Arthur Gugick, 1960-2019

Hi all, I know this blog has been dormant for a long time, but I just saw a notice on Facebook that Arthur Gugick died in a car crash a few days ago. Arthur was a father and math teacher and, the reason I'm noting him here, an AFOL. You may remember him primarily for microscale recreations of world architectural landmarks, also amazing mosaics, along with other MOCs that you can see in his Flickr stream. I've featured his work here on multiple occasions, and indeed some of his last creations were ones that would have gone here as well. For instance, he said his Siem Reap was not a specific replica, but rather a general impression based on his memories. Siem Reap is the home to Angkor Wat, and many other temples and other ruins from the Khmer empire - this MOC is a microscale .

Holi

If you use Google, you probably know that today is the Hindu festival of Holi. This is a spring festival celebrated in India and Nepal, noting the end of winter and the triumph of good over evil, when Vishnu defeated Holika to save Prahlada from being burned. It's a time of renewal, of repaying and forgiving debts, and prayers for destruction of inner darkness. It's become known in the west, though, because after these rituals the people take to the streets to party, and a big part of the celebration is an explosion of color, with people throwing colored powder on each other, or dowsing others with squirt-guns full of colorful dyes, creating great pictures or video that get splashed (see what I did there) across the news around the world. Here we see this depicted in LEGO form by Youmi, Itzlar Chamorro Jorganes, and Marquess Kilian Beck.

Pura Tanah Lot

Tanah Lot means 'Land in the Sea' - this rocky outcrop on the coast of Bali is cut off from the main land at high tide, and accessible by foot at low tide. During the 15th century, the traveling Hindu priest Nirartha rested at this spot, and was inspired by the beautiful location to found a shrine to worship the local sea gods. This recreation of Pura Tanah Lot is found in Legoland Malaysia.

Durga Puja

Durga Puja is an annual fall six day festival by Hindus, particularly in eastern India and Bangladesh, celebrating the visit of the goddess Durga and her children, before returning again to the Himalayas to be with her husband Shiva. One of the traditions is the building of Pandals, temporary structures housing an idol of the goddess, essentially temporary temples. People visit these in a very festive atmosphere, also a time for food, music and dancing. The Pandals are often fancifully decorated, and sometimes are based around themes, and can be a year in the planning, only to be torn down after the festival is over. It sort of reminds me of some of the elaborate floats in the Rose Parade in the US. A couple of years ago, West Bengal was home to a LEGO themed Pandal. Sadly, it's actually built of wood, not LEGO.

Kali

R.Goff1 made this rendition of Kali.

Tiny little ecumenical town

Jennifer Heaton and Nathan Stohlmann recently put on a micropolis display at a local library. The reason to note it here is that they included several religious structures. My favorite is Jennifer's Hindu temple, with the riot of color reflective of many real temples, but we also see a mosque, a Buddhist temple, a traditional cathedral, and a synagogue. Thanks, Peter, for the tip, and for the correction.

Thuggee cult

Following down the trail of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom a bit more, the main antagonist, Mola Ram, and his henchmen are portrayed as adherents to the Thuggee cult. The Thuggees, or thugs for short (that's the origin of that term), were a brotherhood of thieves and assassins in India from the 14th to the 19th century. At least some of them had a religious conviction in addition to their motivation to kill and steal (or perhaps it is possible that they used a religious story to cover over their baser motivations). They believed they were the offspring of Kali, created out of the sweat of her battle with the demon Raktavija. In their view, their victims were human sacrifices to Kali. This is complicated by the fact that very few Hindus, indeed very few devotees of Kali, were Thuggees, and also that not all Thuggees were even Hindu (some were Muslim). There also appears to be some claim that the whole association of Thuggee crime with Hinduism in any form was more of an invention of the colonial British than rooted in fact.

Here's a great depiction of the Temple of Doom by Nick Nitro Brick. There's Kali again in the backdrop. I should also note that the Thuggees of the movie were a highly fictionalized version of the real assassins. The Temple of Doom was banned in India for a time as being an offensive depiction of India and Hinduism.

Temple of Doom

BTW, in the movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, that statue behind Mola Ram is supposed to be Kali (here the emphasis is on her as a goddess of death).


So Kali appears in several LEGO creations based on this movie, such as this by Tim Fegan.


Here by 2 Much Caffeine.


And this by Indyman09.


The official LEGO set 7199 avoids religious imagery by only showing that skull at Kali's feet in the movie.

Kali

Kali (here as a cube dude by Bhanabrix) is the consort of Shiva and is associated with time, change and death. She is often depicted by Hindus as dark and violent, but conversely she is seen as the annihilator of evil. She is also called the Bhavatārini, or redeemer of the universe, and is also seen as a benevolent mother figure.

Nataraja

In Hinduism, three of the most important figures are Brahmā the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Śhiva the destroyer. In destroying the old to make way for the new, Śhiva takes on the form of Nataraja (here in LEGO by Machetero 9), the cosmic dancer. This image is common in Hindu art and is uses in sculpture or relief form in many temples.

Angkor Wat

One of the exiting things to me about the opening of the new Legoland Malaysia is that it includes a lot of great displays of important sites - and for this blog I'm focusing on the religiously significant sites - from Asia. So this means we've got new miniland structures from Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist traditions. Angkor Wat was originally built as a Hindu temple in what is now Cambodia, but later was rededicated as a Buddhist site.

World Turtle

Various ancient cosmologies held that the world rests on the back of a turtle, or on an elephant, or is perhaps contained in the shell of a turtle (with the earth being the lower shell and the sky the upper shell. Some westerners mixed these myths together to say that Hindus believe that the earth rests on four elephants who stand on the back of a giant turtle, and this was repeated by Bertrand Russel. This doesn't really fit Hindu myths, but there is a story where the gods and demons were churning the ocean of the milky way with a mountain that started sinking, so Vishnu came in the form of a tortoise and supported the mountain on his back. Even though a corruption of the ancient myths, this elephants and tortoise picture is a potent one (and I assumed it came from actual ancient myths), and it shows up in the Discworld novels, as shown here by zgrredek.

Hindu temple

Anu Pehrson presented this gorgeous Hindu temple at BrickCon this year, where she appropriately won 'Best Architectural Style'. She explains the details:

This is an Ancient Temple from India. This is the Nagara style of Architecture which was fully developed in the 10th century. Such Temples exist till date and are very much in use as a place of worship and pilgrimage. In Hinduism the devotee offers flowers and fruit to the 'deity' as a form of worship. Therefore we always see stalls selling garlands, flowers and fruit outside a temple. A visit to the Temple is not a sombre event, and could be and evening outing for the family or a 'picnic' Therefore one finds a 'fair' like atmosphere around the entrance.

Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat is surely the most recognizable site in Cambodia. It was first built as a Hindu temple over 800 years ago, and was later rededicated as a Buddhist temple. Here Arthur Gugick gives us a LEGO rendition.

Ahimsa

Ahimsa is the principle of doing no harm, and is important in several religions centered around India - Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. It was preached by Gautama Buddha, leads many to vegetarianism and is tied to the idea of Karma. Jains take this to the greatest lengths, going out of their way to avoid harming even small insects. Today is the 140th birthday of Mohandas K. Gandhi, here depicted in minifig form by Andrew Becraft, perhaps the most well-known proponent of ahimsa. He took this concept from religion and philosophy and applied it to political action in his resistance to British rule. He was also a great influence on Martin Luther King Jr., though Dr. King found the philosophical grounding for his non-violence in Christian teachings.

Eclipse

Today a solar eclipse will be seen across large parts of India and China. Eclipses have had a long history history in relgion. Cultures that worshiped a sun god might see an eclipse as a particularly ominous occasion. Even today, some in India are concerned about ill omens associated with this day, as one of the gods of the Hindu pantheon, Surya, is a sun diety. In Hindu mythology, an eclipse occurs when two demons swallow the sun. Pregnant women should avoid going outdoors to protect their children, while others partake in ritual prayers and bathing.

Just to note other religious ties to eclipses, in one of the ten plagues described in Exodus, God causes darkness to fall across Egypt, and in the story of the crucifixion of Christ the sky turns black. Some have pointed to eclipses as natural explanations of these phenomena.



Here is a motorized LEGO Orrery built by George Moody and his son. An orrery is a model of the solar system or part of the solar system. Follow the link to see a movie on Moody's site showing the relative motions of the earth, sun and moon. In the picture above we see them in their relative positions for a solar eclipse.

I could, by the way, have used this same model to illustrate a different topic relevant to this blog. The Copernican revolution in understanding the solar system was very tied in to the whole science/religion debate. Perhaps I'll go into that in another blog post.

Angkor Wat

Piece of Peace is a display designed by LEGO Master Builder Kazuyoshi Naoe that recreates a number of UNESCO World Heritage sites in LEGO form. This display has been traveling around Japan (and elsewhere?) for the past several years. A great number of models depict religiously significant sites, and I'm going to try to highlight each of these. Angkor Wat was built as a Hindu temple at the direction of Suryavarman II, king of the Khmer Empire (centered in what is now Cambodia), in the 12th century. The design of the temple was meant to resemble Mount Meru, essentially the Hindu equivalent of Mount Olympus. Two centuries later, a new king, Srindravarman, converted the empire over to his own religion, Buddhism, and the temple was rededicated to this purpose. Today Angkor Wat is still revered by Cambodian Buddhists and has become a symbol of Cambodia. Photo credit goes to Claudia~~~~.



Hinduism Buddhism PieceofPeace Architecture OfficialDisplay

Ganesh

Ganesh is one of the major deities of the Hindu pantheon. His image is found throughout Indian art and even has appeared on the Simpsons a few times (Apu has a statue of Ganesh in the Kwik-E-Mart that Homer offered a peanut, plus the Simpson children once dressed up as Ganesh). According to the Wikipedia entry, he is the Lord of Beginnings and Lord of Obstacles, patron of arts and sciences, and the deva of intellect and wisdom. Moose Greebles made a LEGO version of Ganesh for a History of Non-Western Art class.



Thanks to Lt. Col. Thorin for the heads-up on this, and a reminder to anyone to let me know of relevant LEGO creations you see out there. Just drop me a note at bricktalesATgmailDOTcom. Thanks!

Hinduism

There aren't a lot of MOCs out there related to Hinduism, which is probably a reflection of the fact that there is not a large component of the community in those parts of the world where Hinduism is prominent (e.g. only one person has ever posted in lugnet.loc.india). Jhassett did make this South Asian Religion set as kind of a fake LEGO set for his brother, who was studying Hinduism.



This set features three Hindu deities--Shiva, Rama and Hanuman--and two devout characters, a swami and a snake-charmer (while snake charmers now may be more street performers, at one point they were considered to be holy men).

I'd love to feature more LEGO creations from Eastern traditions, but these are harder to find. So if you know of any, please drop me a line at bricktalesATgmailDOTcom.