RE: An Allegory of Salvation (Koen Gheuens & Cary Rapaport)
Barbrey > 11-07-2021, 12:34 AM
Koen, I hit quote but nothing came up so I am just replying to your alpha and omega comment. I too looked this up when researching the mandorla. Apparently, aside from the christ or mary image in a mandorla, the inside was usually left empty with the sometimes exception of...alpha and omega.
And we have 37, not 36, moons, possibly related to a marker for a combined beginning and ending (dragon eating its own tail, intercal period, life everlasting, time everlasting, leap year, alpha and omega! etc, etc).
Until you pointed that out, I didn't realize those letters were the only identifiable ones. Makes you think, but I'm not going down the text road again. Do we know, btw, if that "or" in the mandorla's middle is just someone's random scribble?
Regarding absences, there has to be a bar somewhere I suppose. I don't find the absence of clothes, for instance, remarkable, as I see the figures as part of quintessence, celestial or terrestrial, conceived, begotten and begetting it, as some hermetist remarked. Thus, imaged as pregnant females. All celestials, planets, stars, demigods, and souls, including anima mundi the world soul, are made of quintessence, and all terrestrials contain it (if distilled! - physically and/or spiritually). More remarkable to me is the presence of hats.
This accounts for me, too, why these figures seem to both be making some substance and be the substance they're making, at the same time.
As for utensils, I don't believe they're real people (aside from a few mythic and specific characters), so the only utensils they would carry are ones that mark their specific purposes, such as the stars' role in Fate (the spindle, scissors, as health "blockers", etc), or magic (Solomon's Ring, the sacrifice, the talisman), and ultimately in health.
We do agree, I don't know if you remember, that that one line-up of figures were more specific. You stated, quite convincingly, you thought the story of Philomel was being played out, whereas I believe some mythical women were divided according to good and bad fate, so we had Jocasta as prisoner of fate with son Oedipus missing his foot and Medea on one side, and luckier ones at the beginning of the line. But I keep relating everything back to medicine of the time, and the line up reminded me of that Sphere of Life and Death according to fate that the physicians used.
I wasn't actually thinking of specific script letters when I mentioned absences in the text, though now I'm interested in alpha and omega! More of linguistic patterns.
And where has the time gone?