The Macrocosm and the Microcosm

Knapp painted a face in a mirror, and Hall's caption tells the reader which face. Out of the great Sea of Eternity rise the head and shoulders of the Ancient and Holy One, whose inverted image is mirrored in the Deep. The Ancient One is the God of the Zohar, the Cabalistic book Hall is drawing on, the Ancient of Days; the Deep is the water at the beginning of Genesis. The plate is a diagram of the oldest idea in the book: that everything below is the image of something above.

The upright figure is crowned, white-bearded, with his arms spread wide, and under him, meeting him at the hands, is the same figure upside down. Above the crown and below the reflected crown sit two small globes, each surmounted by a cross, the orb of sovereignty doubled too. Between the two pairs of hands a small red figure hangs with its own arms out, held from above and from below. Hall does not name it. Read with his caption, it is the thing made, suspended between the maker and the maker's image.

All of it sits inside a ring of rainbow colour, and the ring is the frame the whole idea depends on. Hall's second sentence gives the analogy in full: as the universe is the reflection of the Ancient One, so the human body is the reflection, or inverted image, of man's spirit. The great world mirrors God; the little world, a person, mirrors its own spirit; and the mirror in both cases is the ring of the created heavens. The archive files the plate under the Heavens for that reason.

The inversion is the point, and it is easy to miss because the painting is so symmetrical. A reflection is not a copy; it is reversed. Everything that is highest above is lowest below, and Hall's tradition took that seriously: the body has the spirit's shape but stands on its head, so the crown that sits on the roots in Knapp's plate of the tree of the sephiroth, elsewhere in this archive, is here on the head that hangs downward. The plate does not argue this. It simply shows a king looking into the water and finding himself there, the wrong way up, and holding, between them, whatever it is they have made.