SELECTED WRITINGS
This autobiographical article was written in 2020 and published in the 11th Edition of The Invisible College, an issue dedicated to Alchemy. Its wonderful editor and lay-out artist, Gwyllm Llwydd, had asked me to write an article that focussed on Alchemy.
Below is a web version of the text, with images included. A pdf of the original printed version can be found here.
Speculum Alchemiae
Seeing with the Divine Eye
in the Mirrored Sphere of the Cosmos
L. Caruana 2020
It is a little-known fact that most alchemists kept a mirror in their laboratory, as a key-instrument for their hermetic practice.
The most famous example is John Dee’s scrying mirror - an artifact now preserved in the British Museum. It is round, black and obsidian, carved to smooth perfection, and of Aztec origin. Anyone who looks into it (except for the initiated) would see nothing but a dull black surface. Yet, for John Dee and Edward Kelley, Enochian angels revealed ‘The Mysterie of our Creation, The Age of many years, and the conclusion of the World.’
Less well-known is the Electrum Mirror that once belonged to Zosimus of Panopolis, an Alexandrian alchemist from the third century of our era. While archaeologists have indeed discovered mirrors made of electrum (an amalgam of silver and gold), such as the Kelermes Mirror of c. 625 BCE now in the Hermitage, no traces of Zosimus’ mirror remain…
JOHN DEE'S SCRYING MIRROR
BRITISH MUSEUM
THE KELERMES MIRROR
OF SCYTHIAN ORIGIN C. 625 BCE
HERMITAGE MUSEUM
…Except for a fascinating text, written by the alchemist himself, where he describes its use in detail. In a letter of instruction to Theosebia, the adept who he called variously, his ‘sister’, his ‘queen’ and ‘the woman in the purple robe,’ Zosimus describes to her how the Electrum Mirror is to be used.
Here, for the first time in English, I translate passages from the French and original Greek:
“The mirror,” Zosimus writes, “represents the Divine Mind. When the soul looks at itself in it, and sees shameful things, it rejects them. But when it becomes spirit; it rises to a higher state of calm, where one knows - and where one is known. What is the saying of the philosophers? “Know thyself.” What then is this mirror, other than the divine and primordial Mind?”
And he adds: “This mirror is positioned above the Seven Doors [of the visible planets]. Above them exists the eye of unseen sense, the eye of the Mind, which is present here and present in all places. The one who sees this perfect Mind, in the power of which all things are to be found, will be kept safe and free from death. We have spoken of this, because we have been guided here while speaking of the mirror of electrum, that is to say, the mirror of the Mind.”
The task of the alchemist, as Zosimus reminds us, is to shift the center of vision from ourselves to a higher center, to the interiors of that all-seeing Mind which forever beholds and creates its surrounding cosmos.
As a practicing alchemist, I have collected a variety of mirrors over time, whether flat, convex or spherical. My favorite one is spherical and made of steel, which hangs like a large metal ball from the main beam of my laboratory.
In writing about Alchemy, I can do no more than convey to you my experience of the Opus. I do this, in order to give a picture of a practicing alchemist at the turn of the second millennium. And one who - more particularly - renders his alchemical experiences into images and texts, just as the alchemists and engravers did in the 17th and 18th centuries, when they designed their elaborate engravings to allegorize the Ars Magna.
My journey has mostly been that of a painter - a painter who, admittedly, has also written and lectured extensively on a variety of subjects, such as alchemy, painting and visionary experience. Over the years, I have come to understand both painting and visionary experience as a form of alchemy. The three unite, strangely enough, in the mirrored sphere.
A unique property of the spherical mirror - to anyone who looks into it - is that they see their own small reflection at the exact center of their surrounding environment. And in this way, it reminds us that our momentary awareness brings together all the pieces of our world, and unites them in the self, at the very center of our vision. For Zosimus and for Dee, the task of Alchemy was, in part, to elevate that center of seeing to a more divine perspective - where we see the Divine, and the Divine sees us, with one vision.
Whosoever looks into the magic mirror with a more meditative gaze, will also see their own life, reflected as a whole. Our life becomes a series of graduated stages of awareness, like so many steps in the alchymical opus, in our life-long quest for the elusive Stone. In this sense, the spherical mirror is also a vessel - an alchemical vessel that holds within its limits the visible images of our own life unfolding - the black nigredo deaths and white albedo rebirths which were necessary, before we are granted a brief view of the phoenix, in its red rubedo glory. The mirrored vessel is a microcosm of sorts, the condensation of our entire worldview, into one moment of seeing. I have seen the Philosopher’s Stone, during certain rare moments of epiphany, and it does indeed transmute and transform all that it touches - most of all, the viewer himself.
And so my intent here, like any good alchemist, is to relate the steps of my life-opus, as a slow and gradual awareness of one alchemical secret: Seeing with the Divine Eye, in the Mirrored Sphere of the Cosmos.
No one will ever be able to retrace my steps in quite the same way, but the basic tools, symbols and initiations remain the same for all…
Sol & Luna in their Bath
SEQUENCE FROM THE ROSARIUM PHILOSOPHORUM - 1550
My first encounter with Alchemy came, not surprisingly, through books - those large-format paperbacks published in the 70’s like Thames and Hudson’s ‘Art and Imagination Series’ (Sacred Geometry! Beyond Death!), with a special edition dedicated to Alchemy: The Secret Art by Stanislas Klossowski de Rola. Like Johannes Fabricius’ Alchemy (subtitled: ‘The Medieval Alchemists and Their Royal Art’) and Alexander Roob’s small but hefty Alchemy & Mysticism, the images in these books were all out of order, like the imaginary ‘first material’ of the opus itself, and the accompanying texts were more obfuscating than illuminating. Still, something intriguing was afoot, and I wanted more of it.
In the end, we would love and torment each other for ten long years. Our joining in the alchemical bath, I gradually realized, was indeed a pleasurable coniunctio, but also involved a more painful death and rebirth. That death, whether by fire (calcination) or by water (dissolution), was finally followed by a sublime distillation, or rebirth: the liberation of the soul from its material foundation.
In my case, I escaped Toronto for a year, to study painting in Vienna. And it was there that I drew my Canadian girlfriend and myself, baptizing each other in the alchemical bath, witnessed by old man Tiresias. He, the blind prophet, had lived for seven years as a woman, and knew the secret to sexual union within one’s self.
First of all, there were hints of sex. In the Rosarium Philosophorum, drawn in an awkward 16th century style, Sol and Luna got it on in their bath (…which must have overflowed, since it became a river). For a teenager growing up in sexually-repressive Toronto, this was the closest you could get to pictures of ‘it’. And, what is more, there was sex and death - Sol and Luna went from bath to tomb - sexually embracing one moment, and naked corpses the next, laid out on a cold stone slab. And then - what was this all about? - they arose (like Christ!) as one being, a hermaphrodite!
Even as a teenager, growing up within the narrow Catholic tradition, these images spoke to me symbolically of something heretical and forbidden, yet eminently meaningful: of the hope, buried deep in my heart, that the sexual act, while joining man and woman in body, also united them at some higher level, whether in spirit or soul. I was still sexually uninitiated at the time (yes, a male virgin). So now, Sol needed to find his Luna, his alchemical sister, who would willingly accompany him in every alchemical experiment, sexual or otherwise.
I found such a partner, and our alchemical bath was a second storey apartment in an old Victorian house in the High Park district of Toronto. By this time, I was reading Philosophy at university, and was very much into Jung, Eliade and Campbell. I thought that, through Depth Psychology and the Eranos School, I had come to understand Alchemy at last. The alchemist, Jung said, was projecting the contents his unconscious into the alchemical vessel. Like a mirror, the prima materia reflected to him his deepest desires (Freud) and higher aspirations (Jung).
If images of sex, death and hermaphrodites were intriguing to a teenager, then for a young man in his twenties, exploring the unconscious seemed even more dangerous and inviting. Dame Fortune, who rules over our lives while blindly turning her wheel, had made sure to pair me with a partner who suffered from a whole slew of obsessions and compulsions. Not that I was much better, as I quickly followed her down into my own personal psychoses and neuroses.
Alchemical Dreams
The creation of this painting accompanied the next steps of my journey, as I carried it with me from Toronto to Malta to Munich, slowly but patiently teaching myself the forgotten art of painting. In Malta, I experienced the worst winter of my life, which reached its darkest nadir, suitably enough, on the solstice. On the longest night of the year, feeling utterly defeated by my inability to paint, I destroyed the work. Yet, at the same time, I realized that I also had to start it again. It was the birth of light in the darkness. The hidden message in the painting, symbolized by the alchemical child, was (I was told) ‘to die to the world, and come to birth from within’.
NOTEBOOKS OF L. CARUANA - DREAM OF CHRIST ALCHEMIST - 1990
Dreams, at this time of my life, were ‘the royal road to the unconscious’ (drugs, at least in my case, would come much later…) and I had become quite a formidable dreamer. Indeed, alchemy and dreams, I soon realized, shared the same image-language, which used strange arrangements, displacements and condensations of images to hint at some hidden, higher meaning to our life.
All of this came to head on the night of December 15th, 1990, when I dreamt of a painting in clear and sharp detail. I awoke, feeling as if a hieroglyphic script had been handed to me, revealing my life-purpose in enigmatic ciphers. I drew it at once: the main motif of Christ, dressed in the robes and cowl of a monk, gesturing with his hands in a most bizarre fashion. He appeared with my own features, standing from the waist up in an open tomb. On the altar before him was a golden chalice, topped by a glass retort. And within, a mysterious child appeared, glowing in ethereal light. At the top of the painting, the crescent moon shone in the night sky, while the sun appeared on the horizon, like a halo round the head of Christ. And at the very top, written in gold in Byzantine script, were the words ‘Alchemist Christ’.
After consulting a few alchemical texts, I added a tail-eating gryphon on the left (the black Nigredo stage), two entwining serpents on the right (the white Albedo), and a red phoenix at the top (the final Rubedo). As well, on Christ’s breast - situated at the exact center of the painting - I drew a kind of talisman, a rose-within-rose motif, like a gold and silver pendant. All these images were found in Joseph Campbell’s book, The Mythic Image.
Revelation in Munich
By the Spring of 1995, I was living in Munich and had just separated from my Maltese girlfriend (the second woman I’d ever lived with). In my new-found solitude, I stumbled upon the visionary properties of hashish. I was thirty-three years of age, and had tried cannabis on-and-off for years, always finding it to be a pleasant high, a playful game of the senses, and usually quite hilarious. Thus, I was totally unprepared for the experience that, on the evening of May 11th, would forever alter my life.
I smoked a good hit of hashish, and settled down to leafing through books, with pleasant music on the headphones (Peter Gabriel’s Passion Soundtrack) and a somewhat serendipitous attitude. I would just go wherever the experience led me.
ALCHEMICAL ENGRAVING OF CHAOS - FROM ESCALIER DES SAGES - 1686
As it turned out, it led me to an alchemical engraving of clouds, spiraling down to a singular source of light in the abyss. I marveled at the subtle shades of grey, achieved through thousands of finely-engraved lines, which seemed to deepen endlessly into a tunnel of light. The clouds on the periphery of my vision began to morph, mutate and transform, assuming a stunning variety of shapes. I saw the face of my recently-departed lover, of all my lovers, of all those who loved me in some way over the course of my life.
And, before I knew what had happened to me, I had died. I was falling upward, at incredible speed, through the spiral of clouds which reflected to me my life history - image opening onto image opening onto image - each person who I’d loved now hammering at the clay around my heart and cracking it wide open. I cried aloud, weeping inconsolably, yet utterly unable to remove my gaze from that engraving, which held me transfixed by its indescribable beauty and meaning.
It was then that the epiphany occurred, the life-changing event from which there was no turning back. Having died, I now came face to face with my creator. This, despite a traumatic Catholic upbringing, was not God the Father, nor even some Great Goddess of a mother. It was everything and nothing - a felt Presence at the very center of existence, a never-heard-before Silence, and a never-seen-before Light.
It was also Knowledge - knowledge of who I was and where I came from. I, in my self-reflective consciousness, was a tiny particle of awareness, now fully aware of its true, all-knowing source, the Consciousness of the all. My tiny mind searched in all directions for a name to call this unnameable Being, and came away with the words ‘The One’.
This ‘One’ was the unified source of all awareness, which saw itself reflected in the entirety of its creation, which appeared like an endless array of mirrors, all offering up unique images, forms and reflections of itself. I was now one of those mirrors, like an image lit-up from within, shining with divine awareness, and content to gaze upon the sacred Source for all eternity, as it too gazed back at me. Somehow, I was seeing everything around me from a higher, indeed, divine perspective.
From my place on the floor, surrounded by books, I somehow managed to break my gaze and sit myself at my easel. In front of me, still unfinished, was the second version of Christ Alchemist, now a complete underpainting in shades of burnt umber. The rose-within-rose mandala, located at the exact center of the painting, suddenly became my main point of focus. It drew me in, fixing my gaze, like a perfect Archimedean point for the coming shift and transformation.
First slowly, then surely, the circle of my focus widened to include the entire composition within the field of my vision. Somehow, I was seeing the whole painting - and the painting as a whole. I achieved, that moment, unified vision, where the relationship of the parts to the whole became absolutely harmonious, total and complete.
This new way of seeing extended in all directions - to the shapes, the colors, the contrasts of light and dark. One shape seemed to echo with the next, all of them vibrating harmoniously in accord with the larger geometric shapes that made up the painting’s hidden armature. The warm and cold browns somehow separated into yellow, red and blue - all of them brighter, deeper, richer - one color resonating with the next, illuminating each other and creating harmonies - higher harmonies, beyond the reach of my regular vision. Then the darkness deepened into infinite shadow, and the light expanded into flashes of golden white.
I was so caught up in this experience that I didn’t notice that the painting itself had vanished. Only its point of focus remained, as a stilled support for my vision. I marvelled at the pure image, the heavenly archetype, the perfect revelation - of Christ, the Divine made Man, and a man who, through suffering and revelation, had realized his inner divinity. Staring at this portrait of myself - of my own features now transfigured into a Divine Image - I surrendered totally to the experience. Thanks to this unfinished painting, I had entered through the image for the first time. The work had become a holy icon, a kind of sacred mirror, and a doorway to self-transcendence.
The Paris Years
Thus was born in Munich that night a visionary practice which I would carry with me in all my subsequent wanderings, from Munich to Paris to Monaco. That same Spring, I met a French woman, who became my wife, and together we settled in Paris. I wrote my first book, called Enter Through the Image, which elucidated my understanding of ‘The Ancient Image-Language of Myth, Art & Dream’. In that ancient city, part medieval, part modern, I also sought out more signs of Alchemy. The house of Nicolas Flamel still stands, tucked away in the old Jewish quarter of the Marais, and I visited it many times. But, Alchemy came to me in other ways, totally unexpected.
At the Musée Gustave Moreau, where hundreds of his Symbolist works hang unfinished, I was initiated into the Art of Painting. In this strange place, which once served as his studio, the stages of the painter’s Opus had been laid bare, and now I was invited to follow him, step by step, on a journey of discovery. He became my master in spirit, and I returned to his museum many times - often in a totally altered state - to plunge through his absinthe-hashish-and-opium-fueled visions of jeweled cities, Michelangelesque heroes and decadent femmes fatales covered with tattoo-designs. Thanks to Gustave Moreau, I brought my painting of Christ Alchemist to completion.
The other form of Alchimiae which was revealed to me during my years in Paris was medieval stone carving. Let no man say he has studied Alchemy, if he hasn’t also studied the iconography and imagery carved on the cathedrals. And not just Chartres or Notre Dame de Paris, but all the lesser roadside chapels, tucked away along the pilgrimage routes. In the stones are preserved the forgotten language of Allegory - obviously Christian, but less-obviously, a whole host of other traditions: Hermetic, Pagan, Gnostic and, yes, Alchemical. The masons carved in stone every type of healing herb, every symbolic metal and tincture, and every animal shape that animated their healing power.
MOTIF OF THE LION CEPHALOPAGUS (TWO BODIES JOINED BY ONE HEAD)
FROM THE CHURCH OF BUSSIERE BADI, PERIGORD FRANCE
MOTIF OF THE LION CEPHALOPAGUS
ENGRAVING DETAIL FROM THE BOTTOM OF MYLIUS' BASILICA PHILOSOPHICA
MOTIF OF THE LION CEPHALOPAGUS
ENGRAVING DETAIL FROM THE BOTTOM OF MYLIUS' VERSION OF THE ROSARIUM PHILOSOPHORUM
When Ernst Fuchs, the Austrian master of Phantastic Realism, saw my finished version of Christ Alchemist, he invited me to come and work with him. Thus that painting, which was given to me in a dream, became the doorway to another stage of my existence. How could I ever have imagined that one single painting would offer me a series of doorways in my life, each leading to a new stage of experience?
Apprenticeship in Monaco
With Ernst Fuchs, I had finally met my master in the flesh. For years I had admired his meticulous technique, his expansive vision, even his megalomania and riches. Together with my wife, working in his studios in and around Monaco, I spent the better part of a year apprenticing myself to his genius. It wasn’t easy. But he made me aware what apprenticeship means: the unbroken chain of transmission, reaching back across time, from adept to adept - all of them working in humble solitude and servitude to their art. An adept, in the true sense of the word, is one who knows all the aspects of his craft and practises it humbly - day after day, hour after hour.
Through him, I became an adept of painting. I learned the techniques, the variety of different steps that, when executed with a practiced hand, can lead to moments of sheer delight and enlightenment. I studied all the different colors, the materials they were made from, the oils and solvents that bound and dispersed them. I learned how to paint in layers, and see through their different veils to the greater light beyond. But, most of all, I learned to see - to see all things anew.
If hashish had opened my eyes, in Munich, to visionary worlds beyond the surface of the picture plane; now, in Monaco, I was learning how to manipulate the material world that seeded those visions. I was learning to stabilize the visionary flux, to draw it downward, into the material world, and fix it there. This required a complete alteration in my perception, and my master affected that change in me with all the subtlety of a masterful whack across the back of my head (though in this case, his stick was a mahlstick…).
When I opened my eyes (metaphorically, not literally), I saw the world transformed, because my place in it had changed. I was no longer seeing with my own eyes, but the Eye of das Heilige. I was seeing everything with divine vision. In such a state, the surrounding cosmos is nothing less than an ever-metamorphosing field of vision, a play of images, created by the constant flow of our own seeing. The cosmos is a mirrored sphere, in which we are constantly creating the world that surrounds us. While seeing with the Divine Eye, our vision becomes active, not passive, like a beam of light, streaming outward, and mixing with our tears to form the loving, painful and compassionate play of forms that constitute our world.
This means - and here’s the hard part - we must always be on guard against the blindness of our own ego, which superimposes its shadow-world over the world of light. We can just as easily see with the Demonic Eye, if we wish. Indeed, it is ever and always there, drawing the illusory veils of pride and desire over all of our seeing.
While working with Ernst Fuchs, I read deeply into esoteric lore, and came to focus my researches on one rather amazing time in history: Alexandria in the first centuries of our era. It was here, in this place and time, that Alchemy emerged, simultaneously with a variety of other related disciplines: Hermeticism, Gnosticism, Theurgy and Neo-Platonism. Finally, I was able to summarize my reading and realizations into one image, as a kind of model or worldview that best-described this new way of seeing: ‘the Divine Eye at the Center of the Mirrored Sphere of the Cosmos’.
The Vessel of the Universe
THE VESSEL OF THE UNIVERSE (LEFT)
DETAIL FROM ERNST FUCHS' BATTLE OF THE TRANSFORMED GODS (RIGHT)
Ernst Fuchs had, in fact, painted something very much like this, and called it die Behälter des Weltals - the Vessel of the Universe. He also wrote about it at the very time I was working with him, in a text called Zu meinen Bildern (‘About my Pictures’) which prefaces the ‘red’ catalogue for his 2001 exhibition at the State Tretjakov Gallery in Moscow. That text, as you’ll soon discover, was written at breakneck speed, in the form of a revelation, with little editing or arrangement.
But, rather than reading that text aloud to me, Fuchs insisted on another approach. After dinner, for days on end, he spent an hour or more talking to me in a steady, stream-of-consciousness monologue - all delivered in German (or Viennese dialect), all pursuing the same crazy idea from a variety of different angles and approaches. At first, it was unbearable, and I managed to grasp only fragments and phrases. Soon, I was laughing, as I found the whole affair unbelievably ridiculous. You have to picture the old man, with his long beard and regal painter’s cap, peering over his glasses and transfixing me with his gaze - while speaking utter, non-stop nonsense…
It was like peering into a verbal massa confusa, the chaotic primordial abyss of language itself - yes, the linguistic prima materia from which the sacred stone should somehow chance to emerge. But emerge it did. At one point, after he repeated “die Behälter des Weltals” for the umpteenth time - I got it. I saw it! And whatever it was, I became it.
Here is how Fuchs describes the Behälter des Weltals in the Preface to his Russian catalogue. It is full of oddities, expressed in bizarre German constructions, and unfortunately the English translator delivered a near-illegible text. So, what I present here is my own translation:
“To look into the past, into all that has gone before, is to gaze into the Vessel of the Universe. That which we call ego or self is the focus for infinite Being; it is the immeasurable part, seemingly ever-changing, of the eternally existing whole. […]
“The vessel of the universe contains everything all-at-once, but it is revealed to us in the sequence of experience, forgoing, and forgetting. What has been experienced becomes the focus of the All-seen, that first created memory of everything that was, is, and will be. This division of the whole into its parts is the result of an image, a personally-imagined image, that becomes a partial imagining of the whole. Hence, an artist’s motifs are personal, and his unique focal point becomes the main theme of his art. The central theme of all art is the eye - to explore and depict, at this very moment, the seeing of the light, the cosmos, and the entire spectrum of experience, as an eternally existing totality.
“In this way, all the themes in my work are like focal points for my experience of the light. Out of the light and darkness, out of fire and water, comes the All, from the Vessel of the Universe, the receptacle from which nothing can ever be lost. Indeed, each artist is, himself, a point of focus, a perspective directed towards the contents of the cosmos, in order to bear witness thereof – and to become the unique witnessing and accounting that gives the Vessel of the Universe its meaning and fulfillment.
“The will to self-assertion - what a dubious phrase that is, to which we shall return later - unceasingly fills the vessel, and moves the All, all at once, as the main vehicle and purpose of being an artist, its be-all and end-all. This (in essence) is what people call being ‘creative’, without bearing in mind that creativity is only possible, if there is something to be drawn out, in other words a receptacle filled with something which can be drawn out, indeed, that Vessel of the Universe from which we draw out all that is inside it. To be creative means to draw out something from the eternally-existing sum of things; and nothing can be added. ‘Discover’ is the more correct word for ‘create’. The work of the artist is to discover…
“Such thoughts moved me while I was drawing the Vessel of the Universe. […]
“Christ was lost to me until I found him again in Psalm 69: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” The water reached up to the tip of my soul! He who was sunken and dissolved in death is now radiant and awake. Life itself, yes, eternal life, the Messiah is coming, he is already among us, his people know it, they have not waited for him in vain, the egg of the world finds its way into the hand of the master, into the great work of the master builder and architect, the artifex who ritually directs the stroke of his sword that divides the egg of the world. And behold, the ouroboros appears, as a picture-book of Archimedes’ psychology, as… as the way, the focal point, the “self-awareness” of the observer. This self in the egg, the Vessel of the Universe, is to the self and its reflection, just as the reflection is, to the self, completely ungraspable. The light eye and the dark eye, as an opening to the light. The eye gains an iris and pupil. It opens to behold the God in Man, the creator and the created.”
…And so on, for several more pages. But let us pause at the words: “The ouroboros appears as a picture-book of Archimedes’ psychology.” How is it that this nonsense phrase is packed nevertheless with such abundant meaning? Psychology is the study of the soul (psyche). And Archimedes searched for that one fixed point from which we, in our soul, are able to entirely shift our perspective on the world. Such a perspective sees the All as one, and the One in all - which is the exact phrase (Hen to Pan) written in the coils of the ouroboros, in one of our oldest surviving alchemical manuscripts (the 10th century Marciana Graecus MS 299 in Venice, illustrating a passage from Zosimus).
HEN TO PAN - THE ONE [IS] ALL
OUROBOROS IN THE MARCIANA GRECUS
MS 299 VENICE
OMNIA AB UNO (ALL FROM ONE)
OMNIA AD UNUM (ALL TO ONE)
Omnia ab Uno; Omnia ad Unum the 17th century alchemists wrote on their engravings, to describe ‘the emergence of the Many from the One’ (proôdos); and ‘the return of the Many to the One’ (epistrophe). This is the eternal systole and diastole of our existence, the breathing in and breathing out, like an unbroken chain from birth to death; creation to apocalypse.
That Ernst Fuchs was an adept of Alchemy is evident to anyone who has taken the time to look deeply into his works (The Fall of Sodom and Gomorrah, 1947; The Begetting of the Unicorn, 1951 - Note that the unicorn at the bottom is guarding the Behälter des Weltals). But, that Viennese Master wasn’t just an alchemist because he included hermetic motifs in his paintings. Rather, he viewed the world from a higher perspective - a visionary perspective - wherein all things are but reflections of Divine Seeing.
ERNST FUCHS
THE FALL OF SODOM AND GOMORRAH 1947
ERNST FUCHS
THE BEGETTING OF THE UNICORN 1951
Vienna & Prague
My journey as an artist continued apace. After our year with Ernst Fuchs, my wife and I returned to our apartment in the Bastille quarter of Paris. I began exhibiting, lecturing and teaching while organizing summer seminars in Italy. We traveled to Egypt, India, Nepal and Tibet, then Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras. I stepped into temples, in altered states, and had visionary experiences too numerous and astounding to fully recount here. But their sculpture and symbols, from a variety of cultures, opened their visionary world to my gaze. Then, after the birth of our son, Florence and I bought a farmhouse in the Burgundy region of France, and actually managed to live there for three years before life called us elsewhere…
We were called to Vienna, where we co-founded The Vienna Academy of Visionary Art - an institution which flourished and expanded for seven years, until the Covid virus delivered its death blow. Aspiring painters from around the world gathered to study there, under some of the finest visionary artists of our day. Even Professor Fuchs, during the final years of his life, visited the Academy and advised the students on their works. (On a freezing day in November of 2015, I attended the requiem and burial of my master).
Thanks to my colleagues, my knowledge of painting expanded exponentially, extending to areas like Sacred Geometry, perspective and armature, not to mention a wide range of techniques, both historical and modern. This knowledge was summarized and published in the first volume of my book Sacred Codes: The Forgotten Principles of Painting, Revived by Visionary Art.
For the Spring break of 2017, my wife organized a weekend getaway to Prague. We took advantage of that opportunity to visit the old Jewish quarter and its Alchemy Museum, called Speculum Alchemiae (‘The Mirror of Alchemy’). On the ground floor, I was pleasantly amused by the display cases filled with touristy trinkets, and even bought myself an ouroboros pendant in dull lead (which my friend and fellow alchemist, Daniel Kage, later darkened in an acid bath, adding a deep black patina). Since then, I wear it always over my heart - as a reminder.
Because, as we penetrated deeper into the cellars, I soon realized that I was standing in an authentic alchemists’ dungeon. I had what can only be termed an awakening. I realized that alchemists across time, in their underground chambers, had been carrying on this ancient tradition in an unbroken chain, for centuries. And I, as a practicing visionary painter, was uniquely suited to continue in the Hermetic art - I was called to it.
ALCHEMY MUSEUM
SPECULUM ALCHEMIAE - PRAGUE
MY ALCHEMICAL LABORATORIUM
IN VIENNA
Thus, upon our return to Vienna, I installed myself in the darkest corner of the Academy, a narrow room in the damp cellars, where a creaky wooden door led to a windowless room, complete with crumbling brick walls and an old large fireplace. Soon, my alchemical dungeon was filled with glass retorts, lanterns, mirrors and alchemical engravings. And it was at this time that I also acquired the large metal ball, like a spherical mirror, that hangs ever and always from the ceiling of my work space.
The Alchemy of Paint
In my laboratorium, I concerned myself mainly with the alchemy of mediums and pigments, seeking out the correspondence of historical pigments with the seven planetary metals, and how the steps of a painting could become the seven steps of the Opus, moving from lead white and lead-tin yellow in the imprimatura, to underpainting in iron-oxide browns, and glazing in copper greens and blues, before culminating with the mercuric-sulphide of vermillion, adding touches of genuine silver and gold at the end. I learned how to make flake white from the rust of lead, green verdigris from the rust of copper and, in general, to make painting itself an alchemical ritual.
To deepen my connection with the planetary metals, I constructed an altar with the Wheel of the Zodiac at its center. Consulting the heavens each morning, I shifted my metal talismans into their proper places on the wheel - the lead of Saturn, tin of Jupiter, and iron of Mars, then the copper of Venus and quicksilver of Mercury, before finally moving the silver of the Moon and gold of the Sun into their respective places around the zodiac. As above; so below. The microcosm in the macrocosm.
JOHANN DANIEL MILIAS BASILICA PHILOSOPHICA FRONTISPIECE
ENGRAVED BY MATTAEUS MERIAN - 1618
In the dim candlelight of my dungeon, I also continued to meditate on alchemical mandalas, especially The Tabula Smaragdina, which appears as the frontispiece to Johann Daniel Mylius’ Basilica Philosophica of 1618, engraved by the amazing Mattäus Merian. This ‘Emerald Tablet’ became, to me, another mirrored sphere, simultaneously separating and uniting the All, the Darkness and Light, the Day and Night, the Above and Below - and all seeking their union once more in the circle of light at the center.
To see this image in the mirrored sphere, is to become it. The figure at the bottom - as the unique joining of the solar masculine on the left, and the lunar feminine on the right - is not some other, but ourselves. The alchemist’s gaze, lit up from within, enlightens us. The celestial wheel above, with its engraved lines vibrating black and white, appears illuminated from within. Nothing is seen from the outside, but experienced as boundless vision, shining from the inside out, and bounded only by the images that appear within the mirrored sphere.
In summertime, while back at my French farmhouse, I meditated (in a heavily altered state) on the sun and moon: gazing at night into the full moon’s reflection in a small piece of silver, and the solstice sun in a tiny piece of gold. The light of these two powerful visionaries - in silvery blue and golden yellow hues - engraved itself permanently on my active way of seeing.
I kept mandalas with me always, such as the unified-division of the elements and their qualities: the fire-water and earth-air opposites, separated and combined by the hot-cold and moist-dry opposites, all united at their center. Like a lens superimposed over my vision, I saw the cool-moist moonlight and warm-dry sunlight, the turning of seasons through the ancient wheel, and their alternating effect upon my humors.
ALCHEMICAL MANDALAS BY THE AUTHOR
Each Element shares one quality
in common with its neighbour,
and one quality that is different,
creating Separation and Unity
Thanks to my knowledge of French and Attic Greek, I was also able to read many alchemical texts which, thus far, have remained untranslated into English. This is especially true of Zosimus of Panopolis. Although a recent book (Becoming Gold by Shannon Grimes) offers a fascinating presentation and occasional translation of his work, it is really volume IV of Les Alchimistes Grecs by Michèlle Martins that offers the most complete and scholarly edition of his writings. (Indeed, Berthelot and Ruelle’s CAAG of 1888-89, Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs, remains the most reliable source for all the major alchemical texts, though new English translations are appearing yearly).
Through Zosimus, I gained a deeper understanding of the theurgic and visionary practices of Alchemy. His famous Vision, in a text entitled ‘On Excellence’ (or ‘On Virtue’), details his soul ascent to the heavens, as a step-by-step initiation involving many alchemical processes that, ultimately, are based on the tincturing of metals. Zosimus was probably (according to Shannon Grimes) an Egyptian priest, metallurgist and statue maker, who wrote in the Greek language about the dyeing and tincturing of metals, to allegorize the many alchemical steps for making divine statues - a ritual process that included the statue’s conception, construction and final consecration. That ritual consecration included a theurgic rite of ‘the soul ascent’, where the initiated priest came to see and behold the divine Presence in the statue.
Or rather, as his contemporary Iamblichus says, the divine Presence is made visible through the statue’s inner light: “In sacred images, the divine light is not only present, undivided; it fills and unites all things with itself. Whoever, then, contemplates a visible image of the divine - thus united as one - will never have too much reverence.” (On the Mysteries, Bk I, ch. 9)
In alchemists like Zosimus, Mattäus Merian and Stefan Michelspracher, I had found my forerunners - those visionaries who gazed into the speculum alchemiae and recorded all that they saw…
Thus, alchemical motifs began to appear more and more in my work. An hommage to Ernst Fuchs, called The Seven Steps, explores the alchemy of painting in a series of allegories. It remains a work in progress.
So too does a wedding portrait of my wife and I, called In the Bridal Chamber. Here, each of us pours our zoetic life-energies (ΖΩΗ) into the chalice, while the central figure of Christ-Sophia (a hermaphrodite uniting both our features) illuminates it with a pho-tonic beam of light (ΦΩΣ) from the holy host, which has ZOE and PHOS (ΖΩΗ and ΦΩΣ ) combined in cross-formation. Behind us, illuminated by candle-light and carved in stone on the columns, appear two key scenes from the Rosarium Philosophorum. Yes, Sol and Luna, who inspired my first sexual awakening, appear here in their bath, and again, as risen from the dead, the divine hermaphrodite.
Finally, in the Winter of 2019, I summarized and presented all my experiences with Alchemy in a trimester I taught, called The Alchemy of Paint. Seven lectures were recorded (now on YouTube) and offer far more information on the Royal Art than I could ever hope to include here. What those lectures don’t reveal is the variety of ceremonies and initiations we conducted in private, down in the underground Temple, below the Academy’s Studio.
The most memorable evening lasted late into the night, where eleven students, led by my wife and I, ritually ascended through the five elements and seven planetary metals, holding each substance to ourselves - in body, soul and spirit - as we performed sacred hand-gestures, voiced the seven Greek vowels, and chanted the notes of the celestial scale. This psychanodia or ‘anagogic soul ascent’ was a re-construction of the central rite in Alexandrian Theurgy, Hermeticism and Alchemy - the dissolution of the body into its five constituent elements, the visionary passage of the soul through the seven doors of the visible planets, and finally, the arrival of the spirit to a new-born realm of awareness - that ‘divine and primordial Mind’ which, as Zosimus says, is the Mirror of Alchemy, the Speculum Alchemiae.
I am now fifty-eight years of age. After seven years in Vienna, another stage of my life has come to an end. Here, in this old farmhouse in the hills of Burgundy France, I’m ready to begin a new phase. Soon, I’ll experience my second Saturn Return.
Come, great Saturn,
with your black bile burning,
cold and moist,
to fuel my creative frenzy.
Come, old Cronos,
with your sickle in hand,
to sever the sky from earth.
Come, eternal Chronos,
with your serpent’s tail,
wrapped seven times
round the cosmic egg.
I am waiting.
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