THE SACRAL GAME

Alexander Yakimovich


When robust guys run after a ball on the green field, and their prosaic sporting attribute turns into a shining sphere with mystic signs on its surface (such as a triangle, an eye, a star, a cross, etc.) many a sophisticatedly cynical inhabitant of our contemporary Babylonia is ready to see there a conceptual trick alias an entertainment for the mind. This is why one needs a fundamental commentary to Youri Shabelnikov’s project Esoteric Football.

Mystical experience sweeping human souls have since long ago found its way into “plays and spectacles”. The ancient Olympic games in Greece have been quite genuine sacral procedures involving priests serving to Higher Powers. The old Slavic Babki game which was a quasi-sporting exercise with specially prepared horse bones also initially belonged to shamanic performances. At the turn of the new century we cannot fail to see that artists feel strongly attired by sacral games. We descend into magic spaces to look onto mysterious objects, and we love to be fascinated by ecstatic actions of new shamans.

One of the most mystically disposed Russians writers of the past, Nikolay Gogol, has once created a whole book full of secret signs and messages addressed to the well-versed reader. This was “Dead Souls”, the monumental predicament of the coming rebirth of the Russian collective soul. The book starts its action with the symbol of the Wheel, and ends up with the symbolic race of the Russian Chariot. Most of those esoteric codes were borrowed from Plato’s Dialogs which was the favorite reading of Gogol’s Masonic friends searching for cure from our spiritual diseases. Now, the screen picture of the Chariot opens the air of a Russian Governmental channel. The TV people hardly know today what this esoteric symbol is about. On the contrary, advanced artists aim at better knowledge and understanding of the secret language elaborated by cultural tradition East and West.

Jouri Shabelnikov reinvented the football game in this perspective. Even being what it is now – a debris of the past sacral culture – this fight on the pitch still retains several residues of the former pagan “liturgy”. The game appeals to Gods who are patrons of Manhood, Victory, Success, but most of all of the mysterious Contigency.

Socer players in Shabelnikov’s paintings are clearly involved into a king of bacchanal or Gnostic act. Something much more than a sporting event is being implied. The self-abandonment and rage they demonstrate grows over profane emotions into the ecstasy of a Higher Presence. What they hit by feet or heads are more than simple balls. Exhibiting his scenes of Esoteric Football the artist puts in front of them white marble balls with secret signs written on them. They are twenty-two in number – as much as Arcans in Taro card game. Maybe those marble spheres are our questions and wishes sent to Gods, or answers arrived from worlds beyond our own. A marble sphere which is in itself a Platonic symbol of perfection, points to some Word of the sacral rite. Only a miracle of faith makes possible to stop such a “ball” by our chest, or by foot, or to send it by head into the goal without a terrible physical trauma. The American Indians who were the inventors of the initial sacral game like our football must having had deep religious concerns while prohibiting hand or arm touching ball. Upper extremities of man are more than any other member stained by murder of our fellow men and women, and harming the world around us. So, making the ball flying over the green grass football players probably help to achieve purification from the most capital sin. Redemption was and is the principal goal of any religion.