Unlike painters such as Durer, Bosch, Giovanni Bellini, Parmigianino, Guercino, Perugino, and Mantegna, who used to scatter hermetic bits over their works, in Michelangelo, this comes with an extreme rarity. Did Michelangelo know the meaning of the profound and esoteric symbolism? Did he know the relevance of skin allegory and how the whole hermeticism, along with Alchemy, was based on it? Besides being remorseful, Michelangelo was also a great admirer of Dante; he knows the whole passages of the Divine Comedy by heart. And surely he also realized the esoteric and occult implications in Dante’s work.
In Florence, in the first half of the sixteenth century, there was no longer just Dante, Francesco da Barberino, and Petrarca. Marsilio Ficino had already exhausted his earthly adventure and translated works from Greek philosophers. Still, above all, Ficino had already met Gemistos Pletho, the last secret erudite of the dead school of Athens. Therefore Florence had already come into contact with the Neoplatonists, perhaps there was no Bessarion, like in Venice, but the first Neoplatonic academies were beginning to emerge and even bore the name of these late pagan philosophers.
But let us return to our sacred ordeal – symbolically represented by the universal judgment – to perpetuate it, we need a “field of action”, and this place is the skin that envelops and surrounds us. A spiritual part, but still anchored to our body.
Here we are only hinting, only touching, the ancient Philosophy and barely mentioning the triad Apollo-Hecate-Hermes, where Hecate has similarities with the ineffable deity of Aura, and is powerful beyond measure because feared even by Zeus. Her famous spinning top was the instrument with which oracles evoked her.
Ancient myths want this creator of space to represent the Aura that surrounds all bodies, and the most straightforward – as well as clearest – symbol that represents this concept, can only be a skin that wraps around our body. Can we, in this case, use a term so dear to the Theosophists as “subtle body”? Each cultural era has defined this skin in different terms, for example, Iamblichus described the subtle body as the vehicle of the soul (ochêma tês psuchês), and it is through this vehicle that the soul animates the physical body and through which it receives the presence of the gods. Through the ochêma, the soul enters embodied life, and through this same ochêma, the soul receives the gods and becomes divine.
Another reasonably clear symbolic analogy is the so-called Vesica Piscis fish bladder. More than its almond shape, the bladder of the fish gives a good idea because it is full of air, while ours would be full of liquid.
Bartholomew is portrayed with a knife, and it seems like he has skinned himself. Meanwhile, he looks at his neighbor, St. Lawrence, on the gridiron. Defining a grill that is instead of a ladder is a stretch. Here St. Lawrence is holding his gridiron like the farmers who go to pick cherries and take their ladders slipped over their shoulders. But this cannot be a real ladder because it has six steps, like any convenient esoteric stairs.
When it comes to Arcana, alchemists are luckier as they can, to a certain extent, speak more freely of their operations, but through their symbolism. We have already encountered the Skin concept in Blaise de Vigenère. In his Traité du Feu et du Sel, Treatise on Fire and Salt, the French diplomat speaks of sacrifices on minerals and how the extracted skin can be considered a form of light. And how this one becomes the only actual alchemical body in the middle of all that raw matter/Materia Tertia. Because the symbolic skin of our body is the ineffable organ qualified to interact with light, in the same way, Secret Fire is extracted out of whichever body qualified to interact with light, and also with another Secret Fire/Mercurius/Spirit of Life. Mercurius Duplicatus and/or the interactions between our Spirit of Life and light are all model roles for our alchemical skin. Therefore the skin is synonymous with standing for the Spirit of Life and being synonymous with “Mumia” or mummy. And in the same way, Mumia/mummy and skin are allegories for Mercurius.
Both Paracelsus and Philalethes made use of the term “Mumia”. Paracelsus also called it “Evestrum” in Liber Apocalypseos Hermetis, de Supremo Mundi Secreto or book of the hermetic revelations on the ultimate secret of the world (retaken by B.Figulus in Pandora 1608). He also wrote a little treatise entitled De vis magnetica mumiae in homine. Mumia-Skin has the attribute of magnetic because its essential fire, unlike the common fire, operates exclusively employing its essences and virtues. Ostanes would say that “a nature delights in another nature”.
Archarion in his Von Wahrer Alchemie, Freiburg 1983 retook Philalethes: “It is the Light of Life, Mumia Vitalis, the Calidum Nativum (native warm), the radical humidum, Mercurius Vitae (Mercurius of Life), Mercurius of a spiritual and heavenly pure essence, which ordinary men called Heaven, which appears to their eyes consisting of blue light, air, and a magnetic salt. This salt is the fermenting agent, flavoring, balsamic, opening, and altering, in fact into it, its nice mirror; there is a magnetic air light, the concentrated breath of life that gives taste and smell, the celestial fire, the blue agent, the fiery nature, the celestial matter that makes visible the invisible, spiritual the material and manifests the hidden”.
The last sentence brings us to an alchemical axiom, not hermetic though, that’s to say we have to make another pulpy flesh to embody this spiritual light. Mummies and skins seem to have close resemblances with the esoteric etheric bodies. Still, Alchemy is about further embodiments of ancient Souls and the most ancient of all, namely our Spirit of Life/Mumia/Skin (6).
And here, the St. Lawrence stairs come in handy: standing either for the densities of Mercurius, Scala Transmutationibus (stairs of transmutations), or the six steps in the last cooking. The first matter then becomes matter first or Materia Prima. The resurrection of the flesh, or better, the divine, ethereal flesh, is the day we will remain only with the noblest part of ourselves, more precisely with the one we will be able to extract. Although alchemists commonly reserve this treatment to metals, that’s to say, destroying a metal to take out the noblest part, or Secret Fire/Mercurius/Spirit of Life. However, we need a new flesh, or body, to host it.
On a ladder of densities, this Secret Fire/Mercurius will make denser, or richer, the same Mercurius, once duplicated, till becoming a metallic Perfect Sulfur/Soul/Christ through sublimation and/or fixation on the cross of St. John the Baptist. The real action seems to start from St. Peter, the old white-bearded man just above St. Bartholomew and on the left of Christ. The first of the evangelists, or the Holy Stone Saint, looks very similar to our Saturn, the extracting and dissolving agent, or Mercurius. St. Peter is handing two keys to his Christ: one gold and one silver. Just as the two secret keys mentioned by Dante in Divine Comedy and resembling the two hermetic keys sealed in gold and silver, that’s to say, the moon tree and sun tree.
In the upper part of the fresco, therefore in the celestial areas to the infernal part of the damned below, two symbols can be seen: a cross on the right and a column on the left. And both are carried by angelic hosts.
I don’t remember where I read the quote that I’m going to do now – I didn’t think I would ever make a website – but some Neoplatonist philosopher said that the column is a symbol of the drum of the earth.
The cross can symbolically be compared to the sun’s ecliptic and, consequently, the wind rose. In ancient times it was thought that the alternation of the solar seasons gave life to the winds because winds and sounds had the same common origin.
- see also Francesco del Cossa and the Twin Eyes of a Painter;
- See also Holbein Dead Christ Builds his Grave ;