Theses and Dissertations at Montana State University (MSU)
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Item Locating the ancient of days: appropriation and syncretism in the development of a Byzantine christological motif(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2018) Jacobson, Kearstin Alexandra; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Regina GeeConstantinople, capital city of the Byzantine Empire established by Constantine in the fourth century, carried the economic, military, and multicultural advantages of a city that had already existed as a desirable settlement location for nearly a millennium under numerous polities and names. Strategically located on the Bosporus Strait linking the Sea of Marmara and Black Sea, thus the major Euro-Asiatic trade routes, Constantinople benefitted from its position of power as a metaphorical hinge between East and West to gather various stable iconographies and mythologies whose meanings were mutable and could be reconceptualized to fit the Empire's Christian contexts. As didactic devices for translating complicated Christian dogma to the masses became increasingly accepted and necessary in the Byzantine Empire by the second half of the sixth century, Constantinople's transcultural environment facilitated a continuous supply of simplified motifs, like the Ancient of Days used to illustrate Christological preexistence, originating from Greco-Roman, European, Near Eastern, Semite, and Asiatic cultural sources. Depicting neither God the Father nor Christ the Son, the Ancient of Days motif -- an aged man with long hair and beard -- stood for the eternal, immaterial essence of the Christian god. As the Christian god had not been witnessed in a human existence on earth, the Ancient of Days motif can be understood as the syncretic outcome of various divine, eternal, prophetic, and philosophical types familiar throughout the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world. While no single definitive visual model exists for the Ancient of Days, numerous pagan, philosophical, and monotheistic textual sources mentioning either an aged male figure with white hair and beard who imparts wisdom, an entity called the Ancient of Days, or conceptual notions of eternity, exist as further testament to a syncretic contextual basis for the Byzantine motif. Understandably few examples of the pre-Iconoclasm Ancient of Days motif are known. However, the range of format, media, and geography displayed by the Italian diptych, Constantinopolitan mosaics and icon, and Cappadocian frescoes considered here are suggestive of a much larger tradition where the simplicity of the Ancient of Days motif allowed for adaptability into socio-cultural variants across the Byzantine provinces.Item Label symbols and simulated poison bottle interaction among preschoolers(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 1971) Holt, Sonja BunkeItem Images in the labyrinth : a reading of symbol and archetype in four quartets(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2007) Berg, Wayne Carl, Jr.; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Michael SexsonSince the publication of Four Quartets as a complete poem in 1944, the question of meaning, of how to understand the poem, has remained foremost in the mind of the reader. Insight into T.S. Eliot's last major work of prose has run the gamut of interpretive (and evaluative) schools; yet, as perhaps should be the case, exact meaning eludes the critic. That this is a major work of modernism goes without saying, but the analysis of historicism is tied to one, timely dimension. As a religious poem the reverence of its lines ascends into the realms of metaphysics, but simultaneously they lack a dogma and just as easily connect the reader to the corporeal, gritty fundaments of life. A rhetorical reading resonates with the overt linguistic structures prefigured by Eliot himself, but after it is all said and done the experience remains architectural at best. The purpose and method of this thesis are interconnected. The attempt is not to assume or criticize any discipline of analysis, but rather to "care" for, or "curate" the images that Eliot has placed in this work. Through the overlay, the map if you will, of the labyrinth, the effort has been made only to suggest that meaning is a movement, like a river, developed between the poem and the reader. How or why such a relationship works is not the focus; the "focus," if that is the word to be used, is simply to cultivate an awareness of movement, and an awareness of meaning. Just as when we are lost in a maze we ask "what if," what if we were to follow this path here, where does this thread take us, and how deep?