137 - Arthur I. Miller [45]
In his drawings Fludd represented the text of Genesis using images based on alchemy, astrology, and the Kabbalah, with light playing a central role. To him the mundane world was the mirror image of the invisible world of the Trinitarian God. He represented this as two equilateral triangles placed together and wrote beside the upper one: “That most divine and beautiful Object [God] seen in the murky mirror of the world drawn underneath.” The upper triangle contains the four Hebrew characters —the tetragrammaton—for the ineffable name of God, YHVH, set within another perfect triangle. The triangle beneath it is the “reflection of the incomprehensible triangle seen in the mirror of the world,” Fludd wrote.
The divine and mundane triangles. (Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris, Metaphysica, Physica atque technica Historices mundi [1621].)
To depict the creation Fludd used an image of interpenetrating triangles. One triangle ascends from the earth. It is dark at the base and becomes brighter as it moves toward heaven. The inverted triangle, meanwhile, has its apex on the earth. The former culminates in the perfect triangle, the symbol of God, while the latter emanates from it. They mirror each other precisely and thus represent the constant struggle of polar opposites: the triangle rising from the earth represents the dark principle, or matter, while the other is the light principle, or form. Matter and form, light and darkness are the polar principles of the universe. This is reminiscent of the Kabbalah where these opposites are called antipathy and sympathy.
Interpenetration of material and formal pyramids. (Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris, Metaphysica, Physica atque technica Historices mundi [1621].)
Fludd emphasizes that the world about us results from a struggle between dark and light by placing the sun at the intersection point of the two pyramids, where the opposing principles counterbalance each other. This also signals his belief that the unity of God Himself is symbolized in the mystery of the alchemical wedding in which opposites are fused together.
Placing the apex of the light triangle on the earth symbolizes the withdrawal of light and the appearance of matter. In his analysis of all this, Pauli was particularly interested in the Lurianic story of Creation, as revealed by the sixteenth-century mystic and kabbalist Isaac Luria, of whom Fludd was aware. Luria reported that his soul often traveled to divine realms to study the secrets of existence and claimed that he could not write his visions down because they gushed so rapidly from his mind. Others recorded them in what became known as the Lurianic Kabbalah. Some of his disciples asserted that his early death, at thirty-eight, was God’s retribution on him for revealing forbidden knowledge.
Luria asked questions such as, Why everything? Why did creation occur? What is the meaning of everything? Fludd’s inverted triangles contain his replies. Luria called Tsimtsum—the withdrawal of light and thus of God to create matter—one of the most important notions in kabbalistic thought. The problem is, if God is everywhere, how can there be a world? How can there be anything that is not God? To accomplish this separation God must have had to abandon a region within Himself to create a “kind of mystical primordial space from which He withdrew in order to return to it”—or so the kabbalistic scholar Gershom Scholem, a friend of Pauli’s, wrote.
Once darkness, or Nothing, could be visualized, then the act of creation—Let there be light!—followed, or so Fludd believed. To express this he drew a dark square. In another image he drew