The poet William Blake once warned that every man had to create a Cosmology of his own or end up a slave in another man's. Both Bruno and Blake built theirs out of Magic. But the problem with Magic is that it talks a language cobbled together from the habits of Associations and not the clear tracks of Logic. Thomas Mann called it Moon-Grammar. It governed the systems of fools, poets, artists, lunatics, and shamans. It explains mysteries from the inside out - without measurement or rule. Alchemy is "written" in Moon-Grammar; it is at best Steganographic and when it is "sublime" it reaches the Objective Correlative which T.S. Eliot wrote about. Here images speak thru the company they keep and even then they do it as innuendo.

"It is not possible to understand supernatural things, except through their shining in natural things."

L'Asino Cillenico del Nolano

from Cabala del Cacallo Pegaseo

by Giordano Bruno

1585

In this book Bruno introduces the "ass of unknowing" - his character/symbol for the mystical "Nothing" beyond all systems of knowing. The image is borrowed from Egypt where the ass bore Isis: the false worship of the Ass is emblematic of "those who mistake the bearers of holy things for the holy things themselves."

When Kenny La Roche geomances a Rock we drag the spirit of the beast out to its surface - a process called "Calcination" in the Alchemical Opus. Calcination signals the "death of the profane" - it describes "the extinction of all interest in life and in the manifest world." The interior spirit of the matter is manifest now at the surface which yields to the Sacred. The Rock's worldly face is now replaced by the interior mask of its spirit.

In the image above, Slag finds the perfect spot where we can join two "ring" satellites to their mother. Saturn is the third Temple Bell erected and the gang has the process down to a science. Two guys can easily erect a Temple Bell Sculpture, though it's quicker and easier with a gang.

Saturn, the 3rd Temple Bell of the Belfry of the Cathedral Our Lady of the Ligne, stands on a high hill with a commanding view of the Leelanau Peninsula. The sculpture was sold before we made it. It's our 3rd model in the line of 7 and on Saturn we pushed the envelope in wood-carving. Both the front and rear faces of the lintel have been routed and in the center of both sides of the lintel the Captain has carved: Kronos on the front and on the obverse the sigils for the Constellations of Aries and Aquarius.

Continue to Page 9 Temple Bell - Saturn