The drive toward wholeness through polarity. [Archetype Vision 002]

The Yggdrasil Tree illustrated by J. Augustus Knapp, from The Secret Teachings of All Ages, by Manly P. Hall, 1928

Dance of the Wind and Storm by Thomas Blackshear, 1996

To Hildegard of Bingen, the cosmos was not only above you. It was inside you. Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th-century German abbess and mystic, described creation as a network of interacting forces. Fire, ether, air and the cosmic winds were not isolated phenomena. They belonged to a single order governing the heavens, nature and life on Earth. She carried this logic into the human body. The cosmic winds had counterparts in the humors and bodily processes. The same pattern extended into the soul, where thought, speech, will and inner longing were understood as forms of movement and force. This shaped her understanding of health. The body was healthy when its forces remained in the right measure and relationship. Her idea of viriditas described the life-giving vitality that allows creation to grow and flourish, linking the vitality of nature with human health and spiritual flourishing. The same order also had a moral dimension. Human beings could live in harmony with creation or disrupt that harmony. Physical, spiritual and moral disorder could therefore belong to the same larger framework, without reducing every illness to punishment for sin. Only then does her central idea become clear. The human being was the microcosm, the small world, reflecting the macrocosm, the greater universe. The structure of creation was reproduced in the body and soul. Christ completed this picture. God became human, making humanity a meeting point between the material world, the soul and the divine. That makes the spherical Earth almost a side detail. Hildegard was not merely asking where Earth sits in the cosmos. She was asking how the entire cosmos, the human being and God belong to one order. Image source: “The Creation with the Universe and the Cosmic Man” (1230), Hildegard of Bingen. Source: Wikimedia Commons, Biblioteca Statale di Lucca. Version checked: 23 January 2005. License checked: 13 September 2026 - Public Domain (Public Domain Mark 1.0). “Werk Gottes” (1163–1173), Hildegard of Bingen. Source: Wikimedia Commons, Codex Latinus 1942, Biblioteca Statale di Lucca. Version checked: 3 February 2015. License checked: 13 September 2026 - Public Domain / Public Domain Mark 1.0.

Storm by Zdzisław Jasiński, 1925

A tiny painted eye set in gold, carrying centuries of love, loss, and mystery. Victorian mourning jewelry at its most hauntingly beautiful.

[deleted scenes] >>> archetype vision <<<

“We cannot live in a world interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a hope. Part of the terror is to take back our listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.” ― Hildegard von Bingen

Conjunctions of the Sun and the Moon in Petrus Apian's Cosmographia (1524)

a study in circles >>> archetype vision <<<

Queen of Heaven.

Genesis begins with a Hebrew word that has a surprising Babylonian connection. Genesis 1:2 calls the primordial waters tehom, “the deep.” The word is related to the Akkadian tiāmtu, “sea,” and to Tiamat, the Babylonian sea deity from the Enūma Eliš. Both names likely go back to an older Semitic word for the sea or watery deep. In that story, Marduk kills Tiamat, splits her body apart and uses it to form the heavens and the earth. Genesis has no sea goddess and no battle. God speaks, and the waters are separated. But the older imagery appears elsewhere in the Bible. Psalm 74 describes God crushing sea monsters, while Isaiah 27:1 describes Leviathan as a twisting serpent in the sea. So Tehom isn’t Tiamat. But the resemblance is hard to miss. Did biblical writers take an older idea of the primordial sea and reshape it into a creation story where God doesn’t have to fight the waters at all? He simply commands them. Image source: “Chaos. State 1.” (date unknown), Wenceslaus Hollar. Source: Wikimedia Commons / University of Toronto Wenceslaus Hollar Digital Collection. Version checked: 15 March 2009. License checked: 24 September 2026 - Public Domain.

Crouching down to where sky and ground meet, a traveler pushes his head through a gap and into the heavens beyond. Known as the “Flammarion Engraving” this image has long stumped scholars: is it a lost Renaissance engraving or a 19th-century pastiche? — publicdomainreview.org/colle…

The Triumph of Death (The 3 Fates), Flemish tapestry, c. 1510-1520

Jeanne d'Arc, by Frantz Funck-Brentano, illustrated by Octave Denis Victor Guillonnet, 1912

The Sun's Place in the Ecliptic (No. 54) by Charles Blunt, 1842

The Wheel of Fortune by John La Farge, 1900

A scorpion made entirely out of gold and moonstones… honestly, I didn’t expect this to look this good. The little curved tail is such a nice touch.

At the First Touch of Winter, Summer Fades Away by Valentine Cameron Prinsep, c. 1897

These patterns are over 3,300 years old, but the colors we see were recorded in the 20th century. Nina de Garis Davies copied the ceiling of the Tomb of Nebamun and Ipuky at full scale, part of an extraordinary effort to preserve Egyptian paintings whose colors were already disappearing. The colors weren’t modern interpretations. Davies carefully matched what survived on the tomb walls, even developing a technique to reproduce their matte color and brushwork as faithfully as possible.

portrait of urania, 19th century, british school (details)