Sumerian Ram in the Thicket (Gold Leaf, Lapis Lazuli)

Thinking Through Henri Bergson (1859-1941)’s “Creative Evolution”

• Theme: Fertility Ritual Tableau / Divine Ascent through Creative Impulse

From the perspective of Bergson’s metaphysics, the “Sumerian Ram in the Thicket” is not merely an ornate devotional object of gold and lapis, but a crystallization of élan vital—a vital impetus—that expresses the metaphysical intuition of upward life force. The artifact reveals, in stillness, a dynamic movement: a creature poised against a flowering shrub, partially ascending, partially rooted—oscillating between becoming and attachment. It offers a sculptural metaphor for the essential Bergsonian duality between mechanism and life, habit and intuition, matter and memory.

Crafted during the Early Dynastic Period of Sumer, the ram's gesture toward the shrub echoes an archetypal moment of sacred encounter with nourishment and transformation. The animal is not devouring but climbing—suggesting an effort toward transcendence rather than instinctual satisfaction. From Bergson’s view, this motion is creative evolution embodied in form: life pressing forward into unforeseeable novelty, overcoming inertia not through force, but through inventive, creative adaptation. Gold and lapis—the eternal and the celestial—are no longer luxuries; they are philosophical signifiers of endurance and visionary ascent.

Importantly, the artwork also marks a rupture in the purely utilitarian evolution of form. It represents, to use Bergson’s terms, an inversion of the order of manufacture. This is no imitation of life, but a gesture of life returning to itself in symbolic form—conscious of its own generative act. The ram is not a copy of a real ram—it is an expression of what a ram becomes when transfigured by the memory of the cosmos and the rhythm of creative life. The sacred shrub is not a plant, but a conceptual bridge between earth and sky. The gold leaf is not decor; it is duration incarnate.

In this tableau, the illusion of spatial separateness breaks down. What we observe is not a “thing,” but a metaphysical movement held in pause—a spiritual intuition of life striving through matter, captured through the only means the ancient artisan had: symbolic condensation. In its gesture, the artifact exceeds its own form. It resonates with what Bergson called “the intuition of duration”—not clock time, but the lived time of unfolding existence. Thus, this Mesopotamian treasure is not merely archaeological; it is metaphysical: a convergence of ancient ritual, sacred vitality, and the supra-intellectual impulse of creative becoming.