This painting is from my 1972-1980 period of spiritual development and recognized the fact that all archetypal priests, as M. Eliade, notes are wounded individuals. The wound must be a real life threatening event and results in two things. First, it allows the priest to have been at and come back from death's door. This real experience allows him/her to know the bridge between the natural and supernatural worlds of his/her culture. The second thing it does is make the priest sensitive to the human condition so that the esotericism of the archetype doesn't make him/her inaccessible to his society. The images in the painting are gleaned from several cultures but intuited. Every prophet is in some way wounded and lives on the edges of his/her society. Many artists have expressed this by picturing themselves as 'clowns' in the twentieth century.
