Demian: The Heraldic Bird

First Place: Create at Your Library 2006
Silver Key Recipient: 2007 Scholastic Art Awards

Akjnfkkkfeathers.
__________________________


Major references to the bird from the coat of arms in Demian by Herman Hesse
Please note that name of the character Demian is not supposed to mean ‘devil’ ‘demon’ or anything with a negative connotation. He’s a good guy.

P. 22 “ ‘Oh, over there?’ (Demian) said and smiled. ‘I know the house. There’s something odd above the doorway—It interested me at once.’ I didn’t know offhand what he meant and was astonished that he apparently knew our house better than I did myself. The keystone of the arch above the doorway bore no doubt a kind of coat of arms but it had worn off with time and had frequently been painted over. As far as I knew it had nothing to do with us and our family. ‘I don’t know anything about it’ I said shyly. ‘It’s a bird or something like that and must be quite old. The house is supposed to have been part of the monastery at one point.’ ‘That’s quite possible.’ He nodded. ‘Take a good look at it sometime! Such things can be quite interesting. I believe it’s a sparrow hawk.’”

P.42 “As I close my eyes to recollect I can see (Demian’s) image rise up: where was that? Yes, I have it now: in the little alley before our house. One day I saw him standing there, notebook in hand, sketching. He was drawing the old coat of arms with the bird above our entrance…”

P. 75-77 “That night I dreamed of Demian and the coat of arms. It kept changing continuously. Demian held it in his hand, often it was diminutive and gray, often powerful and varicolored, but he explained to me that it was always one and the same thing. In the end he obliged me to eat the coat of arms! When I had swallowed it, I felt to my horror that the heraldic bird was coming to life inside me, and had begun to swell up and devour me from within. Deathly afraid I started up in bed, awoke….”
“I set about painting a fresh picture of the heraldic bird. I could not remember distinctly what it looked like and certain details, as I knew, could not be made out even from close up, because the thing was old and had often been painted over. The bird stood or perched on something, perhaps a flower or a basket or a nest, or on a treetop. I couldn’t trouble myself over this detail and began with what I could visualize clearly. Out of an indistinct need I at once began to employ loud colors, painting the bird’s head a golden yellow. Whenever the mood took me, I worked on the picture, bringing it to completion in several days.
Now it represented a bird of prey with a proud aquiline sparrow hawk’s head, half its body stuck in some dark globe out of which it was struggling to free itself as though from a giant egg—all of this against a sky-blue background. As I continued to scrutinize the sheet it looked to me more and more like the many-colored coat of arms that had occurred to me in my dream….”
“I decided… to send (Demian) the painting of the sparrow hawk, even if it would never reach him. I added no message, not even my name, carefully trimmed the edges and wrote my friend’s former address on it. Then I mailed it.

P.78 (Beginning of chapter five, entitled “The Bird Fights Its Way Out of the Egg”) “My painting was on it’s way searching for my friend…” “Playing with the note I unfolded it… one word stopped me cold; in panic I read on while cold fear contracted my heart: ‘The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy the world. The bird flies to God. That God’s name is Abraxas.’
After reading over these lines a number of times, I sank into a deep reverie. There could be no doubt about it, this was Demian’s reply. No one else could know about my painting. He had grasped its meaning and was helping me to interpret it. But how did all of this fit together? And—this oppressed me most of all—what did Abraxas signify? I had never heard nor read the word. ‘That God’s name is Abraxas’”

P. 121-23 “(The old maid) left me alone in the hallway. I looked around and at once was swept into the middle of my dream. High up on the dark wood-paneled wall, above a door, hung a familiar painting, my bird with the golden-yellow sparrow hawk’s head, clambering out of the terrestrial shell. Deeply moved, I stood there motionless—I felt joy and pain as though this moment everything I had done and experienced returned to me in the form of reply and fulfillment…” “With tears in my eyes I stared at my picture and read within myself. Then I lowered my eyes: beneath the painting stood a tall woman in a dark dress. It was she.” “She pointed up the my painting. ‘You never made (Demian) happier than with this picture,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘And me, too. We were waiting for you and when the painting came we knew that you were on your way…’” “ ‘It is always difficult to be born. You know the chick does not find it easy to break his way out of the shell. Think back and ask yourself: was the way all that difficult? Was it only difficult? Wasn’t it beautiful too? Can you think of a more beautiful and easier way?’”

P. 134 “I half walked, half ran from the house and the town, toward the mountains. The fine rain slanted into my face, low clouds swept by as though weighed down with fear. Near the ground there was hardly a breath of air but in the higher altitudes a storm seemed to rage. Several times the lurid sun broke briefly through the harsh rifts in the steel-gray clouds.
Then a loose, yellow cloud swept across the sky, collided with the other, gray bank of cloud. In a few seconds the wind had fashioned a shape out of this yellow and blue-gray mass, a gigantic bird that tore itself free of the steel-blue chaos and flew off into the sky with a great beating of wings. Then the storm became audible and rain rattled down mixed with hail. A brief, terrifying roar of thunder cracked across the rain-lashed landscape…”

P. 135 “ ‘Help yourself, Sinclair, please. I don’t believe you saw the bird by chance.’
‘By chance? Does one get to see such things by chance?’
‘Quite right. No, one doesn’t. The bird has a significance. Do you know what?’
‘No, only I feel that it signifies some shattering event, a move on the part of destiny. I believe that it concerns all of us.’”

__________________________
XD You don’t really have to read that. It was more for my reference in drawing this.
Other References: -Wikipedia article on sparrow hawks
__________________________
EXPLANATION:
Emil’s painting of the heraldic bird is a turning point in his spiritual journey toward himself, his daemon. It is Demian, representing his inner self, who first notices the bird as Emil’s hidden potential, obscured under the paint at his home. The sharp, childhood contrast between the “world of light” and the “world of darkness” of his home is represented by the egg, which takes the shape of the world. To “be born” Emil must break with his simplistic past, and struggle to find his true self, and be led to the source, Abraxas, and later Frau Eva. Demian, in a dream, bids him to eat the coat of arms, to free the bird he must take it inside of him. He must break free from the world of black and white into a rich vision filled with an entire spectrum of color, of ideas and philosophies. When he does break free of the world, he sees that light and darkness can intertwine into something beautiful in his new vision. When he sees the bird again just before the world war, it signifies that all of humanity is preparing to break from their shells and join the new age.
__________________________
Well, it was this or write a full-blown essay on it. I picked the picture XD. Yay Mr. Feld!

I tried out some new photoshop tricks on this one, namely unsharp mask, channel selections, transparency lock, spherize, made my own brush and probably something I’m forgetting. I’m quite pleased with the result.

Photoshop CS + Tablet

Concept © Herman Hesse
Arts © S. Morrissey 2006