The Surreal Art of Alchemical Diagrams | Hacker News Reader

The Surreal Art of Alchemical Diagrams

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95 pointsprismatic14 comments

https://c6.staticflickr.com/9/8839/28644483981_4406f4a99d_c....

Here we see a sixteenth century rendering of the brothers Mario with their shadow counterparts illustrated. The crown placed above Waluigi depicts the then nascent understanding that society must irrevocably trend toward its own consecration of power into nothing. More Borges than Barthes, Waluigi does not deconstruct his counterpart. He IS the labyrinth.

2 deep 4 me

I've seen the observation made that we often ascribe "matriarchy" to early cultures about which we basically know nothing, such as Minoan culture, based on the observation that they are given to depicting women in their art.

In contrast, we know that medieval/renaissance Spain produced tons of art depicting the Virgin Mary, but we do not usually think of it as a matriarchal culture.

That the entire organized affair -- the chaos of Waluigi notwithstanding -- takes a back seat to the foundation of rooted plants in the foreground suggests that the apparent social structure on offer, a hierarchical and linear assemblage, is finally an illusion; we cannot overcome the complex and rhizomatic nature of reality.

Or, it could be that the king and his wierdo companion that likes to wear a helmet like Mercury fell into a river. So, the king told his servants to hold up his robe up to dry in the breeze, and he threw his crown up to them while they took a swim, realizing only too late that the floor of the river was covered in some sort of icky water plant.

I would have also accepted a feminist treatment of Peach's empty frock on display before the wrath of Bowser's futile bloviation.

See also Melissa Scott's alchemical space opera trilogy, The Roads of Heaven: Five Twelths of Heaven, Silence in Solitude and Empress of Earth.

Yes, you heard that correctly. Alchemical space opera. Spaceships fly because their keels are impregnated by Philospher's Tincture, which always seeks to return to the celestial world. By stimulating it with a harmonium tuned to the music of the spheres, it can overcome the drag of the ship's mundane matter and rises towards heaven...

And if you think that's weird, you should see the FTL drive. Let's just say that the alchemical diagrams pictured in this article are a key to it, and using the right symbology is vitally important.

Excellent books, but very hard to find on paper. Luckily, the author has a revised version available in ebook form.

Thanks for the recommendation!

> Alchemical space opera.

A genre which has also been explored in the interactive fiction game "Hadean Lands" (hadeanlands.com).

This is (was) an another blog of obscure and fantastic images of that sort:

http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/

It has been around for years but unfortunately it looks like it stopped being updated last September.

But you can navigate through old posts to find engravings of Japanese falconry, medieval hand combat techniques, Baltic Heraldry (http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2014-09-...), zoomorphic caligraphy ( http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2014-07-... ), 16th Century Book of Commets ( http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2013/09/comet-sketches.html ) and so on.

Map Sea Monsters is one of my favorite:

http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2013/08/map-monsters.html

If you're interested in why anyone would draw things like this, give Jung a read. His "Alchemical Studies" is chock full of diagrams, in addition to in depth explanations of the symbology and relations between the figures. It's mythological and religious in nature. The alchemists were kind of like nascent scientists, and it's extremely interesting to see how people back then thought. Fair warning: the rabbit hole goes very, very deep (you should probably read a few other works by him first for any of this to make sense: Symbols of Transformation and Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious), so just be prepared for the long haul.

Second that. Check yerself before wrecking said self.

I had a professor really into this way of thinking (it frustrated students who didn't "get it" to no end), he had us read The Waking Dream by Ray Grasse. I thought that book was a great introduction to the symbol-minded way of thinking that typically seems so foreign to us modern educated techies.

Wow, this whole site is full of little treasures :) THX, bookmarked.

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