Observations placeholder
Hokusai - shunga
Identifier
003392
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Hokusai's mother was a Geisha. He thus knew what it meant to achieve spiritual experience via love, making love and other forms of sexual experience. These days Hokusai’s Geisha paintings tend to be viewed [in the west] as a sort of high class pornography, but this shows absolutely no understanding of what they are attempting to depict. All his paintings in this series show that spiritual experience of the highest kind – ecstasy in its true sense - is obtainable via love – love making of various sorts. He is actually depicting ‘union’ in the same way that Hindu temples often showed couples achieving union. The vastly enlarged penis is symbolically an extension of the celestial pole.
Symbolically Hokusai shows the matrix, the water level and, although the colours are faded in this print I think the faded orange cloth is intended to be the red Fire level. The Air level would have been coloured pink and the Aether level white - which is the colour of their bodies and thus symbolically [if this depicts 'union' ] correct.
A description of the experience
The source of the experience
HokusaiConcepts, symbols and science items
Symbols
AetherAir
Celestial pole
Comb
Darkness and Light
Earth
Fire
Matrix, the
Nakedness
Red
Water