#ashrowan

“Ash! You have been reaped, once again for the Games. Now when we last spoke, I told you just how much we would love to see you here again, tell us. Just how do you feel about being back here?”

Three film stills from Fathomless (1964) by Jim Davis, an astonishing display of coloured light in movement. Davis worked in special kind of way - an alchemical experimentation with light - his films are edited from filmed sequences of light refracted and reflected through coloured plastic sculptural installations. Davis would focus light from the sun using a mirror (or sometimes lights), projecting the light through various translucent coloured sculpture mobiles. He would then film the light refractions as they played themselves out on a screen.  

But Davis considered light to be actually substantial - he felt his films were not really psychologically abstract or physically immaterial, but were reflections of fundamental natural forces, they were, in his words "suggestive of the causal properties of nature".

Davis also felt that there was "something sacred, secret, that no human should know or see" in these forms, which hints toward a metaphysical intuition. This connects us to ideas of the 'light of creation', the alchemical/cabbalistic notion of light being a primary emanation of the divine, an intermediary substance between spirit and matter. That matter, without being impregnated with celestial light, could not in fact exist. And perhaps this is what Davis intuits - light as the primal form, pre-material.

Maybe this is, indeed, fathomless.    

Moon, Sun, Elements, Fire. John Dee (1527–1608) describes a line as a point that flows... "Consequently, everything, properly, began from the point and the monad." (II) and "a LINE is produced from the FLOWING OF A POINT. And using this same principle, we point out that this is also the case in our mechanical magic, because the lines indicating our elements are produced by the continuous fall of DROPS (which are like physical points) [moving] as though they are FLOWING." (VII) 

These passages are from Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica (1563), a work in which Dee provides an exegesis of his famous Monad symbol, which seems to operate not just symbolically, but as an alchemical geometric cypher containing a kind of magical agency in its own right.