powers

The Heavens

the cosmos, the spheres

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A diagram of everything, drawn so that a person can be found inside it. Note where the human figure stands in the scheme.

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Sixty-two works here draw the heavens, and almost all the ones the archive has read are really drawing a correspondence.

Hall states it as a rule in the plate of the macrocosm and the microcosm: “As the universe is the reflection of the Ancient One, so the human body is the reflection, or inverted image, of man's spirit.” Once that is granted, a cosmology becomes a description of a person, and the plates behave accordingly. The chakras run up a spine rather than across a sky. The key to the Divine Comedy sets the soul climbing: “As the soul climbs the seven steps of Purgatory it is cleansed of the seven mortal sins, and it then ascends through the seven spheres of the Ptolemaic universe.” The Tree of the Sephiroth is a cosmos drawn as a plant, “ten globes of luminous splendor arranged in three vertical columns”.

The number that keeps returning is seven, and it is not always the same seven. Seven spheres in Dante. Seven wheels on the spine. Seven stars in the hand of the figure between the candlesticks, which the Apocalypse itself glosses without ambiguity: “The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches.” The tarot puts eight rays on a star and then surrounds it with seven more, and Waite counts them precisely: “A great, radiant star of eight rays, surrounded by seven lesser stars--also of eight rays.”

Maier's heavens of 1618 are diagrams of the work too. Four spheres of fire are stacked in the sky over a river, “Orbita quadruplex hoc regit ignis opus”, a fourfold orbit governs this work of fire; the globe of the earth throws its shadow across the stars, “Sol & ejus umbra perficiunt opus”, the sun and its shadow complete the work; a geometer sets his compass to a circle with a man and a woman at its centre. In every case the sky is standing in for the vessel.

Dee's Monas of 1564 draws the heavens twice as parts of his glyph. The thirteenth theorem's grid sets the signs of the seven planets in a cross of squares, each made of the pieces of the one sign, with the monad hatched in the middle, and the label down its margin reads “Totius astronomiae inferioris anatomia Monadica principalis.”, the principal monadic anatomy of the whole of inferior astronomy, which is his name for alchemy. The eighteenth draws an egg with the orbits of the planets inside it as dotted rings and the glyph down its axis, and opens by saying that “Caelestem Astronomiam, inferioris esse quasi Parentem et Magistram”, celestial astronomy is as it were the parent and mistress of the inferior: the sky drawn inside the vessel, which is Maier's habit stated as a theorem fifty years before Maier. On the title the frame of the glyph is lettered “Ignis. Aer. Terra. Aqua.” at its corners, with a sun and a moon at the top and roundels of earth and sea at the foot. Khunrath's school of Nature of 1609 has no diagram at all: a landscape of mountains, lake and town with the learned walking in it, which his caption calls “des grossen Weltbuchs der Natur”, the great World-Book of Nature, and lists what it is written in, “Mare, Aquas, Lapides, Vegetabilia, Animalia, Mineralia atque Metalla.” The macrocosm as a place to go for a walk with a book.

Cross's chart of 1819 puts the heavens on a globe, and the monitor reads the globe as an instrument: on its surface are “the face of the heavens, the planetary revolutions, and other particulars”, and its use is to “illustrate and explain the phenomena arising from the annual revolution, and the diurnal rotation, of the earth round its own axis”. His point within a circle is the same habit turned to conduct, a man drawn as a dot inside the line he must not cross; and his ladder climbs into a cloud of seven stars, where the monitor's one sentence on the subject puts Charity, “beyond the grave, through the boundless realms of eternity”.

What the archive can say is that these pictures use the sky as a way of arranging things that are not in the sky. What it cannot say is that any two of them mean the same seven.

1. Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages: Hall's text and plate captions, 1928. Transcribed here, not yet read against a printed folio.
2. Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot: Waite commissioned the 1909 designs and wrote the key to them, so his account is the closest thing the deck has to an author's statement.
3. The Apocalypse of Saint John, Douay Rheims, Challoner revision: Quoted from the Challoner revision, the English text the archive uses for the Apocalypse throughout.
4. William Martin Conway, Literary Remains of Albrecht Durer: Conway's translations and commentary. A nineteenth-century scholar reading the prints, not Durer explaining himself.
5. Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi historia, 1617: The first tractate of the first volume, Oppenheim 1617, read in the Latin of the Getty Research Institute copy with the archive's English beside it: Fludd's own explanations of the mirror of nature, the black square of the first matter and the world monochord.
6. J. B. Craven, Doctor Robert Fludd, the English Rosicrucian, 1902: An Orkney clergyman's book-by-book account of Fludd, which describes the plates in English. A reader of 1902 looking at the pages, not Fludd explaining himself.
7. Jeremy L. Cross, The True Masonic Chart, or Hieroglyphic Monitor, 1826: The printed lectures of Cross's monitor, New Haven 1826, read against the page images of the Library of Congress copy; each emblem's sentence is quoted where the monitor carries it, and the plates whose lectures went unprinted say so.
8. Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens, 1618: The mottoes and epigrams of the fifty emblems, Oppenheim 1618, read against the page images of the Getty Research Institute copy; the English is the archive's own and is marked as such on every record. Maier's discourses, in which he explains each emblem at length, are not yet transcribed.
9. John Dee, Monas Hieroglyphica, 1564: The lettering of the figures and the theorems beside them in the Frankfurt printing of 1591, read off the page images of the Getty Research Institute copy; the English is the archive's.
10. Heinrich Khunrath, Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae, 1609: The lettering of the plates of the Amphitheatrum, Hanau 1609, read off the page images of the Wellcome and Paris copies at the size of the archive's own images; the Hebrew and Greek are given in transliteration and the English is the archive's.

• The King and the Queen
• The Crown
• The Triangle and the Pyramid
• The Vessel
• Fire
• The Divine
• The Sun
• The Water
• The Hand
• The Angel and the Wing
• The Tree
• The Lion
• The Two Pillars
• The Eye
• The Serpent and the Dragon
• The Pentagram
• Death and the Skull
• The Bird
• The Horse