mere enlightenment

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 10:30:45 -0500
art, myth, power, science

It was on the eve of 1987 when I saw the statue.

My mate and I had flown into San Francisco for winter holiday and a New Year's Eve concert. The previous day we had watched the newly released Star Trek IV. I was still pondering when & how Starfleet Academy ended up in the Bay Area.

We were walking past the fountains in the yet-unrestored Music Concourse, just outside the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. The central fountain featured a big cat. I thought it was our native mountain lion, though I later read it was supposed to be a tiger. This alone would not have been noteworthy. However, this figure was in combat with a serpent or python.

In the New World the eagle and the jaguar represented two kinds of power. The eagle's aerial vision coupled with the ferocity and speed of death from above made it a favorite in the iconography of political power. The jaguar, on the other hand, was the sign of shamanic power and magical transformations. According to legend Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec Empire, was founded on a lake island where the Nahuatl saw an eagle perched on a cactus with a snake in its talons. Today this is Mexico City. What I saw, twenty-five years ago, I read as a transposition of symbols, and the founding of a different kind of empire.

I learned the sculptor was Melvin Earl Cummings, a Berkeley professor of architecture, but never did find any sensible explanation for the Rideout Fountain. It apparently replaced Bonet's Electric Tower, the illuminated centerpiece of the 1894 Mid-Winter Fair's Grand Court, scrapped immediately thereafter.