Splendor Solis – { feuilleton }

The Ingenious by Darius Hinks

My latest cover for Angry Robot Books was revealed this week at the Barnes & Noble blog (where I talk a little about the design aspects) so here it is. The Ingenious is an alchemy-themed fantasy by Darius Hinks, the brief for which required a depiction of the city of Athanor, the central character, Isten, and some indication of the novel’s occult flavour:

Thousands of years ago, the city of Athanor was set adrift in time and space by alchemists called the “Curious Men.” Ever since, it has accumulated cultures, citizens and species into a vast, unmappable metropolis.

Isten and her gang of half-starved political exiles live off petty crime and gangland warfare in Athanor’s seediest alleys. Though they dream of returning home to lead a glorious revolution, Isten’s downward spiral drags them into a mire of addiction and violence. Isten must find a way to save the exiles and herself if they are ever to build a better, fairer world for the people of their distant homeland.

I was also asked to do something in the detailed drawing style of artists such as Philippe Druillet and Ian Miller, a challenge I was happy to accept with the proviso that both those artists are inimitable. As I say in the B&N post, I went in a Miller direction although I don’t know whether anyone would spot the influence. I was more overt years ago in some of my borrowings from Druillet whose aesthetics can be discerned in my poor artwork for Hawkwind and my much better artwork for The Call of Cthulhu. The background pattern was the kind of thing I often do where I spend hours working on something then cover it over, but more of the interlacing and symbolism (all genuine alchemical symbols) will be visible on the back of the book.

The Ingenious will be published on 9th February, 2019.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• De Sphaera
• Delineations
• Musaeum Hermeticum
• A triangular book about alchemy
• Alembic and Ligier Richier
• Atalanta Fugiens
• Splendor Solis revisited
• Laurie Lipton’s Splendor Solis
• The Arms of the Art
• Splendor Solis
• Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae
• Cabala, Speculum Artis Et Naturae In Alchymia
• Digital alchemy

Weekend links 292

The Black Sun from Splendor Solis (1582) “attributed to the legendary figure Salomon Trismosin”.

Topic B predominates this week. The Black Sun of alchemy was the first thing I thought of when the title of David Bowie’s final album was announced late last year. The Black Sun symbolises the nigredo stage of the alchemical process when putrefaction or decomposition takes place; Carl Jung in Psychology and Alchemy equates the nigredo with the dark night of the soul. At the time I didn’t seriously think that the Bowie of 2015 would have had this in mind as a primary reference even though the Bowie of the early 1970s was immersed in Golden Dawn occultism, the Kabbalah, and a reader of Pauwels & Bergier’s The Morning of the Magicians, a book that informs the lyrics of the Hunky Dory album, and which contains a great deal of discussion about alchemy and other esoteric matters. And yet… Of all the outfits that Bowie might have worn in his final video the one that he chose for Lazarus is a match for the one he wore during the Station To Station Kabbalah-drawing photo session. At Sol Ascendans Alex Sumner and his commenters explored this twilight zone.

Back in the sublunary world, Jonathan Barnbrook’s cut-out sleeve design for the Blackstar album gained additional resonance this week: the black star as the hole that’s left when a more familiar star has been removed from its setting. Hindsight also makes poignant the observation that this was the only album without a picture of the artist on the cover. Elsewhere there were speculations about the title being a reference to Black Star by Elvis Presley (who shared a birthday with Bowie) or a term from oncology, two suggestions that fit so well they’re hard to ignore.

He began to develop a science fiction sensibility, drawing on the New Wave SF movement of Michael Moorcock and JG Ballard, other writers who used the genre such as Anthony Burgess and William S Burroughs, and an older fantasy tradition found in HP Lovecraft and Edward Bulwer-Lytton (whose The Coming Race is name-checked in Oh! You Pretty Things, 1971).

Jake Arnott on David Bowie’s literary influences

• In something-else-also-happened-this-week news, 2016 may see the long-awaited release of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films on Region B Blu-ray. Fingers crossed.

• International posters for The Man Who Fell To Earth. More Nicolas Roeg (and more shiny discs): Eureka (1983) will receive a Blu-ray release in March.

• Cracking the codes of Leena Krohn: Peter Bebergal on the Finnish writer of strange stories.

• Anthems for the Moon: Jason Heller examines David Bowie’s connections to science fiction.

• From 2013: Jon Savage on Bowie’s first meeting with William Burroughs in 1974.

• Mixes of the week: Bowie-esque Vol 1 and Bowie-esque Vol 2 by Abigail Ward.

• David Bowie Doing Shit: a Tumblr

• “Heroes” (1978) by Blondie & Robert Fripp | “Heroes” (2003) by King Crimson | “Helden” (2007) by Apocalyptica ft. Till Lindemann

De Sphaera

De Sphaera aka Sphaerae coelestis et planetarum descriptio is a collection of astrological plates and diagrams showing the symbolic attributes of the planets, and also their relations in the heavens according to the beliefs of 1470. There’s an obvious similarity to the celebrated (and much imitated) plates from the Splendor Solis (1582) plates although De Sphaera lacks the alchemical dimension of that work. I’ve omitted the diagrams from this post but a facsimile of the entire book may be downloaded from the Biblioteca Estense (see the Collegamenti esterni links here). Wikimedia Commons has some of the plates in better quality.

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Musaeum Hermeticum

More from the storehouse of wonders that is the Getty Alchemy Collection at the Internet Archive. The illustrations here are from the 1678 edition of the Musaeum Hermeticum, a lengthy collection of alchemical texts with engraved illustrations by Matthäus Merian (1593–1650). Merian’s illustrations are some of the most frequently reprinted of all those you’ll find in alchemical books of this period, and justifiably so, he had a knack for presenting the allegories of the alchemical process in an elegant and detailed manner that’s also gloriously strange. The same quality of strangeness can be found in his other major alchemical work, Atalanta Fugiens (aka Scrutinium Chymicum). Browse Musaeum Hermeticum here or download it here.

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A triangular book about alchemy

Triangular buildings aren’t so very unusual, triangular books, on the other hand, are less common. This example is from the Manly Palmer Hall collection of alchemical manuscripts at the Internet Archive, not only a triangular book but one where most of the pages are written in a symbolic alphabet. A reviewer supplies the following details (which may not be accurate so the usual caveats apply):

“No. Soixante & Seize” de la collection maconnique du F… Ex Dono Sapientissimi Comitis St. Germain Qui Orben Terrarum Per Cucurrit ca. 1775. Hogart MS 209.

This manuscript bought from Frank Hollings, a London antiquary, after 1933 (he apparently was unaware of the Hauser St. Germain manuscript) came from the occult library of Mme. Barbe, who had it from the bibliographer Stanislaus de Guaita, who in turn bought it at the auction of the library of Jules Favre. It is a copy made from one of the magical texts in the possession of St. Germain by the owner’s permission. A number of such copies were executed for the members of his Masonic lodge in Paris, and the following manuscript, as different in style as it is, may be one of the copies too. It is unclear in both cases whether the Comte St. Germain wrote the magical formulae or owned a copy of an ancient text. This manuscript was made for Antoine Louis Moret, a French emigre to America active in Masonry and in politics.

Does the 76 on the cover refer to the year the book was made, or does it have some other significance? One of the meanings assigned to the number 76 in the Sepher Sephiroth is “Secret, put away; a hiding place”, so the latter is a possibility. See the entire volume here.

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