Side Trips: Hell

I was a lost soul when I left the Army. Not really. Actually, I felt freer than I ever felt in my life--and would never feel so free again until I quit my last job after 13 years, turned down a great follow-up opportunity, and stopped looking for work.

But I did have to decide what to do with my life after I left the Army. For a brief time, I thought that would be art, and specifically sculpture. That was in no small part to a bronze-casting class I took at one of our nation's finest institutions of higher learning, West Valley College (no sarcasm intended--I learned more, faster, and more comprehensively at WVC than I did at the supposedly #1 public four-year college in the US).

This is where I was exposed to the works of Auguste Rodin, and particularly the massive effort that went into the lost wax casting of The Gates of Hell. Cast for the Musée Rodin in 1917, the sculpture contains scenes inspired by Dante Aligheri's Inferno. It was never completed in Rodin's lifetime, but contains well-known studies that would become more famous stand-alone pieces, such as The Thinker, The Kiss, and the Three Shades.

I stood before the Gates of Hell. To no one's surprise.

The Gates in their full tourist-free glory, courtesy of Le Musée Rodin.

A lifetime of preparation went into my visit.

Larger representations of The Thinker and the Three Shades can be seen in Le Musée Rodin's gardens, but the main museum is where you will find both treasures and oddities--including the little nasty below. Entitled "The Succubus," it denotes a female demon that conjugally visits men in their sleep, stealing their sperm for later delivery in their male form, the Incubus.

"The Succubus"

Succubi appear in a variety of religious and cultural contexts throughout history (think Lillith) and have even been used as the explanation for phenomena such as wet dreams and sleep paralysis. I had visited another cast of the Gates at a private university in Palo Alto (good taste prevents me from naming it) but was unprepared for the amount of erotic art that Rodin and his workshop produced. In this respect, the Succubus seems to lie at the intersection of the master's interests in sex and damnation.