Christ Between Seven Candlesticks

The number nine at the top of the sheet places it in the same series as the riders on lions and the king with three crowns, the figures circulated in the eighteenth century under the names of Abraham the Jew and Nicolas Flamel, and the Wellcome's cataloguer read it as they read the others, as a stage in the alchemical process. The scene is the first chapter of the Apocalypse, the vision John has on Patmos before any seal is opened, and the archive reads it from there.

A bearded figure in a white robe to his feet stands on a cloud with his right hand raised and a sword standing straight out of his mouth. The chapter describes him: ‘in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks, one like to the Son of man, clothed with a garment down to the feet, and girt about the paps with a golden girdle; and from his mouth came out a sharp two-edged sword. And his face was as the sun shineth in his power.’ The painter has given him rays of light and drawn the sword as literally as the king in the other sheet has his. In the text the figure then speaks: ‘Fear not. I am the First and the Last, and alive, and was dead.’ The raised hand is the hand he lays on John.

The candlesticks are tall and slender, four at the left and three at the right, each with its flame. John turns round to find who is speaking and sees seven golden candlesticks, and the end of the chapter reads them for him: ‘the seven candlesticks are the seven churches’, the seven congregations of Asia Minor to which the letters of the next two chapters are sent. The archive files the sheet under Fire because the seven flames are its central image; they are a count, not a catastrophe, which is the distinction the Fire entry asks a reader to make.

In his right hand he holds up seven stars, painted small against the cloud. The chapter gives them too: ‘he had in his right hand seven stars’, and ‘the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches’. Seven lights on earth, seven lights in the hand; the picture is arranged so that a reader can count both.

The alchemical reading, which the Wellcome's title states and the archive does not, would take the figure with the sword for the perfected stone and the seven lights for the seven metals or the seven operations of the work. It is a reading the designers of these sheets almost certainly intended, since they put the Apocalypse into a book of hieroglyphical figures for no other reason. But they did not write it down where the archive can find it, and the archive will not write it for them. The chapter is here, verse by verse, and the picture matches it to the sword.