brainstorming and analyzation for "elemental powers" title page

Greetings all! I am thrilled to death with what I have to post today. Drafted up over a chicken sandwich at chili's, the end sketch/idea is nigh perfect. The Poet Pleads with the Elemental Powers has always been an interesting problem for me because there are so many elements that are obviously important but I've had no idea how to include them all and yet make anything feel cohesive. Last November I drafted up a first intial for this piece that represented the polar dragon mentioned and my notations from that same day focused on pulling out all the seemingly important poetic elements. Today something just seemed to click and below is what resulted which (I repeat) I'm very happy with. Instead of explaining it all here like usual, I'll explain in between images. Here we go.

Complete Image:

Like I discussed last week, it was pretty clear off the bat that the title page needed to feature a human figure. The purpose of said woman in this particular title page is three fold. 1- She is the embodiment of her whoever her may be (encircle her, love and sing her into peace; whither her footseptes go) 2- She is representative of rose/Immortal Rose. Rose appears in many of Yeats' poems, and more often than not rose is a stand in for the woman Yeats was madly in love with. Notice the actual rose drawn in this woman's hair. 3- She is the embodiment of the elemental powers/ The Powers. The Powers are clearly important to the poem since they are mentiong repeatedly, and find thier way into the poem's title. For the life of me though, I could not think of a way to picture them. An ethereal type woman is always a good path to go when representing mythical figures so that is that path I chose - that of least resistance. To emphasize the elemental part of it, notice the four part wheel that floats between her hands. There is a close up of this below, but this is essentially a wheel that holds the four elements - earth, air, fire & water. I will discuss the sun and moon further down.
The Elemental Wheel/ Sun/ Moon:

See individual images for details

The Elemental Wheel:

This wheel floats between the woman's hands (see top picture) and portrays said elements in the manner that they appear Elemental Powers. 1- water = waves (Great Powers of falling wave; Like the pale cup of sea) 2- fire = flames (unfold your flaming wings; falling wave and wind and windy fire) 3- wind = gusts of wind (windy fire; when winds have gathered) 4- earth = brown darkness with flecks of gold (uncoiled from glimmering deep to deep). The earth bit is perhaps a bit of a stretch, but all the other elements were so clearly present in the poem that I knew earth had to be there somewhere as well. Since it is not uncommon for places below the earth to be poetically referred to as the deep that is what I went with.

The Moon and Sun:

Hello alchemical imagery, how you have been missed! This poem says both the nets of day and night and when winds have gathered and sun and moon burned dim. The sun and moon can clearly be seen as merely a literal portrayal of night and day. However, we both know that Yeats was very fond of slipping alchemical references into his work, and nothing is so glaringly iconographicaly alchemical as these two (explained in a second). Also, from a practical perspective, Yeats mentioned sun and moon turned dim. Does that mean that they were both fading out? In life the sun fades out and is replaced by the moon, likewise the moon gives way to the sun. Not even during a eclipse are both completely gone. this logic leads me to belive that f so than Yeats could not have literally meant sun and moon to mean "sun and moon". They must be standing in for something as symbols.

The Moon:

In alchemy, the moon (also Luna and Diana) is the female aspect of the opus (the continual distillation process necessary to create the Philosopher's Stone). Essentially it is silver (literal or philosophical). It gets complicated, but for the purpose of simplicity, consider Luna to be the name of an elixir that was used to transmute a base metal into pure silver. Pure silver is considered to be only slightly more impure than gold. By combining this silver with pure gold in something called a chemical wedding it helped form the active component essential to creating the Philosopher's Stone. As you would remember if I had posted notes about this (I swear I did but I can't find it now) the Philosopher's Stone was not only a literal object that was able to turn base metals into gold. It was believed that the Stone had the power to make all imperfect things perfect, and would turn a normal man into an extremely illumined philosopher. It symbolized a light brought into darkness and embodied the merger of divine love & divine wisdom. Due to the symbollic weight placd on the Stone it has to be of some bearing here. I'm not quite sure yet how that plays into this poem, but I promise I'm working on it. As for the position of the moon, I visually prefer the waning crescent because its opening faces the female figure. Since the root of this image is iconography/symbolism though, I need to find out what connotations (preferably of Celtic origin) are tied to the waxing and waning moon. More on this eventually as well.

The Sun:

Just as the moon (Luna/Diana) was the female aspect of the chemical wedding, the sun (Sol) is the wedding's male aspect. The sun is representative of gold as prepared via the art of alchemy. There was no other element equal to the sun's inherent symbolism, which philosophically represented divine light. Alchemist Jean de la Fontaine wrote Gold is the sun; to make gold, is to become God. The Philosopher's Stone (see The Moon) was born through the marriage of Sol and Luna. Visually the presence of both Sol and Luna together would then probably suggest the possibility of perfection, philosophical illumination, etc without its actual achievement. Again I need to think about this, but that is off the top of my head. Along this vein though, you will note that I have placed the sun and moon on opposite sides of the central figure. The possibility of their merging exists, but her presence prevents this from happening.

You will notice seven circles nestled within the rays of the sun. These represent the Seven Lights (and though the Seven Lights bowed in their dance and wept). I'm not certain why Lights is capitalized, but there must be a reason to turn it into a proper noun. The number seven holds spiritual connotations as well as magical ones, but I am not well versed enough in this to comment at the moment. We know that Yeats was an active member of the Order of the Golden Dawn so I'd say that some magical connotation is very very likely. Why that makes Lights a proper noun though still remains a personal mystery.

Whew! This ended up being far longer than I had anticipated. It certainly looks like I have my research work cut out for me, but yay for the image! This is the most excited I've been in days so the pending research seems more like an exciting adventure into unknown lands, as opposed to a chore or other undesirable activity. I look forward to seeing you all next week. Who knows what lies in store for then.

mythology alert - brigid and fire

Ok ok ok so I know that I have run this figure in the ground, but I'm about to move on so indulge me one last time. This past weekend I mentioned something about Brigid being the goddess of fire. This has only been mentioned specifically once in all the reading I have been doing and it was in a rather new agey reference so I've been lead to conclude that this is a more recent attribution to her as opposed to a historically authentic connection. After all, even Oxford reference materials don't mention it. However, I am going to be keeping any visual references to fire in this piece fro two reasons. One is not a soundly based academic reason, and pretty much consists of the fact that I really like fire and think that it will be cool. The second reason though is academically based. Both Brigid the goddess and Brigid the saint are patronesses of smiths/blacksmiths. (As a quick aside, Oxford's Dictionary of Irish Mythology [Ellis 50] also connects these two Brigids so I think at this point there really is no question that they are tied together.) While they might not historically have been connected directly to fire; what is a blacksmith without that element? A smith can pound in metal all day but without fire and coals to heat the metal, he'll not have anything but a chunk of cold unharmed metal and bent up tools. so if you want to play connect the dots, fire and Brigid are at least historically indirectly connected. Therefore, the fire stays.

brainstorming for "host of the air" first initial

Today's motto was keep it simple, and that is exactly what happened here. The swoosh of fabric has no discernable iconographic purpose, but it looks cool and solves the question of what to do with the letter d's tail. To give this illumination relevance to Air, Brigid's Cross hangs off the tengwa. Color differentiation will highlight the letter o (the actual capital letter). The fun things about theta (the vowel ... in this case the right hook that is separate) is that when they are the first letter in a piece, the tengwa (the consonant ... in this case the letter that looks like an m with a long tail) has to be illuminated as well. You can't very well write a theta without it's carrier, and a 48pt theta written over a 22pt carrier might be somewhat amiss. Thus, in cases like this, efforts must be taken to emphasize the letter that is really being capitalized whilst illuminating them both.

The misc. grapes and chalice illustrations are ideas for various accent images to be strategically placed around/beside/near the text body. Not so much obscure symbolism, these objects are pulled from/derived directly from the text itself. Known exceptions are the possible fire in the chalice (Too Harry Potter? Darn you Rowling.) and the sheaf of oats (direct symbolism tied to Brigid the goddess and Imbolc).

brainstorming for "hosts of the air" title page

Greetings folks! I haven't picked up the TTP for a couple weeks so it is fantastic to actually have some imagery to share yet again. A good hour + was passed at the pizza parlor early this afternoon. It's amazing how much can get done when forced to leave the house. Add a table made for four (seating just lil' ole' me) to spread papers out on, an endless supply of diet coke, and a pizza buffet of cheesy bread sticks; presto -instant inspiration! Today I tackled the poetic conundrum that is The Host of the Air.

The funny thing about Host of the Air is that it was brought into TTP late in the game as a replacement for Rose of the World. Drawn in by Air's beauty, I felt that surely this was a sensible replacement. Mythological symbolism, possible alchemical symbolism, religious symbolism, people who were other that what they seam- this piece has it all! Funnily enough, this has also been one of the most frustrating poems to brainstorm until today. Perhaps it was the cinnamon sticks or perhaps it was the cheesy bread, but inspiration hit today and it consisted on one key idea ... keep it simple. Host of the Air has so many exciting ideas that, like usual, I wanted to do all of it and ended up finding that this overload was causing me to do nothing at all. Therefore for the title page I focused a few key elements:

1) Brigid the goddess/saint was the woman Yeats refers to as bride and is the subject of this poem.

2) Yeats constantly refers to Bride's dim long hair

3) Brigid the goddess was a goddess of fire (I found this in further reading and will discuss it in some detail later this weekend.)

4) The most recognizable symbol of Brigid the saint is Brigid's Cross. (pictured at end of post)

I then combined all of these into one image that will be sketched on Host of the Air's title page. I have not figured out the placement of the title itself yet, but that will come later. For now here is brainstorm #1 for Air's title page. Along other lines, this was a major breakthrough, because at the moment there is only one other title page sketch - which incidentally is also of a woman. With two of the six transcribed poems being represented by human figures, there clearly is a trend that must continue through the rest of the pieces for continuity sake. We shall see how that works out. For now, enjoy the first Host of the Air title page brainstorm with details. It is clear that there is cleaning up/refiguring that needs doing, but for now I'm thrilled to have this much.

yeats and reoccurring words - an analyzation of "fire" and "air"

Notice that the poem below, just like other poems featured in previous posts, features a box of seemingly random words. These are words that I found to be repeated in at least one other poem I have chosen for this project. The purpose of this list has yet to be determined so for now it is merely a point of interest. If some viable connection can be made between the reoccurring words than perhaps it is something that can inform the imagery that is chosen the TTP (The Tengwar Project). For instance, some of the words like "fire/flame" and "air/wind" appear in almost every poem chosen. Now my reading on alchemical symbolism (which appears in most of the pieces I've chosen to use) tells me that fire and air were considered to "temper" (or exercise control over) each other as elements.

fire = Mastery of this element provided one with the ability to express divine love and it was the chief agent of transmutation in the alchemical process. Compared to the sun by alchemist Nicholas Flamel (fire heats furnace & vessels :: sun heats Earth), Alchemy itself appears to have been known as the art of fire. In New Light of Alchymie, Micheal Sendivogius described the element this way. "Fire is the purest, and most worthy Element of all, full of unctuous corrosivenesse adhereing to it, penetrating, digesting, corroding, and wonderfully adhereing, without visible, but within invisible, and most fixed, it is hot and dry and tempered with Aire." Make of that what you will. Oh yes, and for all you HP geeks out there, I was surprised to discover that Nicholas Flamel was once an actual human being as well.

air = Mastery of this element provided one with the brotherhood to all life. In a poetic sense, the most important thing about air seems to be that alchemists often referred to volatile spirits as being "airy." That reference seems to imply that the element of air was considered very difficult to master. Micheal Sendivogius had this to say about it. "The Aire is an entire Element, most worth of the three in its quality, without, light and invisible, but within, heavy, visible, and fixed, and when it is fixed it makes every body penetrable." Far more clear than his description of fire, the most important information seems to be that M.S. believed air to be of much higher value than all the other elements combined. Could this be due to it's difficulty to tame?

Since I am now operating on the (informed) assumption that the poetry is infused with alchemical symbolism, it only makes sense to start examining the reoccurring words under that type of microscope. At the moment I'm noticing a couple of things that could be important about fire and air.

1) Even though fire is at the heart of alchemy (the art of fire), it is air that M.S. claims to be of better quality. In a poetic sense, this bestows a sense of noblesse upon the usage of this word. (i.e. In The Song of Wandering Aengus Yeats notes that a "glimmering girl" fades through the "brightening air." On one level this is just a case of a feminine apparition. Could it be, however, that the manner in which this female figure disappeared speaks to the value this woman has in the poem? After all, the next stanza discusses exactly what the author would do should he ever find this woman again.)

2) It was believed that if one could master fire, perhaps more metaphysically than literally, than they would be capable of expressing divine love. Since alchemy was considered the art of fire, one can only assume that learning to control this element was not entirely impossible. On the other hand, air was considered volatile. The ability to master this element provided one with a gift far better than divine love - the brotherhood of all life. For those of you who don't know, one of the key goals of alchemy was the creation of the philosopher's stone. (Yes this was pre-existing as well - Rowling did not pull it out of her top hat.) It was believed that should one ever create this "stone" it would not only be able to turn base metals into pure gold, but that it would also possess the base metal to make all imperfect things perfect. Hey! That sounds a good bit like achieving "brotherhood of all life" doesn't it? Perhaps the mastery of air was just as elusive as the creation of the philosopher's stone. Just as the alchemists believed the two elements had the power to control the other, or at least balance the each other out, perhaps Yeats used them int eh same manner poetically. (i.e. In Wandering Aengus, which is the only poem I've fully dissected to date, the author states "I went to blow the fire-a-flame/ But something rustled on the floor." What was it that kept him from lighting a fire? None other than the girl who faded into "the brightening air." Again I could be nit picking, but it almost seems too much of a coincidence to ignore completely.)

All that is to say, that there is a whole lot going on behind the scenes as I try to pull these drawings together. Everywhere I turn there seems to be a new angle. While there is a danger of getting so caught up in the different angles that I lost in information overload, that doesn't seem like it will be too much of a problem. Things are clearly spelled out in my head, and the task really at hand is to assess any new information I'm faced with, pass it through the Irish myth/Alchemy filter and keep what is applicable. The risk to this method lies in the fact that I'm anything but an expert on either subject. To opportunity in the method is that TTP is turning out to be much more of an academic experience than I could have ever dreamed. How exciting!

iconography alert - "the song of wandering aengus"

While doing some research tonight for "To Some I Have Talked with by the Fire," I discovered that any reference to apple blossoms (in the hair of the "glimmering girl" from Wandering Aengus) should not be tied with alchemy. According to W.B. Yeats: Metaphysician as Dramatist by Heather C. Martin (1987, pg 75) apple blossoms from Aengus' (of the Tuatha Dé Danaan) "island of the young" (Tir na Nog ?) induce dreams of forgetfulness. These dreams of forgetfulness are appropriately referred to as Danaan dreams. I'm glad I stumbled across this because while it is clear that the apple trees are no stretch, any alchemical connection I mentally made with the apple blossoms just seemed somewhat contrived. Does the girl wearing these blossoms in her hair signify that the author wants to forget about her later in life, that he won't forget about her, or that the girl would have been forgotten by all others b/c she disappears in mist as if she had never existed? I will have to dwell on this for a bit.

yeats and alchemy

The Tengwar Project has just gained another layer. Yesterday as I yet again studied the chosen poems for imagery I could use, I discovered a whole new dimension to Yeats that I had never seen before. The last two lines of The Song of Wandering Aengus read "The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun." The connection between silver/moon and gold/sun in combination with apple trees simply reeks of alchemic imagery. Desperately trying to remember what I had read in A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery previously this year, all the poems for this project got spread on the table and I went to work. It turned out that there was alchemic imagery to some extent not only in Wandering Aengus, but in every other piece I had chosen as well. Since my knowledge of historic alchemy is fuzzy at best (something that will hopefully be rectified in the near future) it seemed quite feasible that the subject may have draw renewed interest during the Victorian Era as part of the Gothic Revival. It is well known that Yeats had a strong interest in the esoteric beliefs - something that led to him joining The Rosicrucians, The Theosophical Society, and (most importantly) The Order of the Golden Dawn. Some digging on my part has shown The Order deemed alchemy to be one of three parts of Wisdom of the Whole Universe. Further searching turned up a scholarly article published in 1971's The Review of English Studies/No. 85 entitled W.B. Yeats: Artist or Alchemist? by Robert M. Schuler. In the article , Mr. Schuler states that, "Although Richard Ellmann pointed out over twenty years ago [Yeats: The Man and The Masks, 1948] that Yeats was fascinated by the alchemical quest of self-transmutation and that alchemy was one of the subjects studied by The Adepts of the Order of Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn, no serious attempt has been made to eludicate the extended range of meaning contained in the poetic use of the symbols and doctrines of mystical alchemy as Yeats understood them." A lot has happened since 1971, and I would have to dig deeper in order to see if much else has been written on the matter of Yeats and alchemy since. The exciting thing though (I'm seriously giddy as I write this - it's like a connect-the-dot image with inumerable dots!) is that prior to yesterday I had never read anything that linked Yeats and the study of alchemy together. Not only was my "discovery" spot on, but now it has facts to back it up. Moreover, this is a huge breakthough in relation to the imagery that I design for The Tengwar Project. Instead of searching for arbitrary meaning within the poems to base the drawings on, I can now search for alchemic meanings. More importantly, this provides a window to include alchemical symbolism and iconography. For the past couple of years I have toyed on and off with the idea of creating a book of alchemy-informed pen and ink drawings. This revelation makes the latter null and void as that solo work can no be joined with the tengwar book already in progress.

Photographs of some notes created yesterday, as well as some drawings made pre-alchemy connection will be uploaded on the morrow.