Views
Archaeologists and aesthetes are interested in the container and not in what it contains, in the pastoral scenes, the animals on the circumference and not in the milk falling directly from the udder; in the colour of the terracotta and not in the odour it can impart to that milk, the odour of aromatic plants, of smoke, or cow-dung, at random according to the cultures of fresh or rancid butter. They will admire the form of a handle, but they will studiously avoid studying the attitude of the drinking man and asking themselves why, among many peoples, it is shameful to drink while standing up.
Better still, they do not seek to know whether the man who kept the pot empty or filling it, leaving it open or carefully closing it.
They will say that these things are transient and that their reconstruction belongs to the domain of the imagination. But they will deny that they make ample use of the imagination when, in a sketch, they extrapolate the feet or neck of a vase of which they have only the bulbous part?
And, moreover, the supposedly preponderant part of that intemperate faculty could be greatly reduced if we were inclined to take the trouble to look around us. There is an infinite field of observation open to the reasonable mind; present-day humanity, whose beliefs, and even techniques regarding pottery have, on the whole, evolved so little since the world began.
For, after all, how many millions of men still believe in omens drawn from pots smashed before marriages or after drinking, empty pots, or those appearing in dreams? Solomon confined genies in vases, the Golden Legend contains stories of demons imprisoned in pots. How numerous are the spirits of Arab magic, still today called Banu Qamãqim, the "children of bottles"? How many beautiful jars of red clay, filled with inexhaustible and miracle-working water, do the monks of perpetual adoration see refilled day and night in a certain rite of Christian Africa? And each of them, for its defence, has no less than a dragon, a troop of real serpents, and a forest of century-old trees whose fearsome spirits do not permit even the breaking of a branch.