The eight spokes wheel on a Trisulti pillar means more than a yearbook. An archeo-astronomical chart for Equinoxes, Solstices, heliacal and acronic stars.
When one looks at the sundial from the courtyard before the church of St.Bartholomew, he/she can perceive the wheel out of the four signs. So when seeing the solar clock, the eight parts of the lunar-solar year also appear to be considered. The sundial and the pillar seem to belong to the same baroque age. An epoch in which art was never a chance occurrence or a fancy, but a symbol was always a hint. The reader can find an archeoastronomy course on heliacal and acronic stars in the last part of the article.
The presence of a sundial and a yearbook wheel in the st. Bartholomew’s courtyard may stand for the basic fact that not only the hour of the day is critical but also part of the solar-lunar year. So we are here before a solar significance for the allegory of the wheel again, as we have already seen in Heiligen Dreifaltigkeit and Secret Iconography of the Wheel, but this time as a partition of the solar and lunar path, our asters (2). And that leads us to reflect on how ancient Romans were used to dividing a year. Because apart from any other historical consideration, this could be interesting for our alchemical works too.
To make it relatively trouble-free, the interpretation of this eight spokes specimen is all that surrounds it. The set is an ancient ( ten centuries) monastery, turned into Carthusian with special protection by pope Innocenzo III in 1208, to become an abbey in 1947.
The religious community inside was widely renowned for its pharmacological skills. Even today, they prepare and sell in their beautiful eighteenth-style pharmacy their remedies not only from the vegetal kingdom but also from mineral one.
So those monks have been used to working in laboratories for centuries and used to grind in their mortars, to distill and sublime. To fix in the end, as well. The walls of the pharmacy are decorated with a symbolism that we can generically define as hermetic. So that we cannot wonder to also see inside the monastery a Sator square painted on a wall.
The wheel we are examining is likely to be a so-called “time” wheel, not only because of its eight partitions but also for the other signs in the pillar. This quadrilateral stone column stands alongside the monastery driveway and precisely in front of the sundial on the wall. On the top of the pillar stands a lion, a very unusual decoration for an ancient catholic monastery, directly looking at the sundial as though this piece of the painted wall had been a very important item.
The central part of the sundial, or the part from which a very subtle gnomon starts, shows instead a painted kind of three-baluster emblem crossed by a carpenter’s square and a scythe. The emblem is impressive in a catholic monastery. One can guess the farmer’s tool does represent the hard work of monks in the fields ( only a colossal oak forest surrounds the housing, no meadows and just a garden for their medicinal plants inside), the carpenter’s tool might have a rationale for the refurbishing of the original monastery. But why is there no mention of the main activity of the monks inside the Carthusian, that’s to say, the iatrochemistry? And why the three balusters? Three gates, as our three works (see an Opus magnum scheme)? Is believable that back in age from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, a closed community in the middle of an Italian forest, entirely dedicated to chemistry and medicine, had never been reached by the alchemical fashion waving the outside world around them? No, it isn’t.
In the upper part of the emblem, there is a motto: ” post tenebre spero lucem”, or after the dark, I hope in light. But during the baroque age was not uncommon to see similar short sentences about light and dark on solar clocks. For instance, once I saw ” Lux fugat umbra”, or light puts the shadow to flight, which is just a slightly different concept from the Trisulti monastery, nevertheless we can not know if the monks had instead the secret intention to throw an alchemical nuance and make their motto to encapsulate the first whiteness forming over the black matter during the end of the first putrefactive phase in preparatory works, which are brought to an end by this white appearance. We know that there is a stage in our alchemical works defined as ” light coming out of the dark”, which is the precise title of a poetic treatise by Santinelli.
It is a fact that the monks seem to be skilled not only in chemistry but even in the art of making solar clocks. The item in front of the pillar is on a perfectly south-aligned wall. On another perfectly south-aligned wall, just a few meters away, one can find traces of another solar clock calculated with the sophisticated so-called “method of corresponding heights” (1).
Let’s have a look at the other signs around the pillar. Precisely in front of the sundial is a butcher’s knife, recalling san Bartholomew’s martyr. No wonder, since the church is dedicated to this saint ( we have already met him in Michelangelo & the Mumia Skin in Last Judgement. Apparently, he was skinned, indeed). On the other sides of the quadrilateral, we have a cross and an eagle. And here, the explications are curious: the cross stands for the papal power and the eagle for the imperial one. How frequently are we used to seeing ruling signs in a catholic monastery, and why is the sign of the house of Hohenstaufen in the country ruled by the pope? And, what’s more, why having that sculptured some four or five centuries after the death of the last Hohenstaufen emperor, Frederick the second? And why accompany all that is an eight spokes wheel? The official explication is even more imaginative here: the wheel represents the time when the tremendous ruling powers appeared. But why a catholic monastery should have been concerned about a ruling power, the imperial one, which was foreign to it ( although Frederik II was said to have made gifts to the monks)?