Psalm 100:8
hack away
In the morning I put to death all the wicked of the land: that I might cut off all the workers of iniquity from the city of the Lord. (Psalm 100:8 DR)
When I was in my early 20’s I made a terrible mistake that I still have great shame over to this day.
I bleached the tips of my hair.
This egregious decision was mercifully short-lived, and though I initially liked the look (*shudder*), I soon realized that it’s a look that only remains a look if one continually maintains it, which I (also mercifully) was not willing to do.
The dilemma, of course, was that I couldn’t just un-bleach it, and while I wasn’t opposed to shaving my head completely, it was the middle of winter and I was—to be fair— also kind of lazy about those kinds of things. So the only thing to be done was to let the bleached hair grow out long enough alongside all my other hair until it was long enough to cut, what a blessed day.
In the final verse of the Psalm the Psalmist recapitulates the arc of this prayer; in the first verse he would sing of God’s mercy and judgment, which St. Augustine understood as being seasons of God’s dealing with man. Now in the final verse the judgment has come in the morning. St. Augustine finds an obscurity here— how are the wicked in the city of the Lord?
It’s because the night which precedes the morning of judgment is the season of mercy:
He at present spares, He will then judge. But when will He judge? When night shall have passed away. For this reason He has said: In the morning… Why does He spare them until the dawn? Because it was night… Because it was the season for mercy: He was merciful, while the hearts of men were hidden. You see some one living ill; you endure him: for you know not of what sort he will prove to be; since it is night; whether he who today lives ill, tomorrow may live well; and whether he who today lives well, tomorrow may be wicked. For it is night, and God endures all men, since He is of long-suffering: He endures them, that sinners may be converted unto Him. But they who shall not have reformed themselves in that season of mercy, shall be slain. (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 100, 12.)
I perceive also an eschatological import to this passage, in that the judgment at the end of time is the final separation of the righteous from the unrighteous, the concluding of the season of mercy. The image of the wicked being put to death and driven from the city of the Lord is well captured in the Apocalypse:
These shall fight with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them, because he is Lord of lords, and King of kings, and they that are with him are called, and elect, and faithful. (Apocalypse 17:14 DR)
As long as we still have breath, the season of mercy endures, but will not last forever:
But now while it is the time of mercy, let them hear Him. Everywhere He cries out by the Law, by the Prophets, by the Psalms, by the Epistles, by the Gospels: see that He is not silent; that He spares; that He grants mercy; but beware, for the judgment will come. (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 100, 12.)
I found this incredible image from an anonymous Beatus Apocalypse manuscript. I thought that it would perfectly encapsulate the essence of this verse, both in terms of St. Augustine’s commentary but also in terms of the eschatological import.
I cut out the various characters and appendages in Photoshop and had to do a fair amount of Context Aware Fill and Clone Stamping to reconstitute the images that were obscured. I separated them out into separate files to make them easier to deal with in After Effects.
Once in After Effects I used the Puppet Tool on the Lamb character, once again linking the pins to Nulls using PuppetTools 3. The interesting thing about doing this is that if you link one Null to another (as if you were chaining an IK rig), the rotation of the parent Null will also affect the movement of the child Null, which can help create more natural movements with the Puppet Tool. I then used some simple animation to animate the hacking motion.
The other animation was some simply quasi-walking animations with the attackers, which was basically just some Hold keyframes on position and rotation. I then spent an inordinate amount of time getting the head animation just right, so that it had good arc and then enough weight to feel like gravity was affecting it. I had the pile of bodies at the feet of the Lamb not only as a symbolic image, but also because it gave me a way to have the body and head fall without needing to animate them off screen or having to create a cumulative effect that would be more difficult to loop. (If you’ve ever chopped wood in Skyrim, you know what I’m talking about.
Enjoy.
In the morning I put to death all the wicked of the land:
that I might cut off all the workers of iniquity from the city of the Lord.
(Psalm 100:8 DR)
View a higher quality version of this gif here: