They forced me to.

Sometimes choosing to study Religion and Philosophy involves getting huge insane assignments worth 80% of your mark, and getting about six months to do them in, and starting it about three weeks before it's due. This one was mine: foolishly thinking things like "IT'LL BE FUN TO TOTALLY RUIN MY OWN EXISTENCE WITH OBSCURE TOPICS AND A TIME CONSUMING MEDIUM AND NO PREPARATION AT ALL!!!!!!!!" I chose to vomit out a pictorial analysis of the way alchemy and Hermetic philosophy indirectly led to the decline of the influence of Christianity in western culture, using the crazy, alchemist-hatin' symbolism of Hieronymous Bosch. This 'SYMBOLISM' means that basically every single damn object and person in this picture means something, and I wrote a very long essay about it (which later, private research conducted when not under critical amounts of stress proved to be RIDDLED WITH ERRORS, but hah, nobody knew) and STILL wasn't able to cover the amount of thought I put into this thing, I'M SERIOUS, I could talk for literally about an hour straight about what this goddamn picture means because it ate my mind for a month - and I don't have room or time to talk about it now. But quickly, the dramatis personae are from the top: a host of faceless angels, Eve, opposite her on the far side Adam, underneath him Thoth, Hermes Trismegistus holding the Emerald Tablet and pointing at the Seal of Solomon, underneath that Jabir Ibn Hayyan, next to him Roger Bacon, to his left Paracelsus, then underneath is John Dee being accosted by Queen Elizabeth and the Rosicrucian Johan Valentin Andreae, respectively, next to whom is the skeletal (and apocryphal!) Christian Rosencruetz. Then, travelling up via a winged figure ascending the spheres of the Kabbalah, Descartes is dropping an apple on the head of Newton, Voltaire, Kant and Diderot, then a swarm of evolutionary animals culminates in Erasmus Darwin and his grandson Charles, riding on a Galapagos turtle, dressed as the Mad Hatter and having his hand guided by his dead daughter Annie; then, diagonally across, anonymous Rosicrucians are indulging in pantheism, underneath them are Ferdinand Baur, Einhoch, Virginia Woolf and Einstein, J. G. Fraser holding a golden bough, a playboy bunny burning a bra and holding a knife to her customer's throat (okay, some explanation: she represents the sexual revolution and the way it simultaneously brought about rampant sexuality and exploitation of women, but also led to calls for women's right and feminism.) Underneath her is a naked reclining hippie, ah! for the quasi-Rosicrucian ideals and re-deified earth of seventies drug culture, then there's a lot of Boschian symbolism it'd take too long to explain intertwined with urban technology (including Bart Simpson's head grafted in a very self-consciously postmodern fashion to The Garden of Earthly Delights' famous Tree Man) and then, moving along, through the World War One soldier and underneath the gorilla is Madame Blavatsky, blazing symbols of the Golden Dawn, Lucis Trust, the personal sigil of that delightful little freaky-freaky, Aleister Crowley, followed by Alice Bailey, Rudoph Steiner (hah, I had no idea what either of them looked like, creating this very rapidly the night before it was due) L. Ron. Hubbard looking creepy, and the Beast himself. Above them are Karl Marx, Robespierre and Hitler (note: they are not grouped together out of any moral judgment on their personalities, but it'd take too long to go into why) and in the centre the picture the Devil lies crouched, with Adam and Eve again chained at his feet; out of his/her back rears an enormous mushroom cloud, an apocalypse indirectly facilitated by alchemical activity just like ole Bosch predicted it would.


Like I said, I'm leaving out a lot, and I haven't talked about any of theobjects (like the astrolabes, or the people having sex with fish, or the tea-cups or any of the tarot cards scattered around.) This all makes sense when all my a) transparently obvious or b) so obscure it's clear I was making it up at 4 am 'SYMBOLISM' is epxlained. Final thoughts? I mostly wish I'd been under a little less pressure and created this in a less dodgy way, so I could have something I'm really proud of instead of being pretty happy with it but FILLED WITH FLAWS. Also, I wish I'd left myself time to be more original; hahaha, this is like bargain basement Promethea. But it was really fascinating to research, and everyday I learn about new things I got wrong!

...


GODDAMIT.

On closer inspection, ARRRGRGHGGHHH after about an hour of painstakingly scanning and piecing together (this is a big picture, people) it has come to m attention to Robespierre's face has somehow been DESTROYED. Well, for the moment he can just stay that way and I'll fix this up tomorrow. Also, as a side note, O-MAZINGLY, I made this before I'd even heard of Aegypt, by John Crowley, a highly reccommended beautiful moving novel which deals with just this kind of thing.