According to mythology, whirligigs and rhombus were defined as ‘ Dionysus toys, ‘representing the so-called ‘ second Sun‘, or movement. Ripa’s representation of an astronomical radius hardly appears to be able to fulfill its pointing functions. Its form is kind of too oblong and slender, not only to make it look exactly like an ancient radius but even to suggest its featuring aspects as an angles finder. Ripa looks like just a simple lozenge. Below some pictures from Trattato del radio latino o Instrumento giustissimo e facile più di ogni altro per prendere qualsivoglia misura e positione di luogo, tanto in cielo come in terra, or treatise of latin radius, suitable and right tool and easier than any other to take whatever measure and position as in sky so in earth, by Latino Orsini, Roma 1583. Ripa’s radius looks more like a spindle. Archaic spindles were lozenge-shaped tools. But we continue to fail to understand how it could represent “the operation to be done on earth,” as Cavaliere Ripa says.
Back to the Ripa’s wheel-shaped astrolabe, we can not be surprised by its ancient mythical identification with the Sun. Cesare Ripa places it above the Sun globe, as we can evince from the ecliptic around it (1). The Greek god Hephaestus was said to light his forges at the wheel of the Sun. There were other ancient cultures familiar with mythical wheels. For example, Indian tales talked of Wheels of life, and Egyptians believed that the god Khnum created the bodies of children on a potter’s wheel and inserted them into their mother’s bodies, but what is of interest to us is the concept of a Wheel-Sun. I mentioned above, there is much evidence of the European hermetic symbolism also deriving from the ancient greek world ( which could not be a cultural isle) and not only for what concerns the so-called “phonetic symbolism”. So let’s read some interesting hints in ancient thinkers’ writings concerning Anaximander fragments on Sun-Wheel identification, as well as other cosmologic beliefs:
AET. II 15, 6 [Dox. 345]: ” Anaximander, Metrodorus of Chios and Crates argue that the sun is the highest of all the stars, below him the moon, the fixed stars, and planets”.
AËT. II 13, 7 [Dox. 342]: ” Anaximander states that (the stars) are thick casings of air in the form of a wheel, full of fire, in which a part of the openings blow flames”.
ACHILL. isag. I 19 p. 46, 20 [by Posidonius]: ” Some, among them also Anaximander, say that (the sun) sends light and is wheel-shaped. In fact, like in a wheel, the hub is hollow but keeps the rays from it toward the wheel’s outer circumference, so the sun, sending light from a cavity, produces its rays shining outside around”.
AËT. II 25, 1 [Dox. 355]: ” Anaximander argues that (the moon) is a sphere 19 times the earth, similar to a chariot wheel which has the circle hollow and full of fire like that of the sun, is placed in an oblique position like that one and is equipped with a breather, like the pipe of a flute. Eclipses are to the wheel speed.
AËT. II 20, 1 [Dox. 348]: ” Anaximander says that (the sun) is a sphere twenty-eight times the earth, very similar to a chariot wheel, with the circle hollow and full of fire, in which a portion through the opening shows fire, as through the pipe of a flute. This is what the sun”.
DIOG. LAERT. II 1-2. (1): “Anaximander, son of Prassiade from Miletus. He said that the principle and element (of things) is infinite, without defining it as air or water or anything else, that the parties change. Still, everything is unchanging, and that the earth is in the middle and has a central position, in the form of a sphere (the moon has no light of its own but is illuminated by the sun, while the sun is not inferior to earth and is pure fire)”.
THEO SMIRN. p. 198, 18: ” Anaximander says that the earth is suspended in the air and moves around the center of the universe”.
Finally, it is intriguing to know that lozenge-shaped objects, which look so much like spindles, belonged to the imagination of women’s work. The turbot/lozenge/spindle was often in the coat of arms of the women of the great aristocratic families (the royal houses, to be clear). We see the stylized reproduction of the coat of arms of some ladies of the House of Savoy here.
Let’s now leave the last word to operational Alchemy: It would be too easy to take for granted the lozenge shape of our terrestrial tool as a symbol of the female instead of the male Sun.
So we have a wheel-sun and a spindle-spinning action. The woman is holding the Sun with her right hand and the spinning action with her left hand. In ancient Egypt, the right was the male, and the left was the female. Here we are back to what I wanted to avoid: the polarity. But this is just a polarity of actions; we are before active-passive agents. The Sun is male and active. The spinning action is female, passive, or the “operations to be done on earth”. So we have understood that the passive terrestrial agent has to spin around our active agent, the Sun or at least something arrived from the Sun. In this case, male and female are used to suggest a strong attraction ( in ancient cultures, humans had a naive idea of their sexuality) between two entities.
Now we have also understood who, or what, the woman represents: our Waters both from the sky and earth (see undernote 2): ” … this character shares sky parts as well as earth parts”. Our Secret Fire/Mercurius, which in the case of the Sun, we can define Sulphur, while Mercurius is the case of the passive terrestrial action. Because of the rule of three ( by which every symbol may stand for at least three different meanings), we have plenty of Sulphurs, Mercurii, males, and females (3).
And we have plenty of active and passive agents, too, according to the stages. We have them in the metallic “Opus” or work, which we dedicate to extract the Soul of metal, and in the other “Opus”, which we dedicate to extract the Soul of a human being. Something is survived of this last, buried in myths and hidden evidence. The cavaliere Cesare Ripa suggests something intriguing: the meeting of two Secret Fires, one from the Sun and the other from the Earth.
Whether the last one is a natural terrestrial product or an alchemist product, he does not say. Still, we have understood it is our magnet (4). The Secret Fire/Mercurius we have made is called “Magnesia”. And very likely, we have a natural spinning magnet, “Magnesia” inside us, too. The engraving on the left is a rendering of the Mercurius/Magnet by Achille Bocchi’s ” Bonon. Symbolicarum quaestionum de universo genere” 1555, a must to have book for every seventeenth-century researcher in hermetic symbolism, as Cesare Ripa was.
You can find another meaning of the wheel allegory at Heiligen Dreifaltigkeit and Secret Iconography of the Wheel .
- See also San Miniato Sun Path or the Sky as Seen from Earth ;
- See also Thesaurus Hermeticum & Dry Pythagorean River ;
- See also Sun and Moon at the Turn of the First Millennium ;
- See also Introitus Apertus vs Open Entrance.Chap 4