Observations placeholder
Hokusai -shunga
Identifier
003393
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Hokusai's mother was a Geisha. He thus knew what it meant to achieve spiritual experience via love, making love and other forms of sexual experience. These days Hokusai’s Geisha paintings tend to be viewed [in the west] as a sort of high class pornography, but this shows absolutely no understanding of what they are attempting to depict. All his paintings in this series show that spiritual experience of the highest kind – ecstasy in its true sense - is obtainable via love – love making of various sorts. He is actually depicting ‘union’ in the same way that Hindu temples often showed couples achieving union. The vastly enlarged penis is symbolically an extension of the celestial pole
The colours used here may or may not be correct, but the use of red to indicate Fire and thus union above Fire – the mystic marriage - is correct symbolically. I think the scroll also has symbolic significance.