Some Meek, Some Vicious and Sarcastic Winged Hermaphrodites, Alchemical Angels and Hermetic

Androgynes Take Some Delight in a Crumbling Ancient Symbolism, Including Vestigial Fountains

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REBIS

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The very first pages of Shola von Reinhold’s debut novel LOTE contain a reproduction of a Black winged being from the alchemical manuscript Aurora Consurgens.

 

“Traditionally, before turning iridescent, the tincture was black. One of the four fundamental colour stages of alchemy was nigredo, blackness, sometimes depicted more favourably as primordial and mystic, but more often depicted allegorically as something foul and putrefied/”

 

Throughout the book there are also winged beings, less Afrofuturist and more “Afroarcadian” beings called Luxuries:

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“Where we consider angels to be spiritual messengers, we might well think of the Luxuries as sensory ones, communicating with the aesthetic aspects of the soul. They are described as having skin like black marble and parti-coloured wings that far outstrip any peacock. They wear immensely gaudy-sounding robes (not unappealing) and outrageous jewel-encrusted slippers (tremendously appealing).”

 

Part of an ongoing construction of an Afroarcadian landscape that features in her writing, illustration, painting and sound, the works in Von Reinhold’s first exhibition, REBIS, are a configuration of paintings, illustrations and painted collage, that invoke alchemical illuminations, folklore, mystical scholars, modernist literature, ancient Apulian potsherds and Afrofuturism. REBIS, (which refers to the, often winged, figure of the Hermetic Androgyne or Divine Hermaphrodite) attends to what has been a historically misunderstood site of obsession, obscurement, sexualisation and desexualisation, and has been a personal, not unmessy, site of (to borrow from Munoz) (dis)identification for many.

 

More commonly, these figures are described away as being solely abstract symbols for concepts like duality, intellectual balance or elemental, chemical harmony. These figures are indeed used to represent such ideas but not only and not all the time; in fact it doesn’t take long before we can begin to imagine how they could covertly smuggle transsexuality (or more to the point a web of things that do and don’t map onto it) through such concepts and how concepts thus themselves disseminate or stand in for conceptions of transness. REBIS thus looks at the Rebis both as a literal, material being as much as a fantastical one. With its arcadian landscapes and historical imaginings, one might be tempted to cite Sadiaya Hartman’s ‘critical fabulation’, a term often brought up to aspects of the artist’s first novel, and there is a relation, but these baroque creatures, gentle, winged, are a departure from Hartmanian fabulation.

 

“Opal waited as the Natural Philosopher visited the lavatory. By the wall nearest her was a kind of vitrine. It looked very old. Attached to it by a string threaded through a drilled hole was a grey metal coin, maybe pewter, its faces rubbed down and indeterminate. She dropped it in the slot and a light came on in the box.

 

“The most recent are disappointments…works of…clearly a…tawdry period of the rebis cults…”

 

“But ma’am, would you…illuminations are…”

 

“Vulgarities…of the same ilk as that…”

 

The machine clanked and a curtain curtain jerked open. A dirge dribbled from some interior music box - tuneless bells with many gaps entirely in whatever tune was meant to play.

 

But what Grotto saw when the curtain opened unsettled her.

A glittering diorama – an artificial pastoral – it literally, materially, twinkled – green velveted hills, studded all over with flecks and chips of crystal.

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Or perhaps it settled, not unsettled, something inside her. Something inside her became motionless as it moved.

It moved – the painted sky – like those in opera – like those painted backdrops all over the world - moved and became cloud-covered – grey clouds shimmering beneath dusty crystal beads, and then a wooded scene framed in mountains…the sky receded and caves appeared. Visible was a cliff of caves…also studded with crystals or tiny seed shells, whorled grottos…one glimpsed a kind of resin in a cave mouth: pseudo-water gleamed. Then the light in the box flickered and went off. A green light came on. From one grotto, by a concealed mechanical string or track, emerged a waxen figurine. where the wax had been moulded into breast, the pigmentation had, mysteriously, all but turned transparent, but for the areola – green. Verdigris.

“Oh but the grande finale”…the Natural Philosopher had returned. Another strange chime gave ous and from between the figures legs protruded a violet-tipped priapus.

This made the professor laugh.

It was supposed, she thought, to be amusing, pornographic perhaps, lewd…but she thought the whole thing…She recalled, vividly, the feeling she’d had in the borough: the roofs, the green breath driven up by the rain.”

From Grotto, a forthcoming novel, by Shola von Reinhold

 

SHOLA VON REINHOLD is a Scottish writer. Her debut novel, LOTE (2020) won the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the James Tait Memorial Prize. Von Reinhold was briefly a princess, having married into a minor branch of the Grimaldi family at the age of 17. She divorced her husband after discovering anarcho-communism.