Most tourists visit the 1st gallery (8) in a counterclockwise direction because the best-known murals and myths are concentrated on the south side of the temple – "The Battle of Kurukshetra," "The Procession of Suryavarman I's Army," "The Heavens and Hells" and "The Churning of the Ocean of Milk." These are followed by some crudely carved, formulaic murals thought to date from the 16th Century which discourage many from persisting to the two galleries bordering the northwest corner. The 12th Century sculptors appear to have worked from the western entrance towards both the north and south, so these are among the most dynamic and vigorously carved murals of the entire 1st gallery. The one on the northern west face, the "Battle of Lanka," the climax of the Ramayana, is a clear pendant to the "Battle of Kurukshetra," the climax of the Mahabharata, to its immediate south across the 3rd west gopura. This photo shows a detail from the western mural on the temple’s north face, "The Battle Between the Devas and Asuras" for control of the "Three Worlds," the equivalent in Hindu mythology of the Gigantomachy in Greek or Satan’s assault on Paradise in Milton's Paradise Lost. It depicts the brutality of battle candidly but without judgment as unavoidable – similar to the Iliad, the epic of another warrior society sharing a feudal, militaristic ethic. The mural depicts with unsparing frankness but respect the terrible intimacy of hand-to-hand combat joining opponents in a moment when the only certainty is that one must kill the other.    

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In contrast with the narrative historical and mythological murals surrounding the 1st gallery, the 2nd gallery (6) and terrace (5) are usually characterized as austere and penitential. Their sole decoration consists of 1024 bas relief of apsaras or "celestial nymphs. (It is probably not fortuitous that this recent census equals 2¹⁰, though whether this should be attributed to numerology on the part of Angkor Wat’s builders or the expectations of those tasked with this tedious inventory is unclear.) Apsaras may seem an odd choice for renouncing the scopophilia of the 1st terrace since their aesthetic charms supposedly impart a spiritual bliss only hinted at by their voluptuousness. The 2nd terrace therefore should not be conceived as a place of deprivation but a higher level of pleasure above the carnal. 

Apsaras are believed to be derived from animist nature spirits, not denizens of the element of earth (dryads) or water (naiads) but air, similar to the aurai in distantly related Greek mythology. As spirits of the wind, the Khmer associated them both with music and dance, especially from an unknown source, e.g. a breeze rustling through the leaves swaying the trees or the moaning of an Aeolian harp. When Hinduism supplanted animism in Southeast Asia, apsaras were assimilated into it, becoming one of the most common subjects of Khmer art. In the Hindu division of the world into trailokyas or three realms, apsaras hover above the gravity-bound world, and the chariots of victorious champions of divine writ, like Arjuna or Rama, similar to the "winged victories” or nikes with their tiny but exquisite temple on the Acropolis. 

In Buddhism's translation of Hinduism’s tripartite division of the physical world into states of consciousness (by definition, illusory or maya,) apsaras inhabit a realm above even the devas or gods, who are still mired in the kamadhatu or “desire worlds,” possessing material bodies and seeking insatiably for external (cataleptic) pleasures. In contrast, despite their seductive depiction at Angkor Wat, Buddhist apsaras correspond with entities of the rupadhatu or "form worlds," who while still occupying space and time, find delight solely in their own radiance. Since they retain dimension or "territoriality" and experience emotion (albeit only bliss,) they have yet to attain the more elevated state referred to as “no taste” - the unconditioned, indifferent consciousness of the arupadhatu or "formless realms," the final steps towards nirvana, the extinguishing of consciousness itself. 

Apsaras’ charms take on a different light in Vedic tradition, where they were the wives of half-animal, half-human nature spirits, gandharvas, the court musicians of the gods, whom they accompanied with dance. Their performance was no doubt made more intoxicating by their husband’s role as shamans responsible for distilling the elixir of immortality, amrta/ amrita  (Sans.> immortal,) – or at least its feeling. The identity of soma has understandably attracted considerable attention among Indologists and seekers after “expanded consciousness.” Leading candidates include entheogens and hallucinogens, specifically sacrostemma acidum, indigenous to the Himalayas, as well as “performance-enhancing” drugs like ephedra sinica, aka “Mormon Tea,” a precursor to methamphetamines. As with so much else, there is no official record of the Khmer using soma or an equivalent – and all we have are official records. Still apsaras’ association with soma in Vedic lore suggests, they may have had a pharmacological basis beyond normal human wish-fulfillment displaced onto the immortals.  

Apsaras, specifically in the form of the Apsara Dance, continue to play a central role in Cambodian cultural identify. Jayavarman VII is reputed to have employed (or enslaved) 3000 dancers at his court, however, there is no unbroken chain of transmission from these to the dances performed today which were invented only in the 19th and 20th Centuries with royal patronage. In possibly a  unique example of the preservation of an ephemeral art form by one of the most enduring, over 1500 hand gestures (Sans. > mudra, Kh. > kbachs,) have been recorded and cataloged from apsaras depicted on Khmer monuments, a meaning assigned to each and these combined into dances, usually on themes from the still popular Ramayana (Kh.> Reamker,) the inspiration for so much classical Khmer art. Most of the "Apsara Dance's" kbachs as well as body movements inscribe flowing curves, supposedly reflecting the prominence of water in Khmer culture as the element of transformation, e.g. the less inviting naga or rainbow bridge.. 

Apsara dancers were obvious targets for the Khmer Rouge's campaign to erase every vestige of the past and build a society based on their precepts. The few survivors of their genocidal purgation of "incorrect ideas" have attempted once more to reconstruct this obliterated past, much as the Baphuon was pieced together after the Khmer Rouge destroyed the key to its anastylosis or, for that matter, the original invention of the Apsara Dance. Today these frames of an absent past embedded in stone are animated by the Royal Cambodian Ballet for audiences in their homeland and abroad, as well as, by local troupes around the world working to resuscitate this dance, the most transitory of art forms. Apart from Angkor Wat, the Apsara Dance is the most widely recognized symbol of Cambodian cultural identify and has been listed by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage, presumably not so much for its historic authenticity, as the tenacity of Cambodians and humans in general in re-establishing continuity, if only in imagination, with the irretrievably past.

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LIBRARIES

APSARAS, 2ND TERRACE, ANGKOR WAT (1113 -1150)

The architectural values of the sthapakas and sthapatis who designed and built Angkor Wat may be clearer in individual buildings than the whole, which cannot be seen from any one perspective only by walking around it. The "libraries" (16, in the site plan below) in the northwest and southwest corners of the 1st (7,) outer and lowest terrace are by far the largest in Angkorian architecture, consisting of a nave and two aisles divided by double columns, with an eave above the aisles and a barrel-vaulted shala roof above the nave, the familiar split gavaksha or valabhi profile familiar from the meshes of Nagara (Northern Indian) shikharas and tri-lobed Khmer torana arches.  Midway along the libraries’ long east-west sides are portals with pilasters and now-missing pediments and lintels, but no galleries, causeways, walkways or even a paved terrace links them to the rest of the monument; they sit like beached ships in the middle of the 1st terrace's broad sea of grass; one wonders how and if whatever they contained was used? Two more columns project to the east and west from the nave which support open porches on four columns, distyl porticos, each  carved from single blocks of sandstone with chaste "Doric-like" capitals, reaching from the lower, level of the stylobate to the library’s eaves, the springing point for the porches' own, barrel-vaulted gables. The resulting roofline resembles a massive "staggered shala" aedicule, similar to the balanced sequence antarala >  mandapa > ardhamandapa found at  “linearly-expanded” temples also built during Suryavarman II's reign, such as Thommanon and Banteay Samre, except here the aedicular half-story is pierced by baluster clerestory windows. Like those temples, but to a much greater degree, these libraries rest on massive jagatis, (pithas, stereobates) divided into two identical sets of moldings, which set them further apart from their surroundings. Above these plinths, they have prominent, projecting upapithas (stylobates,) almost a second jagati, the height of a single set of moldings and a modest adhisthana (wall base) rising to the levels of the large baluster windows. The portals are reached by two flights of stairs corresponding with the jagati and upapitha. The jagati has four projections reflecting 1) the frontons of the stairs 2) the vessel or nave 3) the porticoes 4) the stereobate; hence the library is technically saptaratha. 

“CRUCIFORM CROSSWALK”