A bog body is the general term for bodies excavated from peat bogs across northern Europe. Many bog bodies are from B.C. periods and are thought to have been in a position of noble standing, such as an ancient chief or “king” [Fischer 2007]. In one instance, to overcome difficult circumstances, such as a famine, a king was killed by his subjects and his body buried in a bog and offered to a goddess [Joy 2009]. This was because the king was married to the goddess of fertility, and the famine was thought to be the result of the goddess's displeasure due to the king's bad behavior. Therefore, to appease the goddess and to pray for a good harvest, the king was sacrificed to the goddess [Kelly 2006]. A wooden stick figure called a pole god was also excavated from the bog.
We found the logical structure of a “Traumatic structure”, specifically “Natural Born Intelligence (NBI)”, in the meaning of a bog body, which shows the knowledge and intelligence used by ancient people to overcome their current situation, or in other words, creativity. A traumatic structure is a logical structure in which there is a positive antinomy in which both A and B are true and a negative antinomy in which neither A nor B are true at the same time, thereby making both outside the antinomy [Gunji, 2019, Gunji & Nakamura 2022]. This structure can be demonstrated by the spatial concept found in old Japanese paintings, such as in many Rimpa paintings. Rimpa depict seemingly childish mountain ranges as a series of semicircles that resemble a graphic plane. Nakamura and Gunji named the flat plane-like representation of the mountains the “Kakiwari” structure, after the name for a stage backdrop in Japanese [Nakamura & Gunji 2018, Nakamura 2021]. A Kakiwari is a painting of a close-up view and a distant view on a wooden board and is therefore a positive antinomy of both, but at the same time, by invalidating the full use of metric space, it negates the meaning of the concepts of close-up and distant views, thereby constructing a negative antinomy. This is the traumatic structure.
The bog body belongs to a king, who mediates between the human world and the world of the gods and is therefore a positive antinomy between the two, but in the event of a famine, he is killed and negated, forming a negative antinomy between the two. This is a way of accessing an outside world that is different from the world of the gods we normally think of and of stopping the famine. It is therefore a traumatic structure, and by developing it as a Kakiwari, it can be implemented as a pictorial expression.
We also went to the discovery site of the Tollund man, a typical bog body, and based on the landscape we attempted to implement this model of creativity by developing the negative antinomy into artwork. Nakamura painted “Body as Anti-Anthropomorphic Landscape,” a series of paintings in which she found a Kakiwari structure in the landscape around the bog. Gunji created an installation artwork using bog plants and his body.
