Cosmic Earth

Cosmic Earth, 2022 acrylic on panel. 20"x 16"

The vision for this painting came while I was finalizing work on Cosmic Mountain and overheard for the first time the haunting piece “ReTurning” by Jennifer Berezan. Recorded in a subterranean sanctuary and tomb used by the Neolithic people of Malta 6,000 years ago (the Hypogeum of Hal Saflieni), the song’s lyrics are mostly comprised of a simple chant: “returning, returning, returning to the Mother of us all.”

Upon hearing these lines, I saw a veiled female figure on the horizon with the fiery light of divine presence emanating from her chest, the moon behind her head as if a halo. As the image began to develop, I realized this shining, silhouetted figure was the alchemical archetype of Universal Nature.

The English term “nature” comes from the Latin natura, which literally means “birth” (derived from the verb nasci, “to be born”) and has a strikingly rich range of meanings including a course of things, something’s essential character or innate disposition, its constitution or quality, as well as the cosmos itself.

In this painting, Universal Nature is personified as the archetype of the feminine “matrix” (or womb) of all life. She is both the maternal space of the cosmos as well as the energy of love that infuses it—an energy that longs for union with its source, driving the process of alchemical transformation through the dark of becoming into the manifest light of essential wholeness. She is the world of existence in both its external and internal forms as well as its creative dynamic of dissolution and regeneration. Often referred to as “the Great Mother,” Universal Nature unites with divine light and discloses the world as primordial revelation. Ibn ‘Arabi, the exalted thirteenth-century Spanish Sufi, reverently called her “the Highest and Greatest Mother.”

The divine power of transformation given to Universal Nature is symbolized in this image by the fire-light emanating from her chest as the all-comprehensive name-symbol of God, Allah. According to Ibn ‘Arabi, the metaphysical meaning of this name lies within its comprehensive unification of opposites. In the painting, the divine name is rendered with fire, the sacred symbol of alchemical transformation, evoking the primordial wisdom of the ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, “the Obscure,” who understood that the cosmos—as the absolute unity of existence and the manifestation of the Logos—is eternal fire, the evolutionary energy flowing within the continual metamorphosis of Nature.

From an alchemical perspective, fire is both the fundamental transformative agent imbued within Nature and a symbol of the divine Essence hidden within all of creation. Heraclitus witnessed Nature as thoroughly suffused with the unseen light of this secret fire, ever transmuting even death to life—dissolving, purifying, and regenerating. As the archetype of the existential duality of generation and destruction, she is nurturing and nourishing, yet also engulfing and effacing. Enlivening matter and then receiving it back at death, she is the expansion of the warm cradle and the dissipation of the cold grave.

Recalling Heraclitus’s aphoristic fragment “Nature loves to conceal herself,” Universal Nature is here depicted as veiled, like the moon in its phases, representing its secret aspect, obscured from the cerebral “probing” of man-kind. In Heraclitus’s usage, the term “Nature” refers to the growth or development of the forms of creation from an invisible or “veiled” realm. In this sense, Nature can only be understood of its own accord in each moment as an emergent experience and not a fixed, conceptual idea. As another well-known fragment of Heraclitus teaches: “we cannot step into the same river twice.”

The sacred fire of the divine is found in the “cave” of the heart. Like the veil worn by Universal Nature, the cave represents hidden receptivity and fecundity, while the fire within continually radiates the infinite disclosures of God as cosmos. The Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry understood the cave as a symbol of the universe, and in the alchemical sense it is the place where Heaven conjoins with Earth, the macrocosm with the microcosm—the transcendent with the immanent.

In the painting, the divine Spirit as the cosmic sun unites with the lunar soul in the light-filled cavern of the heart—seat of divine love and locus of the holy marriage (hieros gamos) between the forces of action and receptivity. It is the place of primordial regeneration and dissolution into essence—the portal to the womb of creation and the tomb of return.

Lit from behind by the disc of the full moon, symbolizing becoming-into-wholeness in the night of the world, Universal Nature here represents the illumined heart of true presence within the dark and limpid pool of divine quintessence. Like the moon, she reflects the heart-light of the cosmic sun, which becomes undifferentiated from her own, dissolving the obfuscating clouds of temporal multiplicity.

By the fused light of such union, she walks in a rose garden, symbolizing the paradisiacal bridal chamber of the heart and the divine throne—the still place of infinite emptiness at the center of both the human being and the universe. Here lies the primordial garden where matriarchal and patriarchal consciousness are united in the heart-fire of sacred love. In the Sufi tradition, the rose symbolizes the essential secret of the cosmos, where God is found within the self through the reconciliation of opposites. Alchemically, the red rose represents the forceful power of the sun and its expansive effulgence, while the white rose represents lunar receptivity, incubation, and internalization.

The white and red rose garden is here divided by two opposing serpents—liminal guardians of the threshold of transformation between the dual nature of spirit and matter, heaven and hell, mercy and justice. The serpent is symbolic of both the upsurging life-force of fiery radiance and the chthonic darkness of deep earth. While the serpent’s ability to wholly shed its skin represents life and resurrection, its venom is a potent symbol of death and annihilation.

It is from the heart-center of the bridal chamber—the place of no place where life and death are one—that the alchemical Elixir, or Fountain of Life, flows. Here, “Nature overcomes Nature,” as the ancient Hermetic formula declares, liberating the lifeforce from the entanglement of its own inherent tension, transforming opposites into complementaries, reunifying that which was divided, and finally creating Cosmic Earth—the Universal Genetrix—in the alchemical oven of metamorphosis.

As the archetype of fecundity and nourishment. Cosmic Earth is the androgynous “divine child”—the “sacred androgyne”—of Universal Nature born out of the holy marriage of opposites: masculine and feminine, father and mother, spirit and soul, fullness and emptiness, warmth and coldness, dryness and wetness, light and darkness. As divine child, Earth is thus “spiritmatter” and her reproduction is parthenogenetic, needing no male consort to generate life. She is the serpent uniting with itself—the ouroboros—continuously dissolving and regenerating, representing the generative and evolutionary dynamic of life and death.

Like the serpent, Cosmic Earth is paradoxically associated with both vivifying “goodness” and deathly “evil.” She is the Greek pharmakon (“medicine”)—remedy and poison, preserver and destroyer. Indeed, according to the deep alchemical wisdom of Heraclitus, the harmony of the world depends upon the existence of what he referred to as “strife” between opposing primordial forces. Without such conflict, life itself couldn’t exist. Coming to the same realization, Ibn ‘Arabi notably discoursed upon the “divine conflict” between the opposing attributes of God by which our perpetually changing and transforming world manifests, going so far as to declare that the created cosmos requires “evil” as an inherent part of its essence.

As the container of God’s immanence, Cosmic Earth is thus embodied presence in ancient time. She is the totality of our ancestors, mother of all who ever were, made up of and nourished by her. In the depths of Earth grows an ensouled creation the essence of which is the purest gold—imbued solar matter embedded in her very tissues and scattered throughout her pulsing veins. She is the treasure of the cosmos, invaluable pearl of the universe, crown of existence. She is none other than the alchemical Stone—the Lapis of Transformation.