Marie Angelo, Harvest, 2005 Vol 51 No.

SPLENDOR SOLIS: INVITING THE

IMAGE TO TEACH
MARIE ANGELO
THE INVITATION ARRIVES
The gold leaf and jewelled colours of a hand-painted illumination introduce us to the
heraldic arms of the Royal Art of Alchemy, for as its title scroll announces, here is Arma Artis
Arms for the Art, first of twenty-two dazzling illuminations forming the master-work Splendor
Solis (Fig. 1). As one of the treasures of the British Library, the spectacular original, dated 1583,
is kept secure and remote, only to be consulted by special permission. And yet, we are invited to
a direct encounter, for in this piece I want to suggest a way of cultivating imaginal relationships,
imagining the image as a living presence, entering its mythos and cosmos (narrative time and
ordered space) and learning of it through participating in it.
Practitioners of therapeutic active imagination and its many variants will recognise these
ideas, but what of an educational setting? Can there be an arts-based transformative education
that re-spects image and will travel an educational distance into its depth?
Certainly, images are now appearing in more sophisticated ways.

Initiatives for

practice-based Masters and Doctoral studies in the creative and performing arts and design enable
practitioners to present dissertations by project in which art-works are a major part of the
research, not adornments and extras (Frayling, 1997). The images are accompanied by texts, but
the words are not the...

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Fig 1. Arma Artis, first illumination of the Splendor Solis (MS Harley 3469, F2, by permission of
the British Library).

main focus, nor an interpretation, they are the stories about the story that set the art into its
context.

For the science-trained, even from the more relaxed atmosphere of the social sciences

and qualitative enquiry, the research methods developed to conduct such arts and practice-based
enquiries challenge conventional....

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assumptions about what counts as knowledge.

For the artist however, it is a delight to discover

that a thesis need not always be solely a long conceptual debate about art, devoid of images, or
with image simply as raw data to be processed.

It is possible for the creative process involved

in practice-based doctorates to be seen as a form of research in its own right as and such
equivalent to scientific research (Frayling, 1997, p21.)
At last images are being credited with some intelligence! But these are the fine images
of the recognised expressive arts; what if your art is to cultivate the inward eye of dream,
visualisation, and that visual, metaphorical mode of thinking named, rather tellingly, through its
negative attributes of being non-propositional or non-discursive? There seems much further
to go in order to bring together our psychology of images and our making of images.

If, as Jung

maintains, the psyche consists essentially of images and is a series of images in the truest
sense (Jung, 1926, par. 618) then image is the substance of our most direct, immediate
perceptions, and the characteristic moves of academic thinking; keeping a distance, interrogating,
translating or interpreting, need to be recognised as only one style of rhetoric; a particularly
iconoclastic, uninviting one.

By maintaining the conventional two cultures opposition

between image and concept, imagination and cognition, this rhetorical mode will take us into
abstract definitions, but not into the imagistic deepening called for if we took Jungs claim
seriously.
Could Hillmans post-Jungian vision of a poetic basis of mind (eg Hillman, 1983, pp210) help dream the myth onward right into the academy itself?

I wanted to honour some of

the alchemical images I had grown to know and love, through many years of private study of the
Hermetic tradition, and through my doctoral research into active imagination as education
(Angelo, 1992). In the practice of hermetic imagination or visionary mysticism I felt I had
received a truly educational invitation, yet such transformative study seemed to be losing ground
to an all-embracing therapeutic imperialism.

With therapy custodian and arbiter of all things

imaginal, we became patients rather than prentices, humble students of Art. The metaphors
shifted from ignorance to pathology, and whilst depth therapy dealt in exiled images, education
dried out.

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After teaching privately for some years, I began an alchemical experiment in the
academy, persuading my university to run an MA programme with a Transformative Education
pathway (contained within the broader scope of Trans-personal Arts & Practice.) I wanted to
establish a practitioner vision, for which the method and grounds of knowledge, the
epistemology, would be as imagistic as the content.

I hoped this would enable students to

receive the invitation I had received, and learn directly from the elders of the Liberal and
Hermetic Arts or what is sometimes historically called the Tradition, with a capital T.

Jung,

not known for innovation in educational methods, nevertheless gave the introductory key; it is
pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach
people the art of seeing. (Jung, 1944, par. 14).

The title of the first course, Waking dreams:

Orpheus & the Art of Seeing reflects my critical studies of Hillman and the Renaissance school
of imagination. We begin with a day devoted to Arma Artis.
In an academic setting, focusing on a detailed particular rather than a general overview
feels risky at first, but moves us straight from conceptual abstractions into imagistic deepening.
By keeping the integrity of the master-work for the prentice alchemist, it sets the scene for a
Renaissance style of education through the imitatio.

As Professor Bantock has pointed out

(Bantock, 1989, p. 147), imitation did not mean mere copying, but the detailed absorption of
past models of excellence, so that excellence is known from within. It facilitates sprezzatura, the
effortlessness of mastery according to ones own genius.
By inviting this solemn and complex image to be the teacher, a model of greatness, I am released
from the burden of such a role to be alongside the students as a fellow student, modelling ways of
learning how to learn.
Together the image and I show how to hold together the essential and so often split
syzygy of senex and puer (Hillman, 1967). I explain simply that I have invited this particular
image to be our guest lecturer because I love it, because it is an elder, and because it is alive, a
living power with transformative abilities.

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WE ARRIVE AT THE MEETING PLACE

Academic embarrassment at appearing enthusiastic and in love is swiftly overcome by
starting with what is most important, rather than trying to lead up to it. Avoiding watered-down
terms such as connections and relationship means I can speak more naturally from the
intelligence of the heart. I can convey that my choice is made, not that everyone should love the
same thing, but because archetypally we are linked with the earliest of teachers, the great platonic
Socrates, for whom all teaching was possible only through the Daimon of Eros. As Hillman
poetically reminds us:
the awakening of the psyche depends altogether on the eros daimon. The psyche is
educated, led out of its chrysalis, by recollecting its pre-existent wings, that is, its a
priori relationships with the divine archetypal nature of all things. (Hillman, 1972,
p. 78)
But we need a way of entering the animate and animating mode of direct experience, this
different mode of waking dream. Simply showing the image doesnt work, because the
unaccustomed eye has no more ability to imagine about imagining than the untrained mind
knows how to think about thinking. As Patricia Berry points out, Our imaginations are
untrained, and we have no adequate epistemology of the imagination with which to meet the
dream image on its own level. (Berry, 1974, p. 78).

Unused to participative enquiry, we have

no way to distinguish between the personal and the subjective, for these have become interiorised,
conflated. The empty space this leaves between us and the image out there fills with projected
stories that occlude rather than reveal the image (Oh its all about war, helmets and things;
Thats amazing, its just like my animus dream about the grail legend..)
The muses never argue with Apollo says Renaissance magus Marsilio Ficino, from the
wisdom of his counter-education, they sing (Ficino, 1494/1994, p. 126), so I simply tell a
different tale, filling the story-space with the image as a living presence, a great teacher. It might
go something like this (depending on the group):
Imagine, if you will, that you are invited to a rather special gathering where there
will be visitors from foreign lands, ambassadors from...

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the far-regions who have a long ancestry, fabulous costumes and intricate,
sophisticated culture. To meet with one of these visitors, an elder or great teacher,
is a special occasion, one of colour, vitality, opportunity. They speak the oldest,
most vital of languages, a language which has inherent power to connect us with the
animate and animating world. Known by many names in many cultures, this
language invokes the great dreaming going on all the time in and through all things.
In our brains as well, for the brain is always dreaming, it is only we who come and
go, as it were, who sleep and wake and perceive an alteration in these states. The
dream is always there whether we know it as the dream-time, the many-coloured
land, the celestial world of stars, the alchemical imaginatio. Not necessarily seen, it
is what brings atmosphere, quality, is felt in intensities, the invisible currents that
sweep around and between us as we sit in class, in the consulting room, with our
friends, enemies or loved ones The image we shall meet today can teach us of
such things.
As the opening tale is told there is a tangible shift in atmosphere, an openness to new
experience. Without losing ourselves in technical language, we have rendered the familiar
strange, arriving at the essential beginners mind (Braud and Anderson, 1998, p. xxvii) that
brackets some of our assumptions and makes learning possible.

WE ARE INTRODUCED TO THE IMAGE

The large, vividly coloured slide is projected on the screen, seeming almost to fill the
room. Everyone is quiet. The tale continues, announcing the image by name, and brief history,
but then taking time to help us learn to see, through a ritual telling the image to the eye.
Eyes conditioned to the fragmented, channel-hopping images of tele-vision (vision at a
distance) and psychological interpretations rather than imagistic descriptions, cannot easily stay
with an image long enough for anything to happen. Containment in ritual deliberately slows the
pace, taking us out of linear time into sacred circular time, so much more appropriate for the
simultaneity of image.
A ritual description is not in a hurry; the gaze relaxes, goes deeper, befriends. Gradually
the image out there becomes present to the inner eye. I was taught the great value of doing this
aloud...

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as a group exercise, when a blind student joined the course and we introduced her to the image
together. The struggle for description not evaluation, with its attendant confusions, laughter,
and raising of questions, clears away some of the personal projections and received
interpretations. It is a reclaiming of lost ignor-ance (in the sense of returning to what is
actually present but has been ignored) essential for the start of an imaginal education.
A true phenomenology of image opens an endless depth, and so, as we reach for some
knowledge categories by which to make the description, I try to provide a few which belong to
the time and place of the image itself; heraldic terms and conventions, for example.

In this way

we create a suitable story-length to tell aloud:

Arma Artis is painted on thick paper which is a little larger than modern A4
size. The traditional wide border is of gold-leaf and jewel colours, depicting
animals, birds and flowers. The azure blue and gold heraldic arms which are the
focus of the interior are set in a grand architectural space, against the backdrop of a
wide purple banner running from ceiling to floor. The upper part of this banner
displays a large, animate gold and red sun, whose many rays alternate between long,
straight points and spiralling lines.
Beneath this solemn, solar face are the heraldic arms themselves. A curved
azure shield displays a vivid red-gold sun, animate, but in a very different way to the
one above. This sun has curved rays which would rotate it clockwise, and its eyes
and mouth are wide-open. These features are themselves faces, so there are three
smaller animate faces within the one.
This shield of arms is accompanied by the traditional heraldic associates of
helmet, mantle, crown and crest (together known as an accomplishment.) The
helm, facing to our left is dark metal with the narrow visor of a tilting helmet (used
in the jousting tournaments of chivalry.) Around it floats and curls a blue, deeply
cut mantle, studded with many small golden stars, and held in place by an elaborate
gold crown. On this rests the crest; three coppery coloured horned moons, nested in
diminishing size, edges gleaming, the uppermost points actually enclosing the
longest pointed ray of the solemn, animate sun directly above.
On the left, a huge stone archway connects banner and arms to an outdoor
scene, in three great sweeps of nested arches. Two small figures stand in this
archway, one in black one in red. Behind these men, in the far background, is sky
and distant town; beneath their feet grass. Directly in front of them, in under the
great arch, stone-flagged paving, four-squares deep, leads to a slightly wider stream
of...

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swift-flowing greenish water casting up spray. Over the stream, three shallow,
broad steps lead across the picture, to the right, up to the heraldic arms and banner in
the foreground.
The title scroll at the top of the border bears the words, Arma Artis (Arms
for the Art) hand-written in gold against red. The lower portion of this border takes
up almost a third of the whole illumination. In the base are two apes; one on the left
holding out a fish to a heron, watched by another of the long-beaked birds behind;
one on the right playing the lute. Around the rest of the frame are five more birds,
including an owl and a hoopoe, and many red, purple and blue flowers such as sweet
peas, complete with seed pods, lilies, and roses.
Such a telling prepares a silence so each can take time to tell the image inwardly, seeing
it with the inner eye, to notice what you have noticed and what is missing.

In this way we

actually meet the image on its own ground and listen first to its own language.

WE ENTER THE FRAME

Hillmans exasperated cry that, Training the person to whom the fiction or the figure or
the dream or the epiphany comes to respond adequately, genuinely is three-quarters of the work
(Hillman, 1983b, p. 67) is rather dismissive of the educational process. However, learning how
to learn is no simple matter. Again and again as we start to talk, we are tempted into ab-stracting
questions (Is the fish a symbol of Christianity? Are the two men animus figures? etc.) I try to
resist inviting or attempting to answer such questions, following a golden rule of archetypal
psychologys method taken up from Jungs original statement (Jung, 1934, par. 320) by LpezPedraza, that we should stick to the image (Hillman, 1983, p. 9).
If we allow the image to teach, to educate the eye, then we are gradually led to its heart,
from the general to the particular, from the outside inwards.

Many presentations of the Splendor

Solis show the images stripped from the frames, making little or no comment about them. To the
re-spectful eye however, this rich, animate garb of shining gold-leaf, flowers, birds and animals is
an intentional setting, telling us that this is how to frame our approach, our way in.

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The frame offers a vessel for the inner image, a dream-like setting. If we then imagine
the image as if it is indeed, a dream, we may apply dream-work methods of metaphor and
imagistic sensitivity (eg Bosnak, 1986), and discover, for example, that when the apes are
kindly and artistic, then the arms for the Art are displayed.

No brute and primitive nature here,

but cultural achievements. Look at the lute-player, at the skill of the paws with their delicately
placed fingers knowingly playing music for our ears. Look at the expression on the face of the
giver of the fish. To modern thinking such actions cannot happen, but who are we to argue with
the dream and insist it follow what we consider natural? There is a lesson here. If we are to enter
the world of the Royal Art, we too need to be contained in such a vessel, framed by such a
context.
Hillmans Anima Mundi perspective marks the later stage of his work in which he
reworks the notion of psychic reality, reclaiming the pre-enlightenment Hermetic Tradition of
Soul wrapped round and through all things rather than interiorised. He invites us to let fall such
games as subject-object, inner-outer (Hillman, 1982, p. 129) in favour of a living cosmos
rather than an empty, dead universe (Hillman, 1989). The recent Western universe view that
matter is meaningless stuff, and ourselves isolated egos shut up inside our skin, is a picture of
alienation and neurotic despair, and, what stress, what effort it takes to live in a cemetery; what
terrible need for will-power (Hillman, 1982, p. 121).
None of the Hermetic Arts, such as Alchemy, can in any way be appreciated from this
universe perspective, since the seventeen centuries during which they flourished and had their
golden age all preceded this modern myth (Holmyard, 1957, Harpur, 2002). The tangible yet
metaphorical eye/I re-entering the animate, animating cosmos needs to be educated to know
what it is seeing. We discover something of this if we spend longer getting to know these apes
and their particular qualities, rather than treating them as apes-in-the-abstract.
For they are not just any apes, they are sixteenth century apes, pre-enlightenment, preDarwin. From commentators of the time, such as renowned Hermetic Philosopher Robert Fludd,
we learn...

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that they are not beast-ly, but the gifted Ape of nature we call Art; a being who has arisen from
human ingenuity and bears the same relation to Nature as she to God (Godwin, 1979, p. 22).
Their Art is not just any art, it is music, one of the seven Liberal Arts that formed the
medieval syllabus of quadrivium and trivium (Geometry, Astronomy, Arithmetic and Music;
Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic). These subjects were understood very differently then, in ways
which today we might see as overlapping with the tradition of the Hermetic Arts. Music in its
various modes echoed the harmonies of Spheres, whilst Geometry rested on sacred foundations,
on divine proportions in art and architecture, in the patterns and measures of the earth. The two
disciplines can be seen as cultivating two intelligences which complement perfectly to display the
heart-mind or Intelligence of the heart (Lawlor, 1982, p. 14).
Their Music is not just any music, it is played on a stringed instrument, a lute. This was
the invention of Hermes, messenger of the gods, patron of all Hermetic Arts, and given as a gift
to Apollo, father of the Muses
Such stories we can tell once we begin deepening into particulars; like soul, there is no
limit. Often it is important to stop after a while and come back to the surface, to let go of any
heroic desire to get to the bottom of the image.

We are not analysing data, but re-storying

living images, in which each part carries information about all the other parts, like cells with their
DNA, the world in a grain of sand.
We can turn from the ground to the sky, to the seven birds, seven winged ones, who, like
angels, carry the message of the frame. Somehow, it is not the owl who has excited most
attention on the many occasions I have presented this illumination, it is the Hoopoe, up there on
the left, its lovely crest raised, who has most charmed us with song and story.
In Rumis poem, The Hoopoes Talent the Hoopoe tells Solomon, I can see where the
springs are/and where good wells may be dug. But she tells also of vulnerability to things that
have trapped me, and the knowledge of a will beyond my knowing that causes both my
blindness and my clairvoyance (Rumi, pp. 18-19). Guided by this image, we take time to read
the poem and we talk about Hoopoe moments in our studies, bright flashes of breakthrough and
swooping clarity.

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The golden living frame has located us in the animate and animating cosmos and now
invites us further in.
WE DISCOVER A PLACE TO STAND
Here, inside the frame, a whole interior opens up and invites us to consider where we are
standing. The two men standing in the doorway cast shadows on the solid ground beneath their
feet, and have faces turned towards each other as if in conversation. Are they hesitating before
daring to enter, or have they just left? How easily they become the vis--vis or personification
(Jung, 1961, p. 369) to reflect our own state of mind and assumptions.
Prompted, though, to return from personal speculations and ask the image to teach us, we
notice how well their costumes suit them to this alchemical image. One is dressed in the black
of the Nigredo stage with which the Opus begins, the other in the red of the Rubedo, with which
the Opus is completed. The pattern of their arms and legs is complementary. The Nigredodressed figure, casting a strong shadow, stands facing the archway. We see his two feet, firmly
placed, but only one arm, the left, raised from the elbow. This is a static pose. By contrast, the
Rubedo-dressed figure, casting almost no shadow, stands sideways-on in an attitude of
movement. We see both hands held out at around waist height, but just the left foot, carrying the
weight forward. If you try standing in this posture (actually doing this rather than just reading
about it) you will experience its dynamic movement, and the way in which the arms will carry on
moving. The two will each have a different view of the Arma Artis interior. If one is indeed
absorbed in the first stage, the other reaching the concluding disseminations of the multiplicatio,
of what might they talk?
Contemplating such a question (rather than trying to answer it) invites us into the
rotatio, the circular nature of the work. By sensitising us to alchemical colours and stages, the
rotatio helps us notice not only what is there, but what is missing. Two figures stand without, in
the colours of the beginning and the ending, yet traditionally there are at least three stages. What
of the middle, in-between stage, the Albedo or whitening? There we would find the psychic
middle-ground, the Silver and the White Earth which...

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situates us in the poetic rather than the literal (Hillman, 1980-81).
Gradually we realise that there is indeed another place to stand, a poetic ground which
is in the middle of the image. An inner gaze, already within, looks out across the whole scene.
The painting has been made so that we join with this third, invisible, figure and, without noticing,
we are standing where this figure is standing and seeing the whole illumination through those
eyes.
Now Arma Artis is teaching us that to be within the image, rather than remain outside, we
need to see through different eyes, not new eyes, but ones usually used unconsciously. When our
vision is ob-jective (from to throw upwards) it shows us things-at-a-distance, apparently
disconnected from ourselves, even though it is we who are throwing them. Meanwhile,
unrecognised, our sub-jective vision (from to throw under) is giving us the very ground we
stand on, our way of seeing.
Asking who is looking is one of Hillmans first puer twists, those hermetic turnings
upon language which help the eye see through its assumptions to a more direct relationship with
the imagistic nature of experience (Hillman, 1975). We hear from Hillmans writing that soul
is perspective based in a psychology of image(Hillman, 1975, pp. x-xi) the perspective
between others and from which others may be viewed (Hillman, 1983, p. 5), but from Arma Artis
we can experience this and see what he means.
Looking at the two figures, held in discussion outside, over there, beyond the steps,
through the water, across the pavement, beneath the great archway, we realise that they cannot
see the heart of the matter. The Heraldic accomplishment, so close to our inner gaze that we can
see every detail, is almost completely hidden from their sight by the great banner. Lacking the
present now they must rely on speculation and memory.
Outside the temple, we engage in various Black and Red dualisms of contemporary
debate; Jungs understanding of himself as a scientist, for example, contrasted with Hillmans
move to an art metaphor (Hillman, 1983b pp. 108-9); depth-height antipathy in psychology
regarding the spontaneous explorations of active imagination and the deliberate cultivations of
guided fantasy (Hillman, 1975, p. 39); sanctioning the activating of...

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images in spiritual prayer, but condemning other imagistic practices as reifications, or occult,
magical arts (a criticism raised by Peter Bishop, 1987, which I have followed-up in some detail:
Angelo, 1992, 2003).
Assessment papers for a conventional academic MA degree may consist entirely of
formally written reports about such debates.

However, a practice-based approach develops a

different view of mastery, emphasising reflexive, participative experience and transformative

learning, with appropriate methods developed for reporting, such as journals, exhibitions,
performance and presentation. In the old practitioner metaphors of apprenticeship, here being
reclaimed, no-one becomes Master of an Art by standing debating in the doorway. The
prentice must know the subject from within. Entering the Anima Mundi perspective restores the
embodied, sensuous experience that Perception is participation (Merleau-Pontys work, so
beautifully expressed by phenomenologist and ecologist David Abram, 1996.) Rather than the
introverted, isolated qualities projected onto it by the conventional sense of inner, the subjective becomes the essential place of participative learning.
But learning to enter the temple is simply the first move, and after the excitement of
finding a place to stand, the images often disappointingly go flat. Blaming the image for
being boring may move us on quantitatively to the next image, but questioning our own lack
of perceptual skill moves us in qualitatively to a deeper experience with this image. If an inner
eye/I is to be cultivated, it requires a further under-standing of our imaginative, invisible gaze,
in the direct sense of what is beneath our feet, our subject-ivity.
Learning from the image itself, we move our attention back to the invisible gaze within
Arma Artis, deepening our sense of being present. We see how we have isolated ourselves again,
ignoring the particularity of the gaze, the Temple floor beneath our feet, the eye/I directed to the
heraldic arms themselves. These are our subject, a term which is an educational reference to a
canon and curriculum of study, but also the name for the alchemists material (Klossowski de
Rola, 1988, p. 19). A similar hermetic twist reveals that the vital charge needed to enliven our
images is right in front of us, since charge is the term for all heraldic figures, and every shield
or other object is said to be charged with any device...

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placed upon it. (Scott-Giles, 1954, p. 14).

Its time to find out about our subject.

RE-CHARGING THE IMAGE

It seems to have raised no comment that heraldry enters history at about the same time
that alchemy entered the West, that is to say around the twelfth century (Slater, 2002; Holmyard,
1957), but now that we are inside the image we notice straight away that the animate, animating
cosmos of the alchemists is also a magical cosmos, with specially charged materials filled with
virtu or energetic effectiveness. These operative or practical, image-based disciplines all
belong together. Like alchemy, heraldry gradually loses its operative qualities, becoming a
speculative, symbolic art. We forget that the decorative images began as actual artefacts,
fantastical, potent forms of regalia in the tradition of the Egyptian god and goddess forms, tribal
and totemic headdresses, magical and religious ceremonial.
When the metals, jewels and sumptuous embroideries of heraldic arms began largely to
be replaced by elaborate paintings, these were meticulously crafted to follow exacting principles
for selecting fabulous beasts, significant objects, curious geometries and colours (or tinctures as
they are still known today.) In any other tradition, this intended, vivid and potent image-making
would be recognised as the magical practice of deliberately charging an image with the power of
the stars. However, I doubt that any historian of heraldry would welcome the thought that both
usages of the word catch that sense of enlivening and honouring which a Renaissance magus
such as Ficino names spiritus.
Spiritus means a very fine and subtle substance everywhere diffused between the soul
of the world and its body, and through which one who has knowledge can draw down the life of
the heavens into a material object (Yates, 1964, pp. 68-9). The correct name for these objects
made with artistry and intent is not simply symbols, but talismans, a word lost to modern
image-study through prejudice, but which belongs with the language of the magical cosmos. It
carries the sense of consecration, a sacred rite, to fulfil or perform in the sense of initiate
into mysteries.
When images have spiritus we know them as living powers, neither dull representations
nor manipulated automata. They...

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breathe, as we breathe, for undoubtedly the world lives and breathes, and we may absorb its
breath (spiritus) (Ficino, in Walker, 1958/2000 p. 13). With each in-spiration there is
exchange and flow, and the metaphors become the airborne ones of harmonies and attunement.
Universe thinking may imagine itself alone in a silent vacuum, but cosmos knows itself to be
at all times muse-ical, ourselves imaginal instruments to tune.
Without such image-language, our subject-ivity remains personal. Hence, a modern
interpretation of Arma Artis can describe this frontispiece of one of the great treasures of the
Royal Art in pathologised terms disconnected from all heraldic knowledge. It is a coat of arms
in a process of falling apart which proclaims weakness and disintegration, for the shield has
fallen onto the pavement. It contains a sick sun with rays like hooks that bend back upon
themselves and horrifying features from which a tiny demonic face peers forth. The helmet is
an image of defended consciousnessabout to be discarded as we leave the dark, outmoded
interior and set out on the journey towards health (Henderson and Sherwood, 2003, pp. 35-41).
Suppose that instead of a sickening look we begin to look heraldically, alchemically,
magically, in tune with the image itself. Straight away we find that the Arma Artis shield is not a
fallen image, for arms are typically presented in this way (called couche.) In its most exalted
form, a full accomplishment is presented upon a compartment or mound either architectural or
drawn as a small hill of earth or grass. In ancient Egyptian cosmology, the cosmos itself is the
primal mound emerging from the waters (Naydler, 1996), and from inside the subject, we know
these steps rising from the alchemically green water are no mere pavement but sacred space, a
temple.
On the azure ground of the shield the dramatic charge is exactly appropriate for a work
called Splendor Solis, since stellar bodies are often presented in heraldry as animate, and a fullfaced sun is actually called a sun in his splendor (Scott-Giles, 1954, p..83.) Whilst the solar
face in the banner Above heraldically denotes light and heat, through the alternation of straight
and wavy lines (Scott-Giles, 1954, p. 83,) the solar charge Below is dynamic, indicating the sun
whirling in movement, clockwise, like the sun moving through the sky. It reminds us that the
word temple itself derives...

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from tempus (Latin for time.) A templum was a section of the sky marked out for augury.
Thus, Traditionally a temple is a time-piece for observing the stars and adjusting our lives in
accordance with the heavens (Edwards, 2003).
Heraldically, the charge on the shield is the most significant part of the accomplishment
(Slater, 2002 p. 54) and the three further charges within this dramatic sun should therefore qualify
the main image and convey the quintessential characteristics of the holder of the arms. Indeed, a
new light shines on those three animate faces when we consider that the legendary author of the
Splendor Solis is Salomon Trismosin, a mysterious adept, who claimed to be the Preceptor of
Paracelsus (McLean, 1991, p. 7) but about whom almost nothing is known. Salomon (with its
intriguing alchemical reference to sal, salt) is an old spelling of Solomon, telling us Trismosin
is not only a solar figure, a sol-omon but one of the thrice-born, thrice Moses no less. We are
more familiar in Hermetic study with thrice greatest Hermes, Hermes Trismegistus, whose
name comes to us down the centuries from its Egyptian origins as Thoth, through its
Hellenisation as Hermes, and Latin equivalent as Mercurius (Angelo, 1997). Moses, equally
venerable, is a contemporary of those earliest stories. He brings not only the sophistication of
Jewish alchemy, only recently recognised for its contribution to the Royal Art (Patai, 1994), but
of Judaic mysticism, through the Cabala, or Tree of Life; that extraordinary cosmological
philosophy which expressed itself essentially in images (Scholem, 1969, p. 96).
The cosmological themes continue when we look at the crest, second most important
device in an accomplishment. Here, above the crown, three copper-coloured moon crescents
gleam, edges silvered by the light of the sun. Between this triple moon and triple sun floats the
azure mantle, set with dozens of tiny golden stars. The opening text of the Splendor Solis
cautions us against approaching the work ignorantly, and begins its alchemical teaching by
confirming that for the alchemist, this astro-logical cosmos, the logos of the stars, is the essential
context in and through which the Royal Art becomes possible, for it is evident that all bodily
things. derive their being, according to the laws of time, through the influence of stars or
planets sun, moon and the rest together with the four qualities of the...

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elements, (Splendor Solis, 1583, in translation, ed. McLean, 1991, p. 19.)
With the re-instatement of astro-logia, as well as magia, at last the animate and
animating cosmos of the alchemists is operative. Yet the heavens, this Hermetic Above is the
context largely missing from Jungs symbolic interpretations. The psychologising of alchemy
misses Traditional, practical astronomie or astro-logia (it being almost impossible even to
mention the term without conjuring modern personalistic trivialising). Hence studies of alchemy
proceed, not only in the impossible context of a universe perspective, but in ignorance of the
sophisticated and subtle operations of cosmos. We miss even the simplest point, that much of
alchemy consists in knowledge of time and timing; not chemistry but physics and agriculture.
We can find hints in some contemporary writers who maintain the Traditional perspective
(Klossowski De Rola, 1988; Fulcanelli, 1964), finding, for example, that the time to begin is at
the Spring equinox. Here, at a moment of equal day and night, the sun Traditionally enters the
zodiacal sign of Aries the Ram, his sign of Exaltation (Edwards, 2003), initiating the celestial
influx essential for the Opus. In Arma Artis we find the correct colours and images, and straight
away have discovered more about this strange alchemical Temple.
Jungs own dealings with heraldry confirm that whilst his work gives so much, so much
is missing. The Jung family coat of arms was once a phoenix (Jung, 1961, p. 259), such punning
or canting arms being a common heraldic practice (Neubecker, 1977, pp. 118-9.) Jung chose
that his coat of arms should be in keeping with alterations made by his grandfather, whom Jung
is careful to identify as an ardent Freemason and Grand Master of the Swiss lodge before
assuring us that this is of no consequence (Jung, 1961, p. 259).

He also makes a point of

describing the arms in full heraldic language (called blazoning), necessitating a translators note
before the charges can be recognised as an azure cross and bunch of grapes, diagonally opposed
on a field of gold, and between them a gold star in a bar of azure. The symbolism of these arms
says Jung, is Masonic, or Rosicrucian cross and grapes are symbols of the heavenly and
chthonic spirit. The uniting symbol is the gold star, the aurum philosophorum. (Jung, 1961, p.
259).

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He explains that the Rosicrucians derived from Hermetic or alchemical philosophy, one
of their founders being the famed alchemist Michael Maier (Jung, 1961, p. 259) then carefully
teases out a chain of connections which he feels demonstrates the fateful links between me and
my ancestors (Jung, 1961, p. 260). He remarks on one Dr Carl Jung who lived in Mainz around
1618, and could be expected to have known both Michael Maier and Gerhard Dorn, but does not
mention his significant alchemical dream of around 1926, when he found himself caught in
the seventeenth century (Jung, 1961, p. 229). Here, perhaps is its ancestral connection, giving
us an insight into Jungs special focus on the alchemical texts of this time.
What prompts these reflections is Jungs memory of the winter of 1955-6 at the Tower,
when he chiselled paternal ancestors names on stone tablets and painted the ceiling with motifs
from my own and my wifes arms, and from those of my sons-in-law (Jung, 1961, p. 259).
However, despite contributing to the many sophisticated artefacts with which Jung adorned the
Tower as his confession of faith in stone (1961, p. 150) these frankly magical makings, filled
with sacred and talismanic qualities, cannot be called such. Psychologically, only the generic
term symbolic has credence, and since this designates process, not content, we have no imagelanguage by which to differentiate these careful distillations of a most well-prepared mind from
nave image-productions or spontaneous impulse release.

From within the magical cosmos,

calling all these images sym-bolic seems merely a way of reassuring us that they are not, by
contrast, dia-bolic; a single vision (pace Blake) that challenges none of the image-prejudice
and ignor-ance of long-term cultural iconoclasm.
Only when alchemy and astro-logia magically complement each other in their
Traditional forms as terrestrial astronomy and celestial agriculture can our alchemy become
truly Hermetic, rather than pressed into modernist servitude. Then comes the true transformative
vision, for, as the Hermetic writers pointed out, long before cognitive psychology and
phenomenology came to the same realisation, since like is understood by like (Corpus
Hermeticum, Book 11, p. 57), in the practice of perceiving cosmos rather than universe,
gradually we become cosmos.

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Poet and archetypalist Noel Cobb writes with subtlety of the Missing Alchemical
Marriage in archetypal psychology, and how the White Queen awaits the Red Kings proposal
(Cobb, 1996). In the missing Hermetic union of Above and Below, is one such marriage which
could bring new spiritus to our poorly charged alchemical images.
RE-JOINING THE IMAGE
In honour of this vision, I would like to conclude our brief meeting with Arma Artis by
looking forward to the possibilities of such marriages. Perhaps the MA programme, with its
many image-meetings and its prenticeship fantasy will provide a place for love to flourish for a
while.

Since we often invite the Muses to sing for Apollo, we speak of amusement and enjoy

a certain degree of Mercurial mischief in making new names for projects, such as imaginatio
enquiry and trans-personal poiesis, the art of making that marries the worlds. I have the odd
ability to speak the strange, dead language of formal academic documentation, so can carry and
interpret messages from universe to cosmos and back (a kind of psychopompous function, as
I was once prompted to describe it.)
It is suggested that the Trismosin literature, with its profound influence upon the
alchemical tradition, is the product of an esoteric school whose pupils created sets of the images
and treatises for their own contemplative and operative use (McLean, 1991, p. 9). Following this
educative lead, I introduce all 22 of the Splendor Solis illuminations in various course options,
enabling the hermetically-minded to practice a truly trans-personal Art in which they enter the
temple, to breathe an air of spiritus, and learn our subject directly from the images. However,
Arma Artis, like an initial dream, is frontispiece and key to all that will come later: a method of
enquiry into image through image. Daimonic, not demonic (Hillman, 1977), such enquiries
share certain characteristics which we are learning from the three faces of the sun in splendor.
The right eye, astro-logically Solar, speaks to us of metaphor not used as a mere
decorative device, but understood as imagistic epistemology, a way of seeing to be entered as
one enters the...

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Temple of Art. Applying the doctrine of the furores (Ficino, from Plato, in Walker, 1958/2000,
p. 21) we might see this as the vision of the prophet, the divine madness which perceives the
entire pattern, the story we are in, the next chapter to come. If we remain outside, like the Red
and Black figures, we may discuss our subject, but will never understand from within. For that
we need to enter and see through those other eyes with their participative perspective. It is
extraordinary how useful it can be, at every stage of writing, to remind ourselves once more to
make this move.
The left eye, astro-logically Lunar, speaks to us of scholarly information and debate that
is not remote and detached, but affords depth and connection. Paying the image the courtesy of
appreciating its language and customs is not merely good manners, but teaches us how to ask
relevant questions, as we began to see with our brief look at heraldry and the magical, astrological cosmos of the alchemists. The intent of coming into relationship with rather than
usage guides our ethic as surely as Hillmans lovely reference to Plotinus and the self-steering
processes that come when we are sensitive to beauty, and the ugliness of going over to another
order that exploits and jars (Hillman, 1981, p. 59). When we wish to serve a mystery rather than
solve and interpret it we enter the divine madness of the priest, the mediator.
As we learn our art of seeing, the open mouth, astro-logically Mercurial, begins to
speak in Orphic voice, the divine madness of the poet; of reflection that is not self-serving, but a
perceptive story about the story meaningful to other prentices on their way to Mastery of the
Art. It hints at a hidden title of the Alchemical adepts as servants of the Golden Head
(Klossowski de Rola, p. 106).
With this triple spiritus of eyes and mouth Arma Artis gives us release from the
conflation of the personal with the subjective. We recognise that The psyche is not unconscious,
we are (Hillman, 1983b, p. 53.) Henceforth, we will know that our imaginal, transformative
education is guided by that most pervasive daimon of all, the divine madness of the lover.

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Contributors note:
MARIE ANGELOs doctorate on active imagination followed art college, dance therapy
training and qualifying as a Chartered Psychologist, but was inspired by entering the
Western Hermetic Tradition through the practice of visionary mysticism. A passionate
advocate of transformative education, she designed and leads an MA in Transpersonal
Arts & Practice at the University of Chichester (West Sussex, UK), for which she runs a
specialist pathway enabling students to explore the alchemical-hermetic Kosmos of the
Splendor Solis master-work directly through imaginative memory theatres. Her
publications include, This thing of brightness: the feminine power of transcendent
imagination in Tessa Adams and Andrea Duncan (eds) The Feminine Case: Jung,
Aesthetics and Creative Process, London: Karnac, 2003.

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