. Music provides a bridge to understanding the mystery of the nativity by showing the newborn Jesus as the one responsible for producing universal harmony. 

The gaze of the infant Jesus provides the vital impulse to the angelic orchestra. The infant looks down to the side and the angel harpist who falls in the line of his gaze returns his glance. This angel is one of two whose eye movements are clearly depicted. This crossing of glances gives a deeper sense to the angelic orchestra; it materializes one of Thomas Aquinas’s discussions: whether God, as a spiritual substance, can move corporeal matter or not.2 The infant’s gaze then behaves like Aristotle’s immobile motor—that is, as the primary cause or “mover” of all the motion of the universe—by symbolizing an eternal incorruptible and immaterial substance, which exists as the ultimate cause of music.3 The baby Jesus does not seem to make any physical movement of his body, but his gaze nonetheless inspires the angels to perform. In The Nativity, the first instrument to be affected in this process is the harp, an instrument that would appropriately provide an essential harmonic foundation over which the vocal and instrumental music could then unfold.

The triangle introduces a vernacular touch into this Christian adaptation of the Greek theory known as the Harmony of the Spheres, a philosophical concept that regards the movements of the celestial bodies as a form of music. Unlike that of the angelic orchestra, this music is not audible to the human ear. Rather, it is a religious concept that might be intimately experienced, or even internally heard, as a sort of harmony. In this kind of religious musical scene, local painters often included angels playing the triangle with or without jingling rings attached to the horizontal bar.4 The triangle performer in The Nativity looks up at a cloud burst. Through the opening in the clouds, we can see a trio of angels singing what may be a different genre of music under the guidance of God the Father. The direct divine inspiration suggests that the music is religious and serious, traits that imply Latin liturgical polyphony rather than the more lively and festive villancicos. Devotees viewing the painting may have imagined that the three angels were singing something similar to the invitatory “Christus natus est nobis” (Christ is born to us) used for matins on Christmas Eve, or perhaps a motet inspired by Luke 2:14: “Gloria in altissimis Deo,” which is written on the phylactery held by two pairs of angels.

The composition does not depict a scene that is musically realistic. The simultaneous performance of both ensembles makes little sense, for their music would interfere with each other creating chaos rather than beauty. Their juxtaposition may, however, have a symbolic connotation. Each group represents the two main division of the church repertory: a vocal and instrumental ensemble for bright and joyful villancicos, and a smaller, subtler, vocal grouping for complex Latin polyphony (or maybe traditional plainchant) that formed the everyday fare of church choirs. Someone accustomed to praying in front of the painting might join the angelic choirs and orchestra by saying (or singing) out loud the text held on the angels’ phylactery: “Gloria in altissimis Deo.” The Novena para celebrar en compañía de todos los coros angélicos el Nacimiento del Niño Jesús (Novena to celebrate the birth of the Christ child in the company of all the angelic choirs) (Puebla, 1774) encouraged devotees to recite this phrase every hour while kneeling before an image of the Nativity.5 This action was to be repeated for nine consecutive days. A novena (from the Latin, novem, meaning nine) is a nine-day period of private prayer to obtain special graces. Devotees were supposed to prepare their souls to receive Jesus as their savior over that period. They were also expected to entrust themselves to the heavenly court and to join in the collective praise. Following these pious instructions allowed devotees to experience the cheerful joy of the angels musically announcing the birth of Christ.

• 1
  Pablo Nasarre, Escuela música según la práctica moderna (Zaragoza: Diego Larumbe, 1724), 91.
• 2
  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I. q. 105. a. 2. Emanuel Winternitz posits that this argument could also explain the mysterious Virgin and Child painted by Geertgen tot Sint Jans. See Winternitz, “On Angel Concerts in the 15th Century: A Critical Approach to Realism and Symbolism in Sacred Painting,” The Musical Quarterly 49, no. 4 (1963): 450-463.
• 3
  Aristotle, Metaphysics , XII. 6. 1071b4-5.
• 4
  Another triangle can be seen in the anonymous Death of Saint Joseph, which is also in the Collection of Carl & Marilynn Thoma.
• 5
  Novena devota para prevenirse a celebrar en compañía de todos los coros angélicos el Santísimo Nacimiento del Niño Jesús (Puebla: Herederos de la viuda de Miguel de Ortega, 1774), Centro de Estudios de Historia de México, 248.143.72.49 VA. It is probable that similar chapbooks circulated within the convents in viceregal Peru.

The experience of contemplation of The Sleeping Christ Child was full of ambiguity. Peaceful rest and hidden suffering were meant to be simultaneously present in the composition. Moreover, the infant Saint John the Baptist calling for silence might have made the pious beholder think of a song, perhaps a villancico, which would have reminded the viewer of the importance of silence. The Sleeping Christ Child in the Thoma Collection (Fig. 2) belongs to an iconographic type that represents the Holy Family with the child Jesus in his cradle. This type of representation was very popular in Latin America during the eighteenth century. 

With his fingers, the sleeping child points to two small figures that stand before his bed. Their joined hands symbolize the union between Christ (the winged infant) and the human soul (the girl). This image is based on a third print, “Amor æternus,” an emblem included in Otto Vaenius’s Amoris Divini Emblemata (Antwerp, 1615) (fig. 8).1  The connection between Christ and the human soul is also expressed by the golden ribbon that ties them together and the inscriptions that span both the two hearts, human and divine. The first inscription, “Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat” (I sleep, but my heart waketh, Song of Songs 5:2), refers to the concept of waking sleep, a common theme in meditations on the sleeping Christ. The idea of waking sleep is pronounced in monastic mystical writings that draw on the books Songs of Songs and Job, especially those by Gregory the Great and Bernard of Clairvaux.2 According to these thinkers, sleep is a type of death; it removes the body from life’s cares, but at the same time, it keeps the soul awake attending to the encounter with God, just as in the parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids (Matthew 25:1-13). Waking sleep suggests that body and soul are not divided in the effort to achieve the mystical union with Christ. In The Sleeping Christ Child this “waking sleep” is represented by the open eye in the sacred heart.

• 1
  Otto Vaenius, Amoris Divini Emblemata (Antuerpiæ: Ex officina Martini Nuti & Ioannis Meursi, 1615), 17.
• 2
  Gregory the Great, “Moralia Book V: 54,” in The Books of the Morals of Saint Gregory the Pope, or an Exposition on the Book of the Blessed Job (Oxford: J.H. Parker, 1844), http://hdl.handle.net/10079/197b3c6c-29b1-448e-82e4-2a4d7c2b2e8f; Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermon LII. 3-4. Life and Works of Saint Bernard Abbot of Clairvaux. Cantica Canticorum. Eighty-Six Sermons on the Songs of Solomon, vol. 4, ed. John Mabillon (London: Hodges: 1893), 315-316.

The second inscription, “Dilectus meus mihi, se ego illi, qui pascitur inter lilia” (My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies), quotes Song of Songs 2:16.  Christian theologians interpreted Song of Songs as a dialogue between an aromatic bride (the soul) and a fragrant bridegroom (God) that attract each other, ultimately joining in a spiritual marriage on a symbolic bed of flowers.1  It is not a coincidence that a large garland of roses, lilies, and jasmines frames the scene. Flowers symbolize the array of Christian virtues (such as charity, faith, hope, obedience, perseverance, chastity, poverty, patience and humility). Religious texts often compare the achievements of women to garlands of fragrant flowers. For instance, in his 1733 eulogy to limeña beata (lay holy woman) Feliciana de San Ignacio Mariaca, José del Castillo Bolivar compared Mariaca’s virtues to amaranth, immortelle flower, caltha, hyacinth, rose, violet, and lily.2 Furthermore, nuns, in particular the Carmelites, tended to interpret the sweet smell of flowers as a reward from God for true devotion.3 Even if smell was usually ranked third in the hierarchy of the senses after sight and hearing, it still played an important role within religious frameworks as a way to confirm women’s virtuousness.4

Lullaby villancicos confirm the affective content of the many symbols displayed in The Sleeping Christ Child. The theme of the lullaby villancico was typically lulling the Christ child to sleep, but also they also reminded the listener that the sleeping baby Jesus dreams of his future Passion. This topic received particular attention in colonial Chuquisaca (known today as Sucre, Bolivia) by means of musical pieces of a high level of complexity and originality.5  Si el Amor se quedare dormido (If Cupid Would Fall Asleep) exemplifies this type of lullaby villancico. The anonymous lyrics (first set in Madrid, in 1697) share important features with the iconography of The Sleeping Christ Child.6 Both the painting and the villancico highlight the opposition between sleep and waking, insisting on maintaining a balance between the two states (ex. 1). 

• 1
  Classen, The Color of Angels, 55. Matthew Boersma, “Scent in Song: Exploring scented symbols in the Song of Songs," Conversations with the Biblical World 30 (2011): 80-94.
• 2
  José del Castillo Bolívar, Ramillete sagrado compuesto de flores que cultivó en heroicas virtudes la venerable sierva de Dios Feliciana de San Ignacio Mariaca, hija del orden tercero de penitencia de nuestro padre San Francisco (Lima: Imprenta de la Calle de Palacio, 1733), 6.
• 3
  José Gómez de la Parra, Fundación y primero siglo. Crónica del primer convento de Carmelitas descalzas en Puebla, 1604-1704 (México: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1992), 399.
• 4
  Classen, The Color of Angels, 59.
• 5
  Bernardo Illari, “Polychoral Culture: Cathedral Music in La Plata (Bolivia), 1680-1730,” vol. 1 (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2001), 162-163.
• 6
  Villancicos que se han de cantar en la Real Capilla de su Majestad la noche de Reyes de este año de 1697, Biblioteca Nacional de España, VE/91/38(1).

Example 1. Si el Amor se quedare dormido, text and translation.1

• 1
  Translation by the author.

Juan de Araujo, choirmaster of the cathedrals of Lima and Chuquisaca in the late-seventeenth century, set the poem to four-part music. His setting survives in manuscript part books copied towards 1713 that may have belonged to the Franciscan convent of Santa Clara.1  Araujo’s villancico was presumably sung there at least once in 1754, as indicated on the front page. Si el Amor se quedare dormido presents the villancico’s customary division in two sections: a through-composed estribillo (that is, an opening section that does not have any internal repeats) and a set of four strophic coplas. The fancy estribillo operates as a rhetorical exordium, catching the listener’s attention. The coplas present the religious core of the piece, as if it were a song-within-a-song.2

Araujo’s setting communicates the emotional content of the poem using musical language that enhances the feeling of unrest and suffering.3 An abundance of changes in tonal focus supports this musical idea, breaking and playing with the expected sense of tonal unity. Important concentrations of successive dissonances appear in the passage, which describes the Christ child “wounded by love,” (“herido de amores”) embodying Jesus’s suffering (ex. 2, m. 9-15). By contrast, the music evokes restful sleep, “he would like to rest” (“quiere descansar”), through lengthy notes and ligatures in slow, flowing melodies (ex. 3, m. 15-20).4 The soft and languid character of this passage matches the affection of the words considered to be appropriate to provoke drowsiness, but also to instill sadness. The expressive interjection “¡Ay!” (Oh!) (ex. 4, m. 21-23) reinforces the painful affection of the piece by interrupting the continuity of the composition.

• 1
  Archivo y Bibliotecas Nacionales de Bolivia, Juan de Araujo, Si el Amor se quedare dormido , Música 156.
• 2
  Illari, “Polychoral Culture,” 168.
• 3
  For a recorded version of the piece: Juan de Araujo, Si el Amor se quedare dormido, Ensemble Elyma, Gabriel Garrido, Nuevo Mundo 17th-Century Music in Latin America, Glossa 4, 2017, CD, http://hdl.handle.net/10079/f1d828a2-9d4a-4aa1-a322-c3fba55cc609.
• 4
  Bernardo Illari, “Agudeza de villancico: los Plumajes de Torrejón,” in El villancico en la encrucijada: nuevas perspectivas en torno a un género literario-musical (siglos XV-XIX) , eds. Esther Borrego Gutiérrez and Javier Marín López (Kassel: Reichenberger, 2019), 504-505.

Silence in relation to music does not exist as a vacuum. The poem brings up the conventional order “¡Quedito, quedo!” to quiet the audience and let the child sleep. The four voices remain silent, but not the basso continuo (a harmonic support and rhythmic accompaniment typically realized with a harp) (m. 39-43). Silence is eloquent; it does not merely articulate sound structures. The paradox of music evoking silence could be understood as a means to encourage the audience—as the infant Saint John the Baptist does in the painting—to perceive in the slumber of Jesus, even for a brief moment, its importance for redemption.

A set of four strophic coplas comes after the estribillo. The repetitive simplicity of their music and their careful rhythmical setting are an apt vehicle for conveying the poem’s contents. The first three coplas associate the Christ child’s tears, moans, and sighs with Cupid’s weapons on the basis of their capacity to move the devotee (who might be the listener or the beholder). The fourth copla charges human indifference as being responsible for not cultivating flowers or virtues. Human indifference and the resulting absent flowers and virtues may interrupt Jesus’s sleep and prevent human salvation. Si el Amor se quedare dormido captures the ambiguity of The Sleeping Christ Child. It bridges the disjunction between wakening and sleep, inviting the devotee to contemplate the peaceful, but also suffering baby Jesus.

The emotional states implied in The Sleeping Christ Child and The Nativity reflect the alternation between tears and bliss that early modern Catholics saw in the childhood of Christ. Since the sixteenth century, one of the concerns of preachers and spiritual directors—both in Europe and the New World—was to teach the faithful to experience “spiritual delight,” while reflecting on the many episodes of the infancy of Christ. That emotion was supposed to be a mixture of suffering and joy.1 The paintings analyzed so far exemplify this form of emotional training. They stay within conventions, but exploited the manifold relations among sight, hearing, and smell to intensify the devotee’s religious commitment.

• 1
  See, for instance, Fray Luis de Granada, Sermones de tiempo , vol. 1 (Madrid: Plácido Barco López, 1790), 381-382.

A rich sonority pervades The Nativity and The Sleeping Christ Child. It is us, the contemporary beholders, who think of colonial religious images as silent, exclusively focused on the eye. This means that we have lost the capacity to perceive the connections suggested in devotional paintings among different senses. Those links were employed as a means for enhancing the faithful’s spiritual perception; their aim was to provide a deeper insight into theological concepts, helping devotees to develop a way of looking and listening that would foster direct contact with the supernatural.

 In past work on devotional images of the Christ child and villancicos, I have demonstrated that the early modern Catholic symbolic sphere characterized music as an essential feature of female nature.1 In the early modern Spanish world, women’s souls were metaphorically conceived as musical instruments. In theory, there were diverse paths to tune those unusual instruments. One of these paths was to actively practice the Christian virtues by thinking about them as if they were the chords of the human soul.2 Another approach was to reflect on the content of images that evoked the perfect harmony of Christ, who was supposedly a musical instrument himself. In that case, the tuning of the feminine soul would occur by means of a mystical sympathetic resonance.3 The Nativity and The Sleeping Christ Child might be included in this genre of musical images since both were intended to offer a path to reach spiritual perfection primarily through the sense of hearing.

Visual representation of music (or at least of topics that might be related to music, such as the waking sleep) points to the beholder’s capacity to internalize the aural experience, mentally linking music or silence to theological concepts and emotions. Otherwise, the depictions of either of those features would be meaningless. This process of association acted within the boundaries of a complex system of symbols that shaped the sensibility and behavior of the faithful.4 In The Nativity and The Sleeping Christ Child, symbols serve as a portal into a world centered around listening. They allow us to understand how women were supposed to feel and live their devotional experiences.5 Even though they were painted separately, both artworks sound together in a sort of consonant harmony. We must identify and interpret the range of symbolic elements these works carry, so that we can attune ourselves to the resonance they share. In order to do so we must learn to hear visuality in Spanish colonial art.

• 1
  “Carolina Sacristán Ramírez, “El entramado de la devoción: pintura, música, religiosidad femenina y el Niño Jesús Pasionario en la Nueva España, 1720-1772” (PhD diss., Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2018). See Chapter 2: “El Niño Jesús tañendo la cruz, c. 1730-1740.” On this subject, see also Ronald E. Surtz, The Guitar of God: Gender, Power and Authority in the Visionary World of Mother Juana de la Cruz (1481-1534) (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 63-85. Ronald E. Surtz, “Imágenes musicales en el libro de la oración (¿1518?) de sor María de Santo Domingo,” Actas del IX Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas 18-23 agosto 1986, Berlín (Vervuert: Frankfurt am Main, 1989), 563-570.
• 2
  Carolina Sacristán Ramírez, “Cantando ‘La huida a Egipto’ con la cítara mística: meditación y música en un devocionario novohispano del siglo XVIII,” Cuadernos del Seminario de Música en la Nueva España y el México Independiente 10, in press.
• 3
  Sacristán Ramírez, “El entramado de la devoción,” 42-83. Sympathetic resonance is a harmonic phenomenon wherein a passive string responds to external vibrations to which it has harmonic likeness.
• 4
  This idea is based on Clifford Geertz’s definition of religion: “Religion as a Cultural System," in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (London: Fontana Press, 1993), 87-125.
• 5
  As Geertz suggests, “The world as lived and the world as imagined, fused under the agency of a single set of symbolic forms, turn to be the same world,” The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 112.

Collection in complement to Alex Dika Seggerman's Modernism on the Nile: Art in Egypt Between the Islamic and the Contemporary, The University of North Carolina Press, 2019.

My book, Modernism on the Nile: Art in Egypt between the Islamic and the Contemporary analyzes the modernist art movement that arose in Cairo and Alexandria from the late-nineteenth century through the 1960s. By incorporating the previously undervalued artists of this understudied region into the modernist canon, I challenge the prevailing understanding that modern art is largely a Euro-American phenomenon. As such, this book serves as post-colonial critique, providing new ways of understanding Egypt’s visual culture, as well as modernism, as a global phenomenon. In what follows, I introduce my reader to the problematic intellectual paradigms of modernism in art history and detail the new approach that I develop in my book for modern Egyptian art. I then analyze a selection of artworks, which are not included in the book, and present how they relate to the overarching themes detailed below. 

The paucity of knowledge about modern art produced outside of Western Europe and America prompted me to take a deep dive into the art history of modern Egypt. Over the last ten years, I have located and evaluated primary sources such as state correspondence, art criticism, and physical artworks, approaching them as part of the global phenomenon of modernism. Admittedly, studying this corpus of visual art has often proved challenging, as Egypt does not have thorough artist archives. The families of the artists analyzed in the book provided essential information and resources. 

Why focus on the Egypt’s modernist art movement? Egypt played a central role in twentieth-century networks of politics, trade, and culture. However, Anglophone scholarship has largely overlooked Egypt’s agency in the creation of modernity. As such, Egypt’s modernist art movement provides a powerful argument for the importance of Muslim networks to global modernism. To be clear, however, I am not suggesting that Egypt is more important to the creation of modernity than any other nation that Eurocentric understandings of global history have similarly ignored. Rather, my book argues that if we take diverse modernist histories more seriously, we will have a richer understanding of the visual cultures of the world we inhabit.  

Several factors came together to make Egypt a particularly vibrant site for the rise of modernism. Due in large part to the Suez Canal, which opened in 1869, Egypt’s twentieth-century economy was robust. This robust economy fostered the institutions and markets that cultivated communities of professional artists in Cairo and Alexandria. Cairo was also a capital of the Nahda, the renaissance movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries that positioned art institutions as crucial to society’s progress.1  Moreover, Egypt’s world-famous ancient art and monuments, from the Pyramids of Giza to the magnificent 1922 discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamun, gave Egypt’s artists a level of recognition abroad that artists from other non-European regions may not have had. As I demonstrate in Chapter 2 of the book in relation to the artist Mahmoud Mukhtar, this association with ancient Egypt impacted artists’ career trajectories and their aesthetics. 

As I lay out in the book’s introduction, Islam was a factor, but not the defining factor, of modernism in Egypt. Often, it is expected that art from a predominantly Muslim country will be primarily concerned with religion, but this is not the case for Egyptian art in this era. Islam played an important, but not central, role in the Egyptian modernist art movement.2 Artists neither rejected nor enshrined religion—it was just one aspect of many in their artistic lives. The majority of the artworks presented in the book are non-religious in purpose, content, and execution. Moreover, the artists that I discuss were not particularly religious and many were avowedly non-religious in their writing and artworks. Although I evaluate these artists’ incorporation of issues related to Islam, religion, or spirituality, as relevant, often they were much more concerned with other social issues, from feminism to the space race, than they were with religion. Islam was only one of the many connections that Egyptian modernist artists acknowledged in their work. 

The history of global modernity is entangled with colonial histories, which continue to inculcate the identities of colonizer and colonized. The existing methodological approaches to non-Euro-American modernist art movements risk perpetuating colonial narratives. Many scholars have rightly challenged the view of modernism as solely Euro-American. However, expanding modernism’s geography does not sufficiently change the scope of modernism or redefine what modernism means. Instead, it risks contributing an additive, alternative story that upholds the paradigm of peripheral modernity. According to this conception of global modernism, non-western actors, such as Egypt, are understood as having a less central role in the creation of modernity than Europe. Moreover, many of these non-western actors, in fact, believed that modernity originated in the West. To challenge the problematic narratives of modernity, perpetuated by both traditional and emergent approaches to modernism, I develop a new paradigm through which I analyze Egyptian modern art. I call this new approach to global modernism “constellational modernism.” 

Constellational modernism more accurately describes the movement and aesthetics of Egyptian artworks than does a vision of a generalized, hyper-connected web of contemporary globalization. My approach builds on yet differs from Jessica Winegar’s ethnography of contemporary Egyptian art and Patrick Kane’s political framework for Egyptian modern art in that my method privileges the artworks and their aesthetics.3 Furthermore, rather than simply reflecting the social or political context of Egypt, I argue that these artworks and this art history are significant for all of global modern art history. Modern Egyptian art and artists circulated in distinct constellations, which encompassed finite local and transnational relations. The artists discussed in my book actively participated in global modernism, and as such were keenly aware of the dominance of European trends on the international art market. They were cognizant both of the competing histories of the French academic style in which most were trained, and of local Egyptian, Arab, and Islamic visual traditions. Their artworks visually map out a constellation of connections to diverse visual sources: embedded in the artworks’ aesthetics, they acknowledge and/or point to these references. The Egyptian sculptor Mahmoud Mukhtar exemplifies how Cairo and Alexandria’s modern artists circulated in distinct constellations. Born in Cairo in 1891, Mukhtar studied classical Greco-Roman sculpture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Embedded into his sculptures are complex references to his Parisian training, Egyptian origins, and classical forms. 

I dubbed this phenomenon “constellational modernism” because the constellation of connections I map for each artist and in each work is made up of a series of distinct and finite points, resembling the recognizable pattern of a celestial constellation. Constellational modernism also refers to the aesthetic characteristics that these connections make—not simply to the physical locations of movement, but also the way in which these references to diverse visual sources are imaged in the artworks. My hope is that other art historians and cultural theorists apply the concept of constellational modernism to other modernisms, both as a way to rethink the canon of modernism, and also to bring the diverse stories of global modernism into conversation with each other.  

In what follows, I introduce and analyze a selection of artworks connected that are not included in the book, and elaborate on how these works relate to the overarching themes I have outlined above.

• 1
  The Nahda is a thoroughly documented movement. One of the classic texts on the subject is Albert Habib Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Since its publication in 1983, there have been many more detailed studies on the Nahda, which are addressed more thoroughly in my book.
• 2
  Following Shahab Ahmed, I conceptualize Islam in late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century Cairo and Alexandria not solely as a religion, but also as a “human and historical phenomenon.” See What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 5.
• 3
  Jessica Winegar, Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006); Patrick Kane, The Politics of Art and Culture in Modern Egypt: Aesthetics, Ideology and Nation-Building , (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013).