Every time I see an image of a hand and fruit I am now liable to think of Sun Wukung, the Monkey King and his theft of the Sacred Peach. But it will be Christopher Walken's sneering definition of man that I will hear inside my head. In the movie The Prophecy, Walken plays Gabriel, the pissed-off Archangel who is so furious at god for letting men into heaven just because they have souls that he descends to earth to wage war against humanity whom he describes simply as: Fuckin' Monkeys. It is interesting that in the East the myths blame a Simian for man's loss of Immortality while in the West we blame ourselves. That's a Jade snuff bottle below - nicely illustrated with the Monkey Myth.
Because of the south-east orientation of the cathedral apse, Fulcanelli says, "one of the three rose windows which adorn the transepts and the main porch, is never lighted by the sun." Which is the north rose on the left transept. The right transept Rose - the southern Rose - "blazes in the midday sun." The window on the main-porch - "the great rose . . . which surpasses its side sisters in size and brilliance" is then "lit by the coloured rays of the setting sun." Fulcanelli sums his thought: "Thus on the facade of the Gothic Cathedral the colours of the Work unfold in a circular progression, going from the shadows - represented by the absence of light and the colour black - to the perfection of ruddy light, passing through the colour white, considered as being the mean between black and red."
"In the Middle Ages, the central rose window of the porches was called Rota, the wheel. Now, the wheel is the alchemical hieroglyph of the time necessary for the coction of the philosophical matter, and consequently of the coction itself. The sustained, constant and equal fire, which the artist maintains night and day in the course of this operation, is for this reason called the fire of the wheel. Moreover, in addition to the heat necessary for the liquefaction of the philosopher's stone, a second agent is needed as well, called the secret or philosophic fire. It is this latter fire, sustained by ordinary heat, which makes the wheel turn and produces the various phenomena which the artist observes in his vessel."
The tombstone skull is from the long cloister of the Campo Santo near the Duomo in Pisa; I just love the way the Rota is Squared by the marble. Fulcanelli continues by quoting De Nuysement's "Poème philosophic de la Vérité de la Phisique Mineralle" -

I recommend you to go by this road and no other.

Only take notice of the tracks of my wheel,

And, in order to give an equal heat overall,

Do not rise or descend too soon to heaven or earth.

For in rising too high you will be burnt by heaven,

And in descending too low you will be destroyed by earth.

But if your course remains set in the middle

The route will be plainer and the way more sure.
"Thus the rose alone represents the action of the fire and its duration. That is why the medieval decorators sought in their rose windows to translate the movements of matter, stirred up by the elementary fire . . . The Preponderance of the fiery symbol in the architecture of the 14th & 15th centuries . . . has given rise to the name flamboyant gothic for the style of this period."
So once again you can see that T.S. Eliot was prescient in his insistence that "The fire and the rose are one." That's Skippy, the Minister of Propaganda for Kenny. On these pages, you're inside his head.
Continue to Page 9 Rose Window Mission