Dragons and Saints at V&A Museum in London

Last Monday, which was February 1st, I spent a few hours at the V&A Museum in London. That wasn't really enough to see all of the new Medieval and Renaissance galleries, but I had a plane to catch back to Amsterdam in the early evening. You will really need a whole day to study the splendid collection of textiles, paintings, sculpture, glass, metalwork, prints, manuscripts, furniture, ceramics and jewellery.


I very much like the concept of telling the story of European art and culture from AD 300–1600; from the decline of the Roman Empire to the end of the Renaissance period, by using not only strictly art pieces from those periods but also everyday objects, design objects and even pieces of building and churches. There is even one of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks to admire!

However of course I was searching for fantasy and fantastic elements in the paintings, drawings, sculptures, stained glass windows and so on. Here some photos with interesting and wonderful pieces from the collection.

St Margaret and the Dragon, about 1530-1540 (from the Church of Saint Germain, France.)
As the legend has it she made a miraculous escape from the belly of the Dragon.




St. George from a church in Ulm (Germany) about circa 1480-1490. This is a figure of St. George in limewood, and carved from one piece of wood. St George was a saint from the East, but as the result of the crusades he became popular throughout Europe. Having rescued a princess by slaying a dragon, he personified the ideals of chivalry and was often depicted with the tamed or dead beast beside him.



By the way, this Dragon doesn't really look enough Dragon -like. It is more a dog-old man figure then a danger dragon. But at the same time it is more original than the St. Margaret's Dragon.



This is an image of a Lamp of a Dragon, from Padua, around 1500.

My new digital images for my book about Betelgeuse and Mintaka

Recently I made a few new images for my story about Betelgeuse and Mintaka, the Boltzmann Dragons. I would love to share these with you and hear your comments and criticisms about them.

I am not sure if I explained the Boltzmann Brain paradox (problem) before. This concept was one of the sources/inspiration for my story about the Shepherds of Seven from Orion and the two creatures that arrived by accident on Earth, Betelgeuse and Mintaka. They are kind of dragon like creatures, but only because my imagination created them so. They are particles, fluctuations, brain-accumulations of the knowledge of the billions of years old cosmos.
The Boltzamann Brain (Boltzmann Paradox) hypothesis/idea is named after the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906) who advanced an idea that the known universe arose as a random fluctuation, similar to a process through which self-aware entities - Boltzmann brains - might arise. Such a self-aware entity may arise due only to random fluctuations out of a state of chaos.

From Wikipedia:

The concept arises from the need to explain why we observe such a large degree of organization in the universe. The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy in the universe will always increase. We may think of the most likely state of the universe as one of high entropy, closer to uniform and without order. So why is the observed entropy so low?

Boltzmann proposed that we and our observed low-entropy world are a random fluctuation in a higher-entropy universe. Even in a near-equilibrium state, there will be stochastic fluctuations in the level of entropy. The most common fluctuations will be relatively small, resulting in only small amounts of organization, while larger fluctuations and their resulting greater levels of organization will be comparatively more rare. Large fluctuations would be almost inconceivably rare, but this can be explained by the enormous size of the universe and by the idea that if we are the results of a fluctuation, there is a "selection bias": We observe this very unlikely universe because the unlikely conditions are necessary for us to be here, an expression of the anthropic principle.

This leads to the Boltzmann brain concept: If our current level of organization, having many self-aware entities, is a result of a random fluctuation, it is much less likely than a level of organization which is only just able to create a single self-aware entity. For every universe with the level of organization we see, there should be an enormous number of lone Boltzmann brains floating around in unorganized environments. This refutes the observer argument above: the organization I see is vastly more than what is required to explain my consciousness, and therefore it is highly unlikely that I am the result of a stochastic fluctuation.

The Boltzmann brains paradox is that it is more likely that a brain randomly forms out of the chaos with false memories of its life than that the universe around us would have billions of self-aware brains.

Don Page, a famous physicist, recently wrote this about the Boltzmann Problem:

"Unless our universe is decaying at an astronomical rate (i.e., on the present cosmological timescale of Giga years, rather than on the quantum recurrence timescale of googolplexes), it would apparently produce an infinite number of observers per commoving volume by thermal or vacuum fluctuations (Boltzmann brains). If the number of ordinary observers per commoving volume is finite, this scenario seems to imply zero likelihood for us to be ordinary observers and minuscule likelihoods for our actual observations.”

If that is true, it would mean that you and me, you reading this and I writing this, are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than persons with a real past and possible future (if we are lucky or unlucky enough). My and your memories and the world we think we see around us are illusions.

“Hence, our observations suggest that this scenario is incorrect and that perhaps our universe is decaying at an astronomical rate.”

In other words it means our universe will die one day.

I hope I have given you some clues about the story I am writing about the two unusual creatures, Betelgeuse and Mintaka.


Here are some new images I made. I hope you will find them enjoyable and interesting.

Graffiti in Exeter

Exeter is an old, interesting and thereby very picturesque city. It was probably somewhat in March when I discovered this Fantasy Graffiti painting at the walls of the under-street passage for bikes and pedestrians. I took some photos. Maybe I didn't know where to look but I couldn’t find a signature or a sign so I do not know the creator.









I am a fan of graffiti art; some of the wall paintings are amazing, they are really excellent. I think that this kind of art (maybe abstract art, too) could be compared to jazz music - spontaneous, improvisational and real. I would once try again to paint on a wall, this time outdoor.

My passion for painting became prominent for the first time when I was 4 years old. It was somewhere in the summer time, our apartment has just been painted; you could still smell the fresh paints on the walls. The kitchen was full of fresh fruits: lots of different berries and currents – just imagine all the pure, beautiful colours and pigments. My parents weren’t at home and our nanny went to our neighbour (no idea why). Only me and my oldest brother and of course the walls and the fruits were there. I have no idea how I convinced my brother to help me with this performance but I did. We carried the boxes with the fruits to the living room and we started to cover the walls with the colourful juice leaking out the fruits,we pushed and rubbed them against the walls. What a happening! Unfortunately I don’t remember anything about what I felt and what kind of effect had my first spontaneous artistic creation “Graffiti Indoor” on others. I have been told that my parents weren’t happy and they punished me in the traditional way: they spanked me. But even that my bottom was hurt and painful it didn’t discourage me to try other indoor walls. I did it on and off almost my whole life, by and large. It is a pity that there are no photos, no documentation of my wall paintings.

Betelgeuse and Mintaka, the Boltzmann Dragons - introduction video version II

A new version of Introduction Video "Betelgeuse and Mintaka, the Boltzmann Dragons"



I would love you to take the time to watch the new video and then the old one again and decide which version is better.

The old version:

Mintaka, Kasia and sleepless night

©kbt 2008 -mixed media

I am painting millions paintings in my brain

I don't sleep. I can't sleep.

As a substitute for a sleep I imagine that I paint and

Indeed I am painting millions paintings in my brain.

I am dreaming and Mintaka is watching over me.

My brain creates millions images and impressions in my memory

My memory is trying to remember my dreams and my visions.

My hands are drawing the encoded scraps of the past reality in my sleepless grey matter -

the wonderful past reality of those nights when I had been painting millions painting in my brain.

William Blake and his Great Red Dragons

This is inexplicable but nevertheless I am fascinated by the poetry and art of William Blake.

William Blake, the visionary, even hallucinatory English painter and poet, who lived at the dawn of the technological era (1757-1827). I think he was a better poet than a painter, but this opinion is in the eye of the beholder. Unlike most artists of his era he did not draw from life, claiming that the visions that appeared before him were clearer and more vivid than his perception of external reality. He was a happy lunatic, an fantastic artist or maybe a realistic one? Though it is hard to classify Blake’s body of work in one genre, he heavily influenced the Romantic poets with recurring themes of good and evil, heaven and hell, knowledge and innocence, and external reality versus inner. Going against common conventions of the time, Blake believed in sexual and racial equality and justice for all, rejected the Old Testament’s teachings in favour of the New, and abhorred oppression in all its forms. He focused his creative efforts beyond the five senses, for,

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.—from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Around 1805-1810, Blake was commissioned to create over a hundred paintings illustrating books from the Bible. Among these was a four-painting cycle of the Great Red Dragon (Satan) from the Book of Revelations in the Bible. The dragon is described as having seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven crowns. His tail drew one third of the stars of the sky, and threw them to the earth.

Here are the paintings from the cycle of the Great Red Dragon:

The Evolution of the Dragon, by Ellliot Smith

I did some search on Gutenberg.org about the subject fantasy art (for my book "Much Ado About Fantasy Art History) and found this scientific article (book) about dragons. The Evolution of the Dragon, by Elliot Smith (PROFESSOR OF ANATOMY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER) from 1919.
Very interesting one, maybe not for an average reader but for the more intellectual one....
If you are into ancient time, history, archaeology and anthropology maybe you will find it fascinating. Here a fragment from the article:

In the earliest records from Egypt and Babylonia it is customary to portray a king's beneficence by representing him initiating irrigation works. In course of time he came to be regarded, not merely as the giver of the water which made the desert fertile, but as himself the personification and the giver of the vital powers of water. The fertility of the land and the welfare of the people thus came to be regarded as dependent upon the king's vitality. Hence it was not illogical to kill him when his virility showed signs of failing and so imperilled the country's prosperity. But when the view developed that the dead king acquired a new grant of vitality in the other world he became the god Osiris, who was able to confer even greater boons of life-giving to the land and people than was the case before. He was the Nile, and he fertilized the land. The original dragon was a beneficent creature, the personification of water, and was identified with kings and gods.

But the enemy of Osiris became an evil dragon, and was identified with Set.

The dragon-myth, however, did not really begin to develop until an ageing king refused to be slain, and called upon the Great Mother, as the giver of life, to rejuvenate him. Her only elixir was human blood; and to obtain it she was compelled to make a human sacrifice. Her murderous act led to her being compared with and ultimately identified with a man-slaying lioness or a cobra. The story of the slaying of the dragon is a much distorted rumour of this incident; and in the process of elaboration the incidents were subjected to every kind of interpretation and also confusion with the legendary account of the conflict between Horus and Set.

When a substitute was obtained to replace the blood the slaying of a human victim was no longer logically necessary: but an explanation had to be found for the persistence of this incident in the story. Mankind (no longer a mere individual human sacrifice) had become sinful and rebellious (the act of rebellion being complaints that the king or god was growing old) and had to be destroyed as a punishment for this treason. The Great Mother continued to act as the avenger of the king or god. But the enemies of the god were also punished by Horus in the legend of Horus and Set. The two stories hence became confused the one with the other. The king Horus took the place of the Great Mother as the avenger of the gods. As she was identified with the moon, he became the Sun-god, and assumed many of the Great Mother's attributes, and also became her son. In the further development of the myth, when the Sun-god had completely usurped his mother's place, the infamy of her deeds of destruction seems to have led to her being confused with the rebellious men who were now called the followers of Set, Horus's enemy. Thus an evil dragon emerged from this blend of the attributes of the Great Mother and Set. This is the Babylonian Tiamat. From the amazingly complex jumble of this tissue of confusion all the incidents of the dragon-myth were derived.

When attributes of the Water-god or his enemy became assimilated with those of the Great Mother and the Warrior Sun-god, the animals with which these deities were identified came to be regarded individually and collectively as concrete expressions of the Water-god's powers. Thus the cow and the gazelle, the falcon and the eagle, the lion and the serpent, the fish and the crocodile became symbols of the life-giving and the life-destroying powers of water, and composite monsters or dragons were invented by combining parts of these various creatures to express the different manifestations of the vital powers of water. The process of elaboration of the attributes of these monsters led to the development of an amazingly complex myth: but the story became still further involved when the dragon's life-controlling powers became confused with man's vital spirit and identified with the good or evil genius which was regarded as the guest, welcome or unwelcome, of every individual's body, and the arbiter of his destiny. In my remarks on the ka and the fravashi I have merely hinted at the vast complexity of these elements of confusion.