Eyes Wide Shut symbols, and where each one comes from
Seven things people ask about, each set beside the printed version somebody signed and explained. Six of the seven have an ancestor in this archive. The seventh, the one everybody remembers, has none.
Kubrick's last film ends with a masked ceremony that people have been decoding for twenty-seven years, and almost none of the decoding cites anybody. There is nobody to cite. No statement survives from anyone who made the film saying what any part of it is for, and the loudest readings in circulation are somebody's guess repeated until it sounded like a fact.
So rather than guess, take it apart. Below are the seven things people arrive asking about, and beside each one the version somebody did explain, in print, over their own name. Six of the seven have an ancestor in this archive, printed between 1602 and 1911, with the meaning set down in plain sentences by the man who put the thing on the page. The seventh is the one everybody remembers, and it has nothing at all.
One. The star at the party
The first symbol in the film is a lamp. Ziegler's party opens under a large electric star hung in the hall, and that star is where most of the online decoding starts. The name attached to it is Ishtar.
The claim has a solid half and an invented half. The solid half is Mesopotamian: an eight-pointed star is the sign of Inanna and Ishtar and stands for the planet Venus, which is ordinary art history. The invented half is the step from there to a light fitting in a 1999 film, and that step rests on nothing anyone has written down.
Here is what it looks like when somebody does write it down. This archive holds three stars, of five points, six and eight, and each one carries its meaning in print beside it.
commemorative of the Star which appeared, to guide the wise men of the East to the place of our Saviour's nativity
Jeremy L. Cross, The True Masonic Chart, 1826 printing, on the blazing star at the centre of the Mosaic Pavement, page 16
Five points, and it is the star of the Nativity, with a second meaning stacked on it in the next clause, Divine Providence. Cross calls it a star and never a pentagram.
A German manuscript of about 1735 sets an eye at the centre of a six-pointed star, a gold triangle over a black one, and letters the heading straight across the top of it.
Christus 3. 6.
Gemma Sapientiae et Prudentiae, an unknown German hand, c. 1735, the heading over the star
Three for the Trinity, six for the points two triangles make. The writer then counts the rest of scripture the same way, a 7 at each point of the star and 12 along its edges, and fills the page below with the sums.
And the most famous star drawn in the last century has eight points. Arthur Edward Waite describes the card Pamela Colman Smith drew for him in 1909.
A great, radiant star of eight rays, surrounded by seven lesser stars
Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, 1911, on the card The Star
The seven lesser ones have eight rays too, so the sky is one figure repeated. Then Waite says the thing worth carrying into any argument about a star.
The star is l'étoile flamboyante, which appears in Masonic symbolism, but has been confused therein.
Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, 1911
That was written in 1911, about people who had been using that star for two centuries. Counting the points of a star and naming a god is the oldest mistake in this material, and the men inside the tradition were already complaining about it.
Two. The password, and the silence
The word at the door is the part of the film everyone quotes. Secrecy as the price of entry is genuinely old, and Heinrich Khunrath does not hint at it. He letters it onto the gate.
Fides. Taciturnitas.
Heinrich Khunrath, 1609, lettered on the two pyramids either side of the gate to the citadel
Faith and silence, one word on each pyramid, and the only road in runs between them. His earlier plate says the same of its own doorway.
Porta Amphitheatri Sapientiae Aeternae, solius verae, angusta quidem, sed tamen satis augusta, Jehovae consecrata.
Khunrath, 1602. The gate of the amphitheatre of eternal wisdom, the only true one, narrow indeed, but august enough, consecrated to Jehovah.
Narrow, and consecrated. The gate is meant to be hard to get through, and the man who drew it printed the reason underneath. What his silence guards is a method, not a guest list.
Three. The circle of figures
A ring of robed people standing round a central figure is the oldest staging in the business, and in print it is not vague at all. Cross sets out what a circle is doing.
There is represented, in every regular and well-governed Lodge, a certain point within a circle, embordered by two perpendicular parallel lines, representing St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist
Jeremy L. Cross, 1826, the monitor, Entered Apprentice, page 17
Not a ring of people at all. A point, a circle, two upright lines and a book on top, every part of it named. The circle is a boundary a man is told not to cross, and the two lines are two saints holding it in place. That is what a circle means when somebody bothers to say.
Four. The floor
The ceremony happens on a patterned floor, and a patterned floor is working rather than decorating. The chequered pavement is the single most reproduced image in Masonic printing, and its lecture is two sentences long.
The Mosaic pavement is a representation of the ground floor of King Solomon's temple
Cross, 1826, on the ornaments of a lodge, page 16
The Mosaic pavement is emblematical of human life, chequered with good and evil; the beautiful border which surrounds it, those manifold blessings and comforts which surround us
Cross, 1826, the same page, the moral that follows
A building, then a life. Black squares and white squares because a life has both in it, and a border round the outside because something is holding the whole thing. There is nothing left over to speculate about.
Five. The censer
Smoke and a swinging vessel is the fastest way to make a scene feel like a rite. It is also a real emblem with a real gloss printed under it.
The Pot of Incense is an emblem of a pure heart, which is always an acceptable sacrifice to the Deity; and, as this glows with fervent heat, so should our hearts continually glow with gratitude
Cross, 1826, page 38
A heart, not a summoning. Khunrath engraves the same object in his oratory of 1609 in the same sense, smoke standing for a prayer going up. The censer in this material is almost never sinister. It is almost always gratitude.
Six. The eye you bring with you
There is no eye in the ceremony. There is one in the title, and one in nearly every account of the film written since, and the printed source for it says close to the opposite of what people expect.
although our thoughts, words and actions, may be hidden from the eyes of men, yet that All-seeing Eye, whom the Sun, Moon and Stars obey, beholds them
Cross, 1826, page 39, on the sword pointing to a naked heart
Hidden from the eyes of men and not from this. It is a sentence about conscience, sold over the counter to anyone who wanted a copy, and it is both stranger and duller than the version in circulation.
Seven. The masks
Search this archive for a mask and it returns nothing. Not one record in a hundred and sixty-eight, across five centuries of alchemical, Masonic, Kabbalistic and tarot imagery, uses a mask as a symbol. The only hits are the phrase unsharp mask, in the archive's own notes about correcting a photograph.
That absence is worth sitting with, because the mask is the one thing everybody remembers. Every other element in this walk has a printed ancestor with an explanation attached to it. The element that carries the whole scene has none.
It does have a maker. The Venetian workshop Ca' Macana states on its own site that its masks were chosen for the film, and what a mask workshop has to say about a mask is about craft: a mould, papier mâché, a finish. Nobody in that chain claims a meaning, and refusing to invent one is the honest position rather than a gap in the research.
The reason the emblem books have no mask stops being mysterious once the other six are laid out. These traditions are about being seen and being known, by a saint at the edge of the circle, by an eye the sun and moon obey, by a god at a narrow gate. Their secrecy governs what a man may say, not who he is. A society that hides faces is a modern idea about secret societies, and it comes out of fiction rather than out of the books.
What the walk shows
The film assembled real furniture. A star, a word at the door, a circle, a floor, a censer, robes. Every one of those is documented, and none of the documentation is hard to come by; Cross's monitor was sold in a shop, and the archive's copy of it is a scan of one that somebody bought.
What the film added was the mask, and the mask is the part with no ancestor, no lecture and no source. That is a fair thing for a film to do. It is also exactly why the film is not a record in this archive: a work gets in when its maker wrote down what it was for, and here the one original element is the one nobody explained.
If a statement ever turns up from someone who made it, saying what the ceremony was built to mean, it becomes a candidate the same afternoon. That is the only door in, and it is the same door for a 1928 colour plate, a 1617 engraving and a 1999 feature.