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The Volatile Feminine
The Volatile Feminine Hitchcock’s The Birds and the Splendor Solis — the same menace, five centuries apart. There is a plate in the Splendor Solis — the luminous alchemical treatise preserved in the British Library as Harley MS 3469 — that has always unsettled me. Not the drowning king, not the dismembered body, not the…
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Sol et Luna: Jung, Alchemy, and the Dreaming Mind
The alchemists thought they were transmuting lead into gold. Jung saw what they were really doing: describing the transformation of the psyche in the only language available to them — the language of matter. The Splendor Solis, that luminous 22-plate manuscript from 1582, is not a chemistry textbook. It is a dream journal written in…
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The Knight of the Royal Art
The Knight of the Royal Art On the Splendor Solis, Crowley’s Art, and the vertical cosmology of VITRIOL. The Knight on the Fountain Splendor Solis Plate 3 is one of the most densely encoded images in Western esotericism. A giant knight stands on the rim of a double fountain — silver armor decorated with gold…
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Dream Plates: Six Visions from the Work
Dream Plates: Six Visions from the Work Trochaic meditations on images that arrived without origin — the Splendor Solis refracted through the places where sleeping goes. I. The Drowning King’s Bathroom The Drowning King’s Bathroom Copper piping runs to nowhere, Tiles are floating, walls are gone. In the bath the bearded sovereign Sits dissolving, calm…
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Why Luna Wears the Red Crown: The Coniunctio Paradox in the Splendor Solis
Why Luna Wears the Red Crown The Coniunctio paradox in the Splendor Solis — and why your confusion is the first stage of the Work. If you have spent any time with the Splendor Solis — the magnificent alchemical treatise attributed to Salomon Trismosin, preserved most beautifully in Harley MS 3469 — you have probably…
