The Place of the Skull

An Interpretation of the ‘Cave’ Illustration from The Mirror of Wisdom

By Mark Waldron

            Much has been written in the field of Western esotericism on the Rosicrucian Manifestoes, those strange documents which surfaced in Europe in the early 17^th century purporting to reveal the existence of a hidden Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross.  Less well known, but no less enigmatic, is a manuscript which the Scottish alchemical researcher Adam McLean has labeled ‘the fourth Rosicrucian Manifesto’.  It was published in 1618 and possesses the somewhat unwieldy title of Speculum Philosophicum Rhodo-Stauroticum (which sounds better in its shortened English translation, The Mirror of Wisdom) and claims authorship by the slightly less awkwardly named Theophilus Schweighardt, which Dame Frances Yates in her book The Rosicrucian Enlightenment suggests may be the pen name of one Daniel Mogling, about whom we are told nothing else.  More recently, Amir Aczel’s Descartes’ Secret Notebook gives more detail on Mogling, claiming that he not only was Schweighardt but that he was also a friend and colleague of Johannes Kepler as well as an officer of the Rosicrucian Order; Aczel goes so far as to state that Mogling was the Order’s person in charge of the studies of medicine, alchemy, mathematics, and astronomy.  Despite his apparent status as a polymath, and the high esteem he was held among some circles as a thinker, it would seem that Speculum is Mogling’s sole claim to fame; yet for this alone students of the Hermetic Art owe him a profound debt, for in this one brief work he gives away a deep insight into the Great Work of alchemy, perhaps even the key to understanding the whole Art.

            The Mirror of Wisdom is a short text, obscure and abstruse as works in the alchemical/Hermetic vein always are.  It includes three illustrations, all of them in the haunting and strangely evocative style which Hermetic texts of the Baroque period exhibit.  Here is one of them:

 

 

            I remember reading somewhere that the early Surrealists took much of their inspiration from alchemical artwork, and the above woodcut alone is enough to cause me to agree.  Even among Hermetic illustrations it stands out for its weird, otherworldly majesty.  What are we to make of the blazing (and pregnant!) angel rising on a pillar labeled ‘Hence Wisdom’ and flanked by the sun and moon?  Of the two figures in caves dug into the hill which rises behind the angel, one cave holding the sky and sun?  Of the kneeling sage at the hill’s crest offering incense and prayers to the Most High, beneath a tent labeled with the Tetragrammaton of the Kabbalah?  Is there any logic at all to this strange collage?

            There is a logic to it, but that logic requires being privy to a certain body of knowledge that seventeenth century Europeans were not supposed to have possessed, a body of knowledge normally associated with Hindu and Buddhist schools of thought and which only became part of Western awareness (so the common wisdom goes) within the last century or so, with the introduction of the study of yoga and Eastern meditation methods.

            In this article I will assume that the reader possesses a basic knowledge of the phenomenon known as the Kundalini and the related concept of chakras.  In case the reader is unfamiliar with these terms I would recommend Harish Johari’s: Chakras: Energy Centers of Transformation, which presents the traditional Hindu understanding of these concepts, as well as the Theosophist C.W. Leadbeater’s classic treatment, The Chakras.  Both works explain the Kundalini in detail as well as the chakra system.

            Hindu and Buddhist methods of yoga are related to their respective schools of thought referred to as Tantra.  Both Hindu and Buddhist Tantrism are called such because they derive their philosophies from sets of scriptures known as the Tantras, of which there is one set for Hindu Tantrists and another for Buddhist Tantrists.  While they possess many similarities, Hindu and Buddhist Tantrism also have notable differences.  For example, in Hindu Tantra (as well as in New Age thought, which largely derives from Theosophy and therefore indirectly from Hinduism) there is a focus in meditation methods and other yogic practices on the chakras, whereas in Tantric Buddhism (the form of Buddhism practiced in Tibet, otherwise known as Vajrayana Buddhism), yogic methods tend to emphasize three channels which run through the body and which the chakras exist as nodes or plexi upon (Harish Johari, relecting the Hindu view, says that chakras are actually the seven places where the three channels come together).  While the Tantric understanding of the channels is every bit as well-defined as that of the chakra system, I have found that New Agers and students of yoga are often totally unaware of them, or else overlook their importance.  The channels, or nadis in Sanskrit, might be likened to acupuncture meridians, except that the Taoist meridian system exists on the surface of the body, while the three channels run inside it.  (Actually, in yoga and in Ayurvedic medicine there are thought to be no fewer than 72,000 nadis total in the human body; but the three nadis we are considering here are held to be the three principal ones.)  In Hindu Tantra and yoga these three channels are referred to as the Ida, or lunar channel; the Pingala, or solar channel, and the Shushumna, or central channel.  According to Johari, the Ida and Pingala—the lunar and solar channels, respectively—run up the back of the torso (with the lunar channel on the left side of the body and the solar channel on the right side, at least in men; in women this order is reversed) and over the crown of the head (where the crown chakra resides), then cross over at the Ajna Chakra, or Third Eye, before terminating at the nostrils.  In the Theosophical and New Age view the Third Eye is associated with the pineal gland as well as psychism and the accessing of higher realms of consciousness, a view shared by some schools of yoga.

The illustration below is from Johari and shows the yogic understanding of the human energy body of chakras and nadis:

 

 

 

            The reader will note that the spiraling complex of the three principal nadis, with the Ida and Pingala winding around the Shushumna, bears a strong resemblance (as many writers before me have pointed out) to the Caduceus, the symbol of Hermes, the patron god of alchemy and of occult knowledge.  This is no coincidence, as we will see momentarily.

            Now, this is all fine and good, but what does any of it have to do with The Mirror of Wisdom?  Only everything.

            I would never have made the leap of intuition necessary to unravel the meaning of Schweighardt’s cave illustration without the aid of Tenzin Wangyal's Wonders of the Natural Mind.  Wangyal is a Tibetan lama in the Bon tradition, which, though it is held to be the original, pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet, has absorbed many practices, terms, and tenets of Vajrayana Buddhism.  (The reverse is also true, so that it is sometimes difficult to determine which aspects of the two religions originated in India, and which in Tibet.)  Wonders of the Natural Mind is Wangyal's presentation of Bon teachings concerning Dzogchen, a deeply esoteric school of Tantrism which seems peculiar to Tibet.

            On page 90 of that book, Wangyal makes a reference to the hermetic writings of Bon.  Having an interest in Hermeticism, it struck me as peculiar that a Tibetan lama would use that particular term to describe certain teachings of the Zhang Zhung Nyan Gyud, the canon of Bon doctrine, so I paid particular attention to the context.  The full passage is: "The eyes are the portals of wisdom according to Bon Dzoghen.  In the hermetic language of the Zhang Zhung Nyan Gyud, there is a great mountain in which there are five hermits and two caves.  The great mountain is the body, the five hermits are the five wisdoms and the two caves are the eyes."

            Not long aftwerwards (this was in 1997) I was thumbing through a coffee-table style book that was a compilation of artwork from various religious and esoteric strains around the world, and which included the cave illustration from Schweighardt.  I had seen it in this book before, but this time, having read Wangyal, I stared at the drawing with newly opened eyes….and truly saw an alchemical emblem for the first time.  It was rather like one of those ‘Magic Eye’ optical illusions which look like television static at first, but after the observer focuses long enough suddenly resolve into a landscape, or a photo of the Space Shuttle.  It was that sort of Eureka moment, only magnified many times over in its emotional impact.

            You see, in the Schweighardt drawing, the ‘hill’ is the upper half of a human skull, and the ‘caves’ are its eye sockets.

            Once this simple revelation is understood, the meaning of the rest of the diagram suddenly becomes starkly clear, if one has a basic grasp of the Kundalini and the three nadis which it rises up through.  What Schweighardt is portraying is nothing less than the awakening of the Kundalini.  The moon and sun in the drawing with their lines that intersect the angel’s womb are actually the Ida and Pingala; they are in exactly the right positions for this, as the moon is shown over the left eye socket and the sun over the right one.  The ‘Hence Wisdom’ pillar is the central channel or Shushumna, and the blazing ‘angel’ whose womb is at the precise location of the Third Eye in respect to the eye-caves is none other than Kundalini or Shakti herself, the fiery goddess of the Serpent Power.  The tent and its supplicant at the crest of the hill represent the crown chakra; the tent pole continues the vertical line of the angel’s pillar, rising into the sky along with the sage’s incense smoke, representing the superconscious state accessible to the alchemist (or Kundalini yogi).

            The two figures in the caves or eye sockets are a bit more problematic.  The solar/Pingala cave on the viewer’s left contains another sun, along with rain that a figure, standing in a body of water, is trying to catch in a mug before a book whose pages are labeled LABORE.  I interpret the ‘water’ in this portion of the diagram to be a reference to prana or chi, the life-force well known to Hindu and Buddhist yogis as well as acupuncturists.  The solar force of the Pingala, then, showers down prana, which the alchemist then collects.  This interpretation seems to me consistent with what modern writers on Kundalini awakenings, such as Gopi Krishna, have stated regarding the overwhelming power of an awakened Pingala (actually Gropi Krishna relates in his autobiography Living With Kundalini that accidentally awakening the Pingala through intensive meditation practices nearly killed him, so strong was the force it unleashed in his body).

            The figure in the ‘lunar’ cave/socket, who stands in near darkness (as perhaps befits the lunar energy of the Ida) is holding a bellows and flanks a table of suspiciously phallic-looking alchemical equipment.  This, I feel, most likely illustrates the retention and transmutation of sexual energy that is common to Tantric and Taoist self-cultivation practices, a process which Schweighardt labels the ‘Arte Natura’.

            Of course, the idea that Europeans from the Middle Ages through the Baroque Period were well acquainted with such ‘Eastern’ concepts as Kundalini and prana goes against the common grain of what most people understand of Western history.  However, we should remember that the medical system of the time was a form of humoral medicine, basically the traditional Islamic medical system known as Yunani, and as such bore more than a passing resemblance to both Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine.  Consider the following illustration from Theosophica Practica by Johann Georg Gichtel (1638-1710), made famous as the frontispiece of Leadbeater’s The Chakras:

 

 

 

            As Leadbeater and other writers have pointed out, this drawing very clearly and unmistakably shows the chakra system, or at least a variation of it, with each chakra associated with the astrological symbol of one of the seven classical planets.  It even shows a serpent coiled around the heart chakra, here associated with the sun.  Since there is a correspondence here to celestial bodies, the little dog that is running around the spiral leading from the crown chakra to the heart chakra (and thus telling us which direction the spiral runs) most likely represents the Dog Star, Sirius.  I have not decoded the significance of Sirius with respect to the chakras, but the Dog Star was worshipped as the goddess Sothis by the ancient Egyptians, and shows up in folklore the world over, always encoded as some form of canine: a dog, fox, or wolf (cf. Santillana and Von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill).

            As an aside, I believe that the Gichtel drawing is also a depiction of the legendary image which is always linked to alchemy in the popular mind: that of the alchemist turning lead into gold.  In the classical cosmology that was followed by Europeans all the way up to the Enlightenment, each of the seven visible planets was associated with a metal.  Saturn was associated with lead and Sol with gold.  Now, note the positions of Saturn and Sol as shown by Gichtel.  Saturn here represents or rules the crown chakra, while Sol is associated with the heart chakra.  The spiral running around the figure begins at Saturn and ends at Sol.  Thus the spiral leads from ‘lead’ to ‘gold’….and so the transmutation of lead into gold would seem to actually represent an energetic movement from the crown chakra to the heart chakra.  There are Eastern visualization methods that employ this very movement, though not necessarily in a spiraling form….for instance, in the hands-on healing modality known as Reiki, the healer is to visualize a column of clear white light coming down through the crown of the head into the heart, then splitting in two and running around the shoulders, down the arms, and out through the hands.

            In addition to Gichtel, there is another Western tradition in which there is a mention of seven energy centers in the human body: that is the Kabbalah, and more specifically its foundation text, the Zohar.  From Perle Epstein’s popular treatment Kabbalah: Way of the Jewish Mystic, we find that the Zohar (attributed to a Rabbi Simeon Bar Yohai who lived in antiquity, but most likely penned by the medieval Jewish philosopher Moses de Leon) contains this curious passage (note that the ‘tree’ referred to below is the Tree of Life or Tree of the Sephiroth, the emblematic structure which has come to symbolize the Kabbalah in the minds of many of its modern students):

 

“The parts of the Kabbalist’s body, too, are alive with knowledge.  The seven lower spheres on the tree correspond to seven centers of heavenly power distributed along the spine.  Meditation on the spine reveals that a human being is composed of male (active, fiery) energy on the right, and female (receptive, watery) on the left….Furthermore, the seven lower spheres by which the transcendent Absolute is comprehensible to man all share human neural counterparts which, like the spheres along the tree, meet in the highest center located in the brain.”

 

            The similarity of the above description to the system of chakras and nadis is self-evident.  Aside from the seven holy centers along the spine, the male energy of the right side of the body and the female energy of the left correspond to the Pingala and Ida, respectively.  Meditating on the seven chakras is a standard traditional practice among Tantric yogis in India, and here we have a recommendation to meditate on the spine and its seven centers.  It is tempting to conclude from this passage that the Kabbalah, at its most esoteric core, is actually a form of Kundalini yoga….just as alchemy would seem to be.  In any case, it could not be clearer that there were Europeans of the Middle Ages who were aware of the bodily phenomena normally associated with Eastern yogic methods and theory, i.e. the chakras and nadis.  Of significance is the fact that Moses de Leon, the probable author of the Zohar, lived in Spain….and it was from Moorish Spain that alchemy entered into European awareness, along with Muslim medicine, mathematics, and astrology, which in turn had been inherited from the classical world.

            It should be obvious at this point that between Gichtel and the Zohar we can see that the notion of medieval Hermeticists being aware of the chakras, nadis, and even the Kundalini is not so far-fetched at all.

            Returning to The Mirror of Wisdom: if Mogling’s cave illustration is an example of a kind of universal code language of alchemists, analogous to the ‘Twilight Language’ of Hindu Tantric yogis, we would expect to find other examples of caves and hills being used in a similar manner.  Take, for example, the following illustration, which comprises plate 5 of the Splendor Solis, a well-known alchemical manuscript famous for the beauty of its artwork:

 

 

            Again we have a hillock or boulder with two small caves, in this case dug into the boulder by two miners.  Again we have the motifs of the sun (over the left cave, or the right from the standpoint of the ‘skull’) and moon (which is positioned centrally, but as the boulder/skull is off-center the moon is more or less under the cave on the right).  Thus we have the symbols of the Ida and Pingala in their proper places again.  Instead of one central pillar, we have two elaborately carved pillars incorporated into the ‘frame’ holding the main illustration, and these may correspond to the solar and lunar channels, just as the central pillar in the cave diagram from Mogling represents the Shushumna.  Surmounting the round portal through which we see the main scene there is a matched pair of foliage emanating from the mouths of stylized serpents or sea creatures; the curling of the foliage and creatures suggest the Caduceus and by extension the nadis.  Between the twin foliage motifs there is a winged head which may be an angel but which could also possibly be Hermes, the bearer of the Caduceus.  Below the main scene is a second, minor scene showing, among other things, three pillars whose colors match those indicated by the three phases which the alchemical Work is traditionally divided into: the Negredo (symbolized by the black pillar), the Albedo, (by the white pillar) and the Rubedo (by the red pillar).  I will commend this lower scene to the reader’s interpretation based on the foregoing material, but I will just point out the two arches stretching over the scene: they cross, just as the Ida and Pingala cross at the Third Eye, and it is directly below this crossing that the (lunar?) queen crosses over to be given a kind of benediction or command by the (solar?) king.

            This essay is not the first to claim that the Kundalini and its awakening comprise one aspect, if not the key aspect, of the Hermetic Art.  It does, however, lend support to this theory.  If the interepretation of Mogling’s work given here is correct, it may well be the case that The Mirror of Wisdom, while not as well-known as the documents comprising the Rosicrucian Manifestoes, may ultimately eclipse them in furthering our understanding of the nature of alchemy and its methods.

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aczel, Amir.  Descartes’ Secret Notebook.  New York: Broadway Books, 2005.

Chishti, Shaykh Hakim Moinuddin.  The Book of Sufi Healing.  Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1991.

De Santillana, Giorgio, and Von Dechend, Hertha.  Hamlet’s Mill.  Jeffrey, New Hampshire: David R. Godine, 1977.

Epstein, Perle.  Kabbalah: The Way of the Jewish Mystic.  New York: Barnes and Noble, 1998.

Johari, Harish.  Chakras: Energy Centers of Transformation.  Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 2000.

Leadbeater, Charles W.  The Chakras.  Wheaton, Illinois: Quest Books, 1973.

Wangyal, Tenzin.  Wonders of the Natural Mind.  Barrytown, New York: Station Hill Press, 1993.

Wasserman, James.  Art and Symbolism of the Occult.  London: Tiger Books International, 1993.