Rome was sunny. Santa was alternately stoned or playing sax for lunch. Bruno spent the last 7 years of his life in the hideous Castel Sant' Angelo, the medieval prison which connects with the Vatican thru a long, dank, corridor. Pooler says he saw the Nolan in his cell on Candlemas in February of 1600. Just days before his execution. His last Christmas, he told Pooler Jones, had convinced him more than ever that he was right about the sun - about Sol - and about Sol Invictus. God sheds the grace of life thru all his suns in all his universe just as Hermes Trismegistus had instructed the monkeys so long ago.

The first of the 7 Temple Bells of the Cathedral Our Lady of the Ligne is dedicated to the "Planet" Sol. In Alchemy the 7 Planets play leading roles in the drama with Sol and Luna - the sun and the moon - being the two principles, or opposites which both wear a bunch of masks. They are icons of the active and passive, the king and the queen, the male and the female. Sol is the "philosophical sulfur" while Luna, the moon, is the "mercury" of the Work. In Alchemical iconography, when the sun is painted black (Sol niger) it signifies the "prime matter" - or as Jung points out - the unconscious mind in an unworked state. As the sun, and the Work, climb from this Nigredo state, the miracle of transmutation will process the prima materia from the base of lead to the goal of gold.

When a lion and a dragon eat each other they signify "union without loss of identity." In Alchemy, when the Green Lion is shown devouring the Sun we are meant to see the color of the lion as emblematic of the beginning of the Work, or as a chemical cipher where it warns that the gold has been dissolved in "aqua regia" which is a mixture of hydrochloric acids and nitric. Jung writes: "In alchemy, the lion - the 'royal' beast - is a synonym for Mercurius, or, to be more accurate, for a stage in his transformation. He is the warm-blooded form of the devouring, predatory monster who first appears as the dragon. Usually the lion-form succeeds the dragon's death and eventual dismemberment." Adam Mclean points out that the Green Lion is also an image of the raw power in nature, the power the poet Dylan Thomas refers to as "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower." The illustration above is from the Alchemical Manuscript called the "Rosarium" which was composed of 20 woodcuts collected into a Volume called: De Alchimia opuscula complura veterum philosophorum published in Frankfurt in 1550. Stanislaw Klossowski De Rola cautions us to focus first on the blood in the image. A Green Lion, he intimates, is matter itself in its primordial state out of which the principles of sulfur and mercury will be extracted. So the Lion may not be eating the sun but rather "disgorging" it as well as the Hermetic Mercury of the Wise in the form of blood.

When Sol was first erected at Kejara's Bridge Cafe we made 4 plaques 7" by 7" and let them in at about throat level, two each on each side of the verticals. Skippy outputted the images of the 4 sigils from his giclée printer and then slag "laminated" them with some kind of clear spar varnish. But the weather got to them and the colors of the ink ran together. So the Captain took over the task and hand-carved the sigils into some contrasting woods to be set like jewels in the notched verticals. The sigil to the left is Kenny's symbol of the Above and the Below as mirror images of each other. As Hermes Trismegistus put it: "What is Above is What is Below, so that the Miracle of Unity may Happen."

To the right is the Alphalogical symbol for the metal Gold, the "material" goal of the great Opus of Alchemy. In Alchemical symbolism the Lion and the Gold and the Sun are one. Self-luminous, sacred, incorruptible, wisdom, are some of their attributes. Gold is emblematic of attaining the mystical center, or completion of the goal. Primitives saw gold as god's shit and in several languages the terms for wealth, gold, and shit are cognate. Bruno knew that in Egypt gold was considered to be the flesh of the gods themselves. Freud loved the connections between gold and flesh and shit and all kinds of buried and/or hidden treasures which needed to be "dug up" and transformed.

To the right is a copy of another plaque which we mounted on a small pedestal near the finished statue of Sol. You can see the other two sigils which we used for Sol: that of Kenny La Roche - out winged serpent-circle and then below that the Astrological symbol of the Sun - the circle with the dot in the center.

Continue to Page 6 Temple Bell - Luna