Making Molds... and Ancient History

Winter, with regular temperatures of -22°C, is a perfect time to find Craft activities that can be done indoors. For example, mold-making! While not dealing with fire or heat directly, learning to make molds out of silicone rubber and plaster will prepare us for later when we start casting material melted in our kilns and forges...

So this past weekend a bunch of us got together to start. We looked for suitable objects to copy, using some of the old examples a few of us had created in the past, or else finding new ones. For this first session we used prefab mold kits to keep it simple.

 Although we started working with a modern material (silicone rubber), the theme of originals, copies and molds is an ancient one:

“You, Aruru, who created humanity, create now a copy of Gilgamesh, so that when these two meet they will fight between themselves and leave our city in peace.” The goddess Aruru, hearing this request, concentrated within herself, moistened her hands, and, taking some clay, formed the valiant Enkidu. The hero was born with his body covered with hair as thick as the barley of the fields."

In Silo's Universal Root Myths, there is a wonderful footnote to this text from the myth of Gilgamesh, concerning the creation of Enkidu, Gilgamesh's "twin". Silo writes:

"The poem of Gilgamesh was apparently written toward the end of the third millennium B.C.E., but based on much older material. We are led to agree with this hypothesis on the basis of the history of developments in ceramic technology. In fact, around the time that this tale was written down, history’s first potter’s wheel had already been invented in Uruk (circa 3500 b.c.e.).

"...In the poem, however, the goddess Aruru creates the man of clay using nothing more than her moistened hands. This is a detail of some importance, since one can deduce from this technical description that the myth pertains to a time before the introduction of the potter’s wheel... The Sumerian poem alludes to the creation of the hero Enkidu as a “double,” a copy of Gilgamesh, after the goddess Aruru “concentrates within herself.” It is possible that this refers to a technique used in the production of ceramic human figures involving the making of copies through the use of molds (i.e., “within herself”) based on a previously manufactured original. The fact that Enkidu is born covered with hair (“the hero was born with his body covered with hair as thick as the barley of the fields”) could refer to the visible presence of materials added to reduce plasticity (cereal cuttings, straw, and so on), which were added to the clay to prevent it from cracking, as is still done in some areas where clay is used to prepare adobe.

"All this technology corresponds to a stage previous to that of industrial ceramics and the use of the potter’s wheel. Thus, the story predates the epoch of al’Ubaid [ca. 6500 to 3800 BCE] and originates long before the appearance of the myth of Marduk, in which Marduk wishes to create man out of his blood and bones, although he later decides to do so with the blood of his enemy, Kingu. In this case, we are already in the presence of engobe, or glazed ceramics, of which there are numerous Babylonian examples from that period... In synthesis, the Sumerian myth [of Gilgamesh] presents us with the oldest example of the creation of the human being by a potter-god."

In the footnote, Silo goes on to give examples related to the Hebrew Genesis, (God's breath which animates Adam is "suggestive because the use of a mechanism for introducing air into a furnace predates the potter’s wheel") and the Mayan Popul Vuh (the gods first make the human being out of mud but it falls apart in the rain, indicating, "a pre-ceramic time of dried clay.") All wonderful stuff, and for me it's a shining example of the kinds of relations and comprehensions that could be arrived at by working in the Craft. By playing with mud and playing with fire.

Next week we'll open up our molds and do some first casts with plaster, clay, plastic resin or maybe even beeswax - eventually working our way up in temperature to lead or pewter, as the Earth tilts back and our hemisphere works its way up in temperature too.