Metallurgy and Immortality at Caṇḍi Sukuh, Central Java

My aim in this article is to establish that the relief is in fact appropriate to its context, that its meaning is rooted in an important religious and imaginative complex, and that, to an uncommon degree, the artist has succeeded in enacting in visual terms a deeply felt correspondence between metallurgy and human fate. By seizing upon the processes through which metallic substances are transformed, he has provided an equivalence in natural energies and rhythms for those spiritual transformations believed to govern the career of the soul after death. At the very outset, it is essential to understand that almost everywhere in the preindustrial world iron working was invested with an aura of danger and magic. To us now the smith appears merely as someone who performs technically neutral operations on inert matter, and this conviction makes it almost metaphysically impossible for us to recover the imaginative universe implied by the Sukuh relief. We are aware, of course, that the great empirical discoveries and inventions such as the steam engine, the clock, the pendulum, and cybernetics have structured thought and feeling by providing a new fund of analogies, homologies, and metaphors with which to construe experience. Our speech is enlivened daily by such phrases as "on track," "the swing of the pendulum," "feedback," "safety valve," "a head of steam." None of these images, however, confounds our central intellectual order, our conception of the gulf between subject and object, the natural world and the conscious mind, the supernatural and the natural. But at the heart of the technological metaphor presented by the Sukuh relief, I would argue, is the visionary claim that the operations of the smith and smelter parallel cosmic processes and that, with their ability