Unurthed

A diagram of the Laws of Magic, appearing in Isaac Bonewits’s Real Magic (1971).

“A qualitative diagram showing [the Laws] primary interrelationships”. Click for larger version.

Another scroll reproduced in Ethiopian Magic Scrolls.

“This image is recognizably a development of the eight-pointed star [c.f. previous post]. Here the image tends towards formal perfection. A double movement animates it: expansion following the four vertical and horizontal arms and the angel’s heads, and penetration following the four diagonal points. We have noted… that the former are the directions of the Cross (i.e., of a body with outstretched arms), and the latter direction of the penetrating gaze. The black lobate curve articulates this double movement here, so that it appears to begin from a circular form. The eyes of the central face are placed on the transversal axis. If we consider the genesis of this picture through related motifs, we will note that what have become here the radiating points of the central face were originally part of the angel’s clothing. They have been separated from the collar and shifted toward the center, for purely formal reasons.

“The Virgin’s Prayer at Bartos says: ‘Come, you four angels who hold up the four corners of the world and who are called Fertiyal, Ferfay, Fumael and Fananyal’. The winged faces are the angels of the four directions. Who are they guarding? The hidden face of the divine? The owner of the scroll? Satan in prison? All of these explanations are current among dabtaras who make such pictures” (p118).

Speaking of eyes and wings, a talismanic scroll presented in Mercier’s 1979 Ethiopian Magic Scrolls.

“The central design, a face within an eight-pointed star, is the most common and most characteristic motif in Ethiopian scrolls. The face is known as gätsä säb’e (’face of a person’). It is the face connected with the prayer that goes with the talisman, and its presence is necessary for the effectiveness of the scroll. Thus defined, the face has a sort of ‘local’ identity. A generic meaning can also be attributed to it, interpretable with help of the accompanying prayer: the face of God, an angel, a demon, a man, and so on.

“The eight points indicate the four directions of the talisman’s protective power: ‘Whoever comes from the East, etc…’. In relation to the face in the center, they are luminous radiance or the wings that enable it to move in all directions. One dabtara has said that each of the eight wings is an angel serving the central face. He is referring implicitly to a passage from the Apocrypha of Clement (or Qälémentos): ‘The family of angels is numerous. They have no single aspect. Indeed, there are some who have many eyes; some who are only eyes; some who are a burst of light brighter than the light of the sun; some who have faces like a man’s face; some who have two wings; some who have one wing; some who are two wings; some who are all one wing’. Therefore, in a picture like this, eyes, face, and wings can all be angels” (p9).

A 1966 drawing by Szukalski of a never-done monument, reproduced in Struggle: The Art of Szukalski (also see previous posts).

Monument to Jules Stein Eye Institute, 1966. Click for larger version.

“Ever since the eye hospital was built in Westwood, California, I have wished to make a monument to its donor, Jules Stein. Not knowing his face, I placed the portrait of a stranger in its place in my drawing of the project.

“He is eagerly stepping forward from his prayerful kneeling position to magically touch the blind child’s eyes so that it may see. To see his wonderful world will be the most glorious of it’s experiences, for, like any child, it is but a foreigner…

“Please note the peacock feathers that make up the pedestal to this monument. It has two kinds of eyes; the ones that see and the ones that have no eyeballs. Instead of Wings of Inspiration, I gave the donor of this superb hospital the Eyes of Inspiration” (p109).

On the eye-wings is an inscription that reads:

To see,
To perceive,
To foresee,
To conceive,
So to create
More light.

Four drawings of modrons, first appearing in the AD&D Monster Manual II (1983). Modrons are geometrically-derived creatures that embody an order irrespective of morality.

Monodrone (p87).

“The Plane of Nirvana is a plane of balance and absolute order [lawful neutral]. It is equally hot and cold, equally light and dark, and made of equal parts of solid and liquid. The chief inhbitants of this plane are known as modrons and live in a rigid caste system under the absolute rule of Primus the One.

“Nirvana is laid out like a great wheel with the Tower of Primus at the hub. The wheel is infinitely wide but divided into 64 sectors, each sector with its own governor. Four sectors become a region, maintained by its ruler, and 4 regions are ruled by a viceroy as a single quarter. The 4 quarters are ruled by Primus. Access to this great wheel is possible by astral means or by portals that connect to Arcadia, Archeron, and the Plane of Concordant Opposition, but the locations of these portals change as the wheel revolves around the Tower of Primus.

“In modrons’ society all beings are classified, all actions regulated, and all procedures deliniated. Obedience to the laws is immediate and unquestioned. The society is separated into the base modrons who are the largest in number and act as the servant class, and the hierarch modrons, who are the leaders, enforcers, and governors” (p86).

The modronic castes are based on mathematical progressions: the base modrons (with their populations given in parenthesis) include monodrones (300+ million), duodrones (55+ million), tridrones (6+ million), quadrones (1.5+ million), and pentadrones (500,000+); the hierarch modrons include decatons (100), nonatons (81), octons (64), septons (49), hextons (36), quintons (25), quartons (16), tertians (9), secundi (4), and Primus (1).

Tridrone (p88).

“Modrons are not affected by any illusions or magic that affects the mind (beguilement, charm, domination, hold, hypnosis, and sleep are examples). Fear and other emotion spells have no effect, and the modrons are unaffected by attacks based in the Positive or Negative Planes (including life-draining or life-stealing)” (p86).

Nonaton (p89).

The perceptual abilities of modrons increase according to their rank in the hierarchy.  For example, a monodrones’ senses are less than humans’ and tridrones’ senses equal to humans’, whereas septons, in addition to hearing, sight, smell, taste, and touch, have the two additional senses of ESP (with 30-foot range) and detect magic.  The Primus itself can communicate telepathically and immediately with any creature in Nirvana.

Primus, The one and the Prime (p91).

“Primus is a huge being who rises from the energy pool in the central part of his great tower at the center of the plane, although the Prime One may also appear as a normal human. In giant-form, Primus’ hands are unseen, the right swathed in rainbow-bright lights, the left clouded in inky darkness. Those creatures struck by the light-hand must save vs. spells or be teleported to Arcadia [tending good]; those struck by the left must save or be sent to Acheron [tending evil]” (p91).

A painting by André Enard appearing in An Art of Our Own by Roger Lipsey.

Number 27, 1975, oil and goldleaf on wood (black-and-white reproduction).

“What are we looking at? A geometry that recalls both the Platonic ‘perfect figures’ and Tantric designs, the image of the labyrinth rendered as a looping intestinal pattern, gestational images of seed and egg — drawn into a whole by craftsmanship that brings to mind the skills of jeweler and icon-maker” (Lipsey, p414).

Enard writes, in a 1987 letter to the author, “Most manifestations of art today lack good common sense, lack relation with a higher reality, and lack spiritual purpose.

“What can there be of value without a search into oneself, linked to essential knowledge?

“Isn’t the ultimate desire of human beings to perceive an order of laws that surpasses us yet is also within us, and to participate in that order?

“Isn’t the role of the artist to reflect on and to reflect back something of this greater order, for the sake of stimulating the viewer to reconstruct the original idea?

“Isn’t this quest the purpose, conscious or unconscious, of all artistic effort?

“To try to grasp the soul, that which animates each thing at its source!

“Finally, what seems most important in the process of painting is the quality of feeling that the artist conveys by doing what he does, no matter what subject he chooses; and then, the care he takes and the quality of attention he communicates, which may arouse the same quality in the viewer.

“When that quality of energy is there, it can be felt — it is palpable, visible in the canvas. It has an action; one is touched, and one can glimpse the reality behind appearances.

“The act of painting can be understood as an act of contemplation, of meditation, through which the artist can rediscover and remember what is laid down in his deepest nature, his primal consciousness — and by that very means summon the same in response from the viewer” (p415-6).

Four images from Mookerjee’s The Tantric Way (see also these yantras).

“Tantra is a creative mystery which impels us to transmute our actions more and more into inner awareness: not by ceasing to act but by transforming our acts into creative evolution. Tantra provides a synthesis between spirit and matter to enable man to achieve his fullest spiritual and material potential. Renunciation, detachment and asceticism — by which one may free oneself from the bondage of existence and thereby recall one’s original identity with the source of the universe — are not the way of tantra. Indeed, tantra is the opposite: not a withdrawal from life, but the fullest possible acceptance of our desires, feelings, and situations as human beings.

“Tantra has healed the dichotomy that exists between the physical world and its inner reality, for the spiritual, to a tantrika, is not in conflict with the organic but rather its fulfillment. His aim is not the discovery of the unknown but the realization of the known, for ‘What is here, is everywhere. What is not here, is nowhere’ (Visvasara Tantra); the result is an experience which is even more real than the experience of the objective world” (p9).

Gunas: sattva, rajas, tamas (p95).

Tantra art “is specially intended to convey a knowledge evoking a higher level of perception, and taps dormant sources of our awareness. This form of expression is not pursued like detached speculation to achieve aesthetic delight, but has a deeper meaning. Apart from aesthetic value, its real significance lies in its content, the meaning it conveys, the philosophy of life it unravels, the world-view it represents. In this sense tantra art is visual metaphysics” (p41).

Shyama (Kali) Yantra. Rajasthan, 18th century (p35).

Yantra “represents an energy pattern whose force increases in proportion to the abstraction and precision of the diagram. Through these power-diagrams creation and control of ideas are said to be possible” (p34).

The Principle of Fire. Rajasthan, 18th century (p189).

“Tantric images have a meditative resilience expressed mostly in abstract signs and symbols. Vision and contemplation serve as a basis for the creation of free abstract structures surpassing schematic intention. A geometrical configuration such as a triangle representing Prakriti or female energy, for example, is neither a reproduced image nor a confused blur of distortion but a primal root-form representing the governing principle of life in abstract imagery as a sign” (p44).

Salagram, a cosmic spheroid (p13).

Three images from the second edition (2008) of the Nuclear Platypus Biscuit Bible by Pope Gus (see previous post for first edition imagery).

The God-Biscuit (p102).

The new edition sports expanded cantos, several new appendices, and satisfyingly addresses a number of long-standing erratum. In the latter camp, for example, the humanoid used-car salesman facade of Xe8eX’s Presidential disguise is properly named Shaquille O’Neal (p23); and the strange species of creature post-dating the dinosaurs is correctly designated hornulus (p60), rather than dorkosaurus, reflecting recent evidence that these critters were more horny than dorky.

And Pope Gus finally makes good on the foreshadowing in the Gospel of Quxxxzxxx in which it states of the Oozumgreep, “What it would be we could not yet tell, but whatever it was involved propellers and an unconscionable amount of rayon” (p52). As we now know, these are the creatures that, thousands of years later, would propel[ler] the BisQuitus-era UFOs that ferried “I” away from the end times. (For bonus points, compare and contrast the updated UFO manifest.)

Only a careful reading, however, reveals the subtle revisions that evidence the confidence and vision of Pope Gus’s spiritual progress over the nearly two decade hiatus between editions. Perhaps none more so than his reshuffling of the six billion year old Twelve Commandments of the God Biscuit.

Consider, in particular, the original seventh commandment, “I exist only to amuse myself,” and the now tenth commandment, “I and thou exist only to amuse Myself” — an explicit nod to the esoteric teachings of the God Biscuit (“As above, so below”) that remain hidden to the mass of mainstream Arglebargleists. The three-step delta is a clue so formidable I will not call attention to it.

Percipient numerologists will also observe the updated icon of the Nuclear Platypus Himself. For where His Gesture was before a four-sided, four-dimensional “quadrilateral tesseract”, obviously representing the visible Work, the new Gesture goes one hermetic step further, symbolizing the five-sided objective of Perfected Man: “The Platypus most Nuclear had in His right hand something that was neither a noun nor a verb, and in His left hand He gently caressed an aperiodic pentagonal tessellation” (p102).

Sasquatchi hierogyphics (p77).

By now you should have a sense of the significance of this second edition. Therefore, let us rather turn our gaze obversely, to this bonus image, lifted from an Arglebargle brochure, recovered from the Unurthed Vault, so archived there circa 1991:

Three more icons (see previous post), and Florensky (again, from Iconostasis) on the use of gold-leaf in iconpainting.

The Holy Face (The Vernicle) icon, 16th century.

“The whole of iconpainting seeks to prove — with an ultimate persuasiveness — that the gold and the paint are wholly incommensurable. The happiest icon attains this, for in its gold we can discern not the slightest dullness or darkness or materiality. The gold is pure, ‘admixtureless’ light, a light impossible to put on the same plane with paint — for paint, as we plainly see, reflects the light: thus, the paint and the gold, visually apprehended, belong to wholly different sphere of existence. Gold is therefore not a color but a tone” (p123).

“Depicting this unmingling mingling is the representation of the invisible dimension of the visible, the invisible understood now in the highest and ultimate meaning of the word as the divine energy that penetrates into the visible so that we can see it” (p127).

Archangel Michael icon, 14th century.

“In the iconpainting process, the golden color of superqualitative existence first surrounds the areas that will become the figures, manifesting them as possibilities to be transfigured so that the abstract non-existents become concrete non-existents; i.e., through the gold, the figures become potentialities. These potentialities are no longer abstract, but they do not yet have distinct qualities, although each of them is a possibility of not any but of some concrete quality. The non-existent has become the potential. Technically speaking, the operation is one of filling in with color the spaces defined by the golden contours so that the abstract white silhouette becomes the concrete colorful silhouette of the figure — more precisely, it begins to become the concrete colorful silhouette of the figure. For at this point, the space does not yet posses true color; rather, it is only not a darkness, not wholly a darkness, having now the first gleam of light, the first shimmer of existence out from the dark nothingness. This is the first manifestation of the quality, color, a little bit illumined by light… Reality is revealed by the degrees of the manifestation of existence” (p138).

St. John the Baptist icon, 15th century.

“I call your attention to this remarkable sentence: the icon is executed upon light — a sentence perfectly expressing the whole ontology of iconpainting. When it corresponds most closely to iconic tradition, light shines golden, i.e., it is pure light and not color. In other words, every iconic image appears always in a sea of golden grace, ceaselessly awash in the waves of divine light. In the heart of this light ‘we live, and move, and have our being’; it is the space of true reality. Thus, we can comprehend why golden light is the icon’s true measure: any color would drag the icon to earth and weaken its whole vision” (p136-7).

Three Orthodox icons, the painting of which is described in Pavel Florensky’s Iconostasis. Thanks go to Polymathicus for recommending this essential text.

Archangel Gabriel icon, 16th century.

“In creating a work of art, the psyche or soul of the artist ascends from the earthly realm into the heavenly; there, free of all images, the soul is fed in contemplation by the essences of the highest realm, knowing the permanent noumena of things; then, satiated with this knowing, it descends again to the earthly realm. And precisely at the boundary between the two worlds, the soul’s spiritual knowledge assumes the shapes of symbolic imagery: and it is these images that make permanent the work of art. Art is thus the materialized dream, separated from the ordinary consciousness of waking life.

“In this separation, there are two moments that yield, in the artwork, two types of imagery: the moment of ascent into the heavenly realm, and the moment of descent into the earthly world. At the crossing of the boundary into the upper world, the soul sheds — like outworn clothes — the images of our everyday emptiness, the psychic effluvia that cannot find a place above, those elements of our being that are not spiritually grounded. At the point of descent and re-entry, on the other hand, the images are experiences of mystical life crystallized out on the boundary of two worlds. Thus, an artist misunderstands (and so causes us to misunderstand) when he puts into his art those images that come to him during the uprushing of his inspiration — if, that is, it is only the imagery of the soul’s ascent. We need, instead, his early morning dreams, those dreams that carry the coolness of the eternal azure. The other imagery is merely psychic raw material, no matter how powerfully it affects him (and us), no matter how artistically and tastefully developed in the artwork. Once we understand this difference, we can easily distinguish the ‘moment’ of an artistic image: the descending image, even if incoherently motivated in the work, is nevertheless abundantly teleological; hence, it is a crystal of time in an imaginal space. The image of ascent, on the other hand, even if bursting with artistic coherence, is merely a mechanism constructed in accordance with the moment of its psychic genesis. When we pass from ordinary reality into the imagined space, naturalism generates imaginary portrayals whose similarity to everyday life creates an empty image of the real. The opposite art — symbolism — born of the descent, incarnates in real images the experience of the highest realm; hence, this imagery — which is symbolic imagery — attains a super-reality” (p44-5).

Black Madonna of Czestochowa icon, 14th century.

“Icons, as St. Dionysus Aeropagite says, are ‘visible images of mysterious and supernatural visions.’ An icon is therefore always either more than itself in becoming for us an image of a heavenly vision or less than itself in failing to open our consciousness to the world beyond our senses — then it is merely a board with some paint on it. Thus, the contemporary view that sees iconpainting as an ancient fine art is profoundly false. It is false, first of all, because the very assumption that a fine art possesses its own intrinsic power is, in itself, false: a fine art is either greater or less than itself. Any instance of fine art (such as a painting) reaches its goal when it carries the viewer beyond the limitations of empirically seen colors on canvas and into a specific reality, for a painting shares with all symbolic work the basic ontological characteristic of seeking to be that which it symbolizes. But if a painter fails to attain this end, either for a specific group of viewers or for the world in general, so that his painting leads no one beyond itself, then his work unquestionably fails to be art; we then call it mere daubs of paint, and so on. Now, an icon reaches its goal when it leads our consciousness out into the spiritual realm where we behold ‘mysterious and supernatural visions.’ If this goal is not reached — if neither the steadily empathic gaze nor the swiftly intuitive glance evokes in the viewer the reality of the other world (as the pungent scent of seaweed in the air evokes in us the still faraway ocean), then nothing can be said of that icon except that it has failed to enter into the works of spiritual culture and that its value is therefore either merely material or (at best) archaeological” (p65-6).

Prophet Elijah icon, 15th century.

“Both metaphysics and iconpainting are grounded on the same rational fact (or factual rationality) concerning a spiritual appearance: which is that, in anything sensuously given, the senses wholly penetrate it in such a way that the thing has nothing abstract in it but is entirely incarnated sense and comprehended visuality. A Christian metaphysician will therefore never lose concreteness and so, for him, an icon is always sensuously given; equally, the iconpainter can never employ a visual technique that has no metaphysical sensuousness. But the fact that the Christian philosopher consciously compares iconpainting and ontology does not lead the iconpainter to use the philosopher’s terms; rather, the iconpainter expresses Christian ontology not through a study of its teachings but by philosophizing with his brush. It is no accident that the supreme masters of iconpainting were, in the ancient texts, called philosophers; for, although they did not write a single abstract word, these masters (illumined by divine vision) testified to the incarnate Word with their hands and fingers, philosophizing truly through their colors” (p152).