The Lovers

This silence is not the silence

of the vast space between the stars.

Neither is it the silence

of the dim grey light before the dawn.

This is the greater silence of lovers

that has no need of words.

A wide cloth, spread between two

as easily covering as removed:

a white membrane –

both birth-sack and winding-cloth

for past selves left far behind:

forever changed by these infinities

of transformation, gold and white

uniting in an alchemical wedding.

White queen, red king,

and all the world their court.

Glistening, new-formed:

these are no masks they wear

but their true selves

with all else burned away

in the white fire

of love’s simple existence.

For love has no need of masks

and acceptance is all

and everything.

Text © Emma Bergen

The Four Elements: Symbols

Traditionally there are [1]four winds, four cardinal directions, [2]four temperaments and four elements. These symmetries stemmed from the enquiring minds of the Classical World, and were further developed by the philosophers and mystics of later centuries in the application of alchemy. The four elements were said to form from the interaction of the further four qualities of hot, cold, wet and dry, and also represented four different phases of the alchemical work.

The traditional symbols for these elements are simple and direct: the four triangles in my painting above (left to right: water, fire, air and earth). When these four symbols are overlaid upon each other they form a six-pointed star. Our contemporary view recognizes this symbol as the familiar Star of David, but in traditional mysticism it represents the Hermetic ideal of ‘as above, so below’, with the combined triangles pointing both upwards to the heavens and downwards to our own world.

My painting is based upon the engraving of these personified symbols in D. Stolcius von Stolcemberg’s 17th-century Viridarium Chymicum. The figures have been adapted from Eadweard Muybridge’s 19th-century sequence of photographs of the dancer Isadora Duncan. I first considered using the photographs themselves, but from a reference point-of-view the quality of the images was too degraded, and I ended up completely repainting them. 

Notes:

[1] Also Four Gospels? With considerably more presumption than logic, Irenaeus, the influential bishop of 2nd-century Lyons, taking the examples of four winds and four cardinal directions as his model, decided that there also should be four gospels. He then selected the four texts of his choice - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John - to become canonical, and which now appear in the New Testament. This in turn meant that some thirty-odd other popular gospels then in circulation which in the bishop’s personal opinion did not measure up, and which otherwise would have made the New Testament as substantial as the Old Testament, hit the cutting room floor. It is an irony of history that Irenaeus’ bizarre reasoning was actually based upon Classical Greek – and therefore pagan – teachings.

[2] Choleric, sanguine, melancholic and phlegmatic.

Adam and Eve in the Garden

To consider Eden as a physical place is to put a foot on the path of literalism, to relinquish access to the deeper meaning of what is intended by the story. Eden is a state beyond the material world, in which the physical body does not yet have its form. This light body, this ethereal essence, must first fall into Time, must first eat of the fruit. Only then can this ethereal body incarnate and make its descent into the physical realm, into the world.

Love

The Italian 16th-century philosopher and mystic Giordano Bruno devised and drew various geometric figures to which he ascribed human qualities: for the reasoning intellect, for thought, and others. A full two centuries after Bruno’s time, the German scientist Ernst Chladni developed a means to make unseen harmonics visible by striking with a violin bow the edge of a metal plate that had been scattered with sand. These Chladni patterns mysteriously mirror Bruno’s figures, and both the patterns and the figures powerfully suggest the hidden harmonies which permeate all things.

When I came to create an image based upon Bruno’s figure for love, for me the only option was to use Bruno’s own drawing, and this I have done. Centuries ahead of his time, Bruno’s progressive mind uniquely saw our cosmos as extending infinitely, abounding with worlds like our own which also harboured life, much as our current thinking – and the Hubble orbiting telescope – confirms. But in his day Bruno’s bold ideas set him on a collision course with the Church authorities. Imprisoned for heresy by the Papal Inquisition for eight years and periodically tortured, in February of the year 1600 he was at last led to the stake and burned, after which his ashes were dumped in the Tiber. To this day the Papal Office refuses to formally pardon Bruno. 

No earthly trace of Giordano Bruno remains, but his writings, ideas and drawings survive, enduring, like love itself, beyond the transience of life and mere mortal death.

And Ye shall be as Gods

"And ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." Genesis 3:5. The promise made by the serpent to Eve as a way of persuading her to eat of the fruit of the Tree. Intriguingly, only in Genesis is it called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Book of Enoch, which contains many details lacking in Genesis - including the actual appearance of the fruit - refers to it simply as the Tree of Knowledge, with no attached moral values. This is what true knowledge is; it is up to us how we use that knowledge, and how we apply our own moral values to that knowledge. The Deity wished to keep the insights and experiences which come with such knowledge for himself. The serpent, the friend and ally of humankind, knew in his wisdom that humans would need to possess that knowledge as a necessary means for the soul to progress. But the wise serpent also knew that the price that he would pay would be to be cursed in doctrine for the coming millennia, damned like Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods for mankind's benefit. I have here incorporated into my painting the geomantic symbols for good and evil. It falls to us to stand at the fulcrum of these opposing forces.

Dark Night of the Soul

Sooner or later a shadow will slide across the sun and our world goes into eclipse. It might be something that we neither had wished nor planned for, but it happens. We wait in this new darkness in which we find ourselves, perhaps wondering if we have been the cause of the loss of light, whether if we had done things differently it never would have happened. But sometimes it just happens, and we must wait, patient and accepting, for the sun to return. In time the alchemy of darkness which all the while has been at work inside us will allow us to emerge transformed. Darkness as much as light can be a powerful medium for transformation if we allow it to be: if, instead of resisting, we make it our ally and give it the time and the space to do its work.

The Alchemist

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