EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Breaking out of the World

For aeons men and women have thought that the stars in the night sky were pin-prick size holes in the fabric of the cosmos and that the bright light pouring in through these holes was visual evidence of a truer reality beyond. Above, in what is probably a seventeenth-century woodcut, a spiritual traveller breaks through the fabric to see those truths. They are depicted as rings of flames , suns and wheels, the latter representing the eternal life-cycle. This originally monochromatic woodcut, probably from the seventeenth century, was colored by Adam Maclean for the cover of Stephan A. Hoeller’s excellent introduction to Gnosticism.¹ No wonder. Few images so clearly convey how certain mystics see this world with Nature and all its forms as illusory and something to escape from.

There is, to my mind, one fault. It fails to suggest how all such extra-reality voyages are inward, into a greater understanding of one’s own self and to find the source of one’s imagination. Here’s how the poet and artist William Blake put it:

“To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the Immortal Eyes of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought into Eternity Ever Expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.”

1. Hoeller, Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing (New York: Quest Books) 2002