Topped by this same caduceus-bearing Mercury, Cabala’s final scene, “End: Multiplication”, depicts the resurrected Christ offering the Water of Life to King/Sun and Queen/Moon, while Peg-leg Saturn and his fellow planets wave their bellows from below, and the halo-bearing dove of the Holy Spirit flies between the walled city of Jerusalem (right), the Tetragrammaton (the Hebrew JHVH, upper left), and Christ, the Fountain of Life.
Featured on PDR in the collection A Hall of Mirrors: Cabala, Spiegel Der Kunst Und Natur, In Alchymia (1615)
Featuring four alchemical engravings by Raphael Custos — much reproduced since Carl Jung included the third as “The Mountain of the Adepts” in Psychology and Alchemy (1968) — Cabala’s leading symbol is the looking glass, which the author offers as a tool for penetrating the mysteries of alchemy and divinity. The century spanning from 1550 to 1650 saw the publication of hundreds of books with “Speculum”, “Spiegel”, and “Mirror” in their titles, a testament to the technology’s immense power over the European imagination. As Urszula Szulakowska describes, a belief emerged during this period that “pictures drawn according to the single-point perspective system could become a type of magical mirror”. To help its readers commune with God, the “celestial looking glass”, Cabala offers three graphical “mirrors”…
Also appearing in the collection…
End: Multiplication
Artist
Date
1615
From
Cabala, Spiegel der Kunst unnd Natur: in Alchymia
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