Painting is magic

 Summary: Salvator Mundi conjoins with Anima Mundi in a self-revelatory act. We hypothesize that Leonardo created his Salvator Mundi in a state of magical possession, daimonic inspiration and passionate fervor in bright moonlight, with a candle, and a magical or skrying mirror that might explain the quality of light and other anomalies in the painting.

Whether he consciously or unconsciously employed magical technique, a tangible numinous quality emanates from the iconic work. Beyond all the intracosmic forces and conflicts we are normally vulnerable to, we can encounter that force.

Art and magic have been associated with one another from the first scratched petroglyphs and cave paintings. Art has always been a magical act. Some may have been created in broad daylight, but others were purposefully concealed from full light in darkness, the dim light of the silvery moon, torchlight or deep within caves.

An intentional act, none of the imaginal approach to the artistic gesture was accidental and added to the numinous effect of the creation. Notions of ‘like attracts like’ built up to create a specific magical atmosphere (doctrine of signatures), where art mirrors creation, as metaphorically and literally exemplified by the camera obscura.

Later artists learned to use a variety of techniques and technologies to enhance their experience as well as result. Hermeticists, for example, were well aware of such psychic effects. Magic and art go hand in hand both using invisible forces to change the visible world. What if the artist sat for his own portrait with the same intent and passion as the magician invoking the gods?

They used correspondences to amplify their theurgic rites, and those of the Sun (son) encouraged the ascension of the soul into celestial realms, a higher state of consciousness familiar to many artists and creative types.  The rite creates a conducive frame of mind. Creativity has a spiritual dimension. They also employed divinatory rites in their expression.

In Renaissance art, the addition of realistic perspective, depth of field, and luminosity, made control of light within the canvas crucial. Much depended on the desired influence. Questions arise around the crystal sphere in the painting. Is it refracting multiple light sources or is it encoding a secret allusion to yet another mystery, even older than Christ? And, if so, what might that message be?

All of the above could potentially relate to the production and look of Salvator Mundi. The prospect it is Leonardo’s self-portrait increases the possibility some form of mirror was used in its execution, not to exclude the psychic reflection such an act surely produced. After all, portraying oneself as Christ is at least an identification with the archetype and at worst a hubris.

The Serious Moonlight

So, the question remains: what sort of light conditions, worldview, and technical assistance might Leonardo have employed in this masterpiece and why did he choose them? Was this art purposefully made for conscious or unconscious magical purposes? And how might that have affected its production?

Was Leonardo, (b. April 15, 1452 – d. May 2, 1519), in fact, purposefully recreating himself at a higher level? Jung said individuation, the realization of our innate potential, goes on whether we consciously work to develop it through spiritual means, or not. Arguably, Leonardo was one of the most complex and gifted individuals who ever lived.

Was he now giving himself Christ’s iconic benediction as Christ Almighty? But curiously there is no characteristic halo, nor gospels clutched to the chest. Or, is he using it in the old Roman sense for us to know his doppelganger is ‘speaking’ or ‘teaching’, suggesting perhaps a deeper mystery?

“As Christian art evolved, symbols, including Christ’s hand gestures, took on deeper significance. With the thumb opened, the three open digits came to represent the Trinity (The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), while the two closed represented the dual nature of Christ as both man and God.” 

Renaissance art moved away from iconography toward a more naturalistic depiction of God as man. Did Leonardo see himself somehow as both Fully Human and Fully Divine? Are his doppelganger’s fingers actually pointing at the Moon?

Natural individuation just happens. Instead of going into a dream, artists go into their imagination. Few individuals in history have been as unique as Leonardo, or expressed as much genius in art and invention.

He was a highly differentiated individual and divergent thinker. Yet as a bastard child with a gay orientation and wild eccentricities, he was not a likely candidate for conventional spirituality. Fortunately, his was a rather humanistic era, in which his talents were exploited by the wealthy.

If, as Jung suggested, the gods have become diseases, Leonardo possibly contended with an ocular problem that made his vision a singular challenge — strabismus, the misalignment of crossed eyes or wall-eyed. Being left-handed, his brain was also crossed-wired, and thus we find him mirror-writing in his journals, a technique considered also as a magical cypher concealing secrets. Or, was he simply dyslexic?

Or, he might have just been ambidexterous as one article suggests: “Analysis of his hatching, though, suggests that he was in fact right-handed. … There is even some evidence that left-handed poster boy Leonardo da Vinci may not have been naturally left-handed. He clearly did use his left hand to draw and paint with: there seems little doubt about that.“

Christ is a symbol of Jung’s archetype of the Self. This union with the Self, uniting all opposites is an illumined lunacy, a form of wholeness embodying the Self, the most powerful archetypal forces. Few people went their own way through life pursuing the love of beauty as intensely as Leonardo. The crystal sphere is another symbol for the Self. So, perhaps one invisible trope is Self-Mastery.

We might logically expect a subject such as ‘the light of the world’ to be presented in glowing brightness, reflecting the radiant solar nature of the Christ. Instead, we a dimmer impression, even a sort of illumined lunacy in the haunting figure with its peculiar eyes. This figure continues to breathe mystery after all these centuries of obscurity.

Could this be the subtle madness of mesmerizing muse possession, a higher state of mind than logic or reason? What artist doesn’t know the giddy response of the guiding inspirational spirit — whether called one’s Angel, Daimon, or Duende. Mesmerized creativity comes from the unconscious, an entranced realm, channeling the universal magnetic current of aesthetic sensibility.

Surrender to the Muse produces a more fluid, even erotic relationship of subject and object that collapses the distance in a mystical unification. The muse is both mirror and mask  even a reflection of anxieties about gender and power, alterity and authority.

The daimonic causes obsession until it has its way, until the person with the talent begins to work on developing it through inspired motivation by a spiritual force or genius. We hunger for that calling, destiny, and empowerment. Rollo May claimed, “The source is simply human potential.”

Plato described “possession by the Muses” as “a kind of madness,” but in a good way, saying that sane people had no place in halls of art. It narrows the focus to the project at hand, makes us stop eating, craving only the nourishment of the flow state, and keeps us restless long into the night in pursuit of a satisfying resting place. Socrates also called this variety of creative passion ‘possession by the Muses’ and rated it above technical mastery.

Depth psychology views solar and lunar minds as complimentary aspects of a single entity, the mind as a whole. In a modern comment, psychologist James Hillman said, “Alchemical soul-making proposes that the final idea of sun conjuncted with moon means nothing less and no other than a condition of being in which solar brilliance and awakeness and moon-madness are marvelously conjoined. The mysterium conjunctionis is illumined lunacy.” (Hillman, “Silver and the White Earth” (part 1), p 21).

The lunar orientation suggested by the androgyny of the figure and the crystal ball includes psychism, embodiment, depth, depression, ecstasy, and immersion in life and pain — organic rhythms and cycles, death, renewal, and regeneration.

Alchemists were called “the old artists,” by Paracelsus ((born Nov. 11 or Dec. 17, 1493, Einsiedeln, Switzerland—died Sept. 24, 1541, Salzburg). Leonardo died (1452-1519) when Paracelsus was in his late 20’s, so they shared a similar alchemical culture, if not one another’s direct influence.

Was Leonardo an alchemist? Wikipedia say the obvious, “He was trained in the workshop of Verrocchio, who according to Vasari, was an able alchemist. Leonardo was a chemist in so much as that he experimented with different media for suspending paint pigment.”

In alchemy, when Solar and Lunar forces from the previous stages which are fused together in a coagulation, the Tincture arises and its Augmentation and Multiplication. The Tincture of the Philosophers is an herbal medicine or quintessence. Referring to their “dirty drugs,” Paracelsus claims expertise and divinity, “O, you hypocrites, who despise the truths taught you by a true physician, who is himself instructed by Nature, and is a son of God himself!”

This first arcanum hides the foundations of all mysteries and of all works. This Universal Medicine, the Philosopher’s Stone, was for renovation and was used in secret. Is it too far-fetched to think Leonardo might have had an interest in this secret? As an experimentalist, he may well have been interested in medicines and longevity.

Paracelsus says, “The matter of the Tincture, then, is a very great pearl and a most precious treasure, and the noblest thing next to the manifestation of the Most High and the consideration of men which can exist upon earth. This is the Lili of Alchemy and of Medicine, which the philosophers have so diligently sought after, but, through the failure of entire knowledge and complete preparation, they have not progressed to the perfect end thereof.”

Lunar consciousness, the feminine side, embraces and incorporates egoic solar dynamics, a deepening and acceptance of our wounds. They say ‘The gift is near to the wound.’ Lunar consciousness includes our personal reactions to the complex environment. Lunar rites of creativity typically take place under the full moon.

He is critical in his notebooks of superstitions, but maybe he privately sought to correct them, like Paracelsus. Wikipedia quotes him on alchemists:“The false interpreters of nature declare that quicksilver is the common seed of every metal, not remembering that nature varies the seed according to the variety of the things she desires to produce in the world.[4][14]

Old alchemists… have never either by chance or by experiment succeeded in creating the smallest element that can be created by nature; however [they] deserve unmeasured praise for the usefulness of things invented for the use of men, and would deserve it even more if they had not been the inventors of noxious things like poisons and other similar things which destroy life or mind.”[15]
And many have made a trade of delusions and false miracles, deceiving the stupid multitude.”[4]

Are You Sirius?

A major flaw in a painting identified as one of Leonardo da Vinci’s lost works makes some historians think it’s a fake, according to The Guardian. The crystal orb in the image doesn’t distort light in the way natural physics does, which would be an unusual error for da Vinci.

Or, could it be that Leonardo sought to depict something beyond photo realism. A hypercosmic allusion to what might well be the constellation Sirius seems to float in the spherical heaven, for whatever reason he might have found that germane to the subject.

To show which star was suggested required the context of at least part of the constellation Canis Major. This dog star, called Sothis in Egypt, was associated with Isis, the Feminine principle.

This is certainly as viable and more plausible than Christie’s toss-off suggestion that, “It is our opinion that he chose not to portray it in this way because it would be too distracting to the subject of the painting,” a spokeswoman told The Guardian.”

It might just as well indicate a subtle balancing of the personality anima/animus traits, the sphere incorporating the Feminine aspects of the Christ — his anima or inner female.
In the One World of alchemy, inner and outer light are identical, seamlessly wed like Luna and Sol in Hillman’s ‘illumined lunacy’. Such lunar consciousness is a different type of interior light, an imaginal world distinctly different from the bright dayworld.

If, indeed, this were his aim, it could help explain why he would choose such a subtle light for the canvas, when he lived in a land known for its bright sun, unlike far northern climes.

Their alchemical combination is a sort of “illumined lunacy,” according to Hillman.  Thus, the “fuzzy” domain is revealed as the realm of imagination between the spiritual heights and psychobiological depths–that limbo, or twilight zone, between heaven and hell.

This imaginal perspective is neither real nor unreal, in the conventional sense. In the archetypal journey, both the unconscious and conscious are transformed through the imaginal morphological process. The whole is a process of fuzzy transformations of imaginal forms, culminating in a state of consciousness which transcends them all. An old alchemical text says, “Whence will come the Chamaeleon of our Chaos, in which all secrets are hid in their potential state.”

One result of embracing the alchemical notion of coincidentia oppositorum is the logical consequence of the relativity of the God-concept. It evokes the fundamental ambiguity of the divine nature of the self. The coincidence of opposites is expressed in the image of a divine or royal marriage, which has universal cultural validity and redeeming effects.

It supersedes the constructive/destructive powers of the unconscious, allowing us to experience awareness of a fraction of the unconscious which gets us outside of ourselves, our times, and our cultural bias. In alchemy this state is symbolized as an androgen, that which is whole unto itself.

It is well-known that Leonardo was gay, whether such tropes worked into his painting consciously or unconsciously. Others have speculated on many of his other works for such signals. Ficino, with his own homoerotic tendencies, believed that Eros, a “great demon,” was the centerpiece of all magical activity.

The interaction of spirit and soul, discrete yet connected, represents the sacred marriage, or coniunctio. So, one task is to distinguish them, one from the other. They have been confounded in theology, philosophy, psychology, and science. Anima, is a diffuse consciousness that seeks to re-create and unify with spirit in the royal marriage.

This mode of perception is conscious of its unconsciousness and can recognize the potential latent in the unknown aspect (the promise of the divine child). This style of consciousness can be characterized as illumined lunacy, and was a characteristic of many saints and sages throughout history. Lunar consciousness is anima consciousness, realization of the animating  and enchanting principle of the soul of the world, the natural archetypal counterpart of the Christ.

Anima, or anima mundi as the soul of the world is the archetype of psychic consciousness that makes us aware of our areas of unconsciousness.  Soul, in its relationship with spirit constantly invades the day-world consciousness with images, fears, moods, and mystery.  It is elusive, paradoxical, and ambiguous.  This mode of perception is conscious of its unconsciousness and can recognize the potential latent in the unknown aspect.

It could be characterized as “illumined lunacy.” Anima-consciousness is that mode which is appropriate to experience in the astral plane and astral body.  The realm of imagination is psychic reality. Historically, crystals and magic mirrors have been used to induce and manifest such liminal states of consciousness.

Mystical models of thing and no-thing, such as the Taoist symbol of yin-yang embody such polarity in ever-shifting proportions of dynamic interplay. It reflects the interpenetration of existence with non-existence, of essence and Source. The principles of coherence and correspondence unite them.