A piece in the Principium series.
Live, grow, and flourish.
Vive, cresce e floresce.
A common Latin greeting, now used as a motto by countless educational institutions and institutions linked to spiritual life.
The illustration is by Joseph Maclise, from his book "Surgical Anatomy" (1859).
Inside the chest we find an image entitled "Conversation between Souls", by the German Lutheran philosopher and mystic Jacob Böhme (1575–1624), part of his work "Theosophia Revelata", published only in 1730. Böhme had mystical experiences throughout his youth, culminating in an epiphany in 1600 that is said to have revealed to him the spiritual structure of the world, as well as the relations between Good and Evil. After another vision in 1610, he began writing his first work, Aurora (Die Morgenröte im Aufgang), born of that illumination. The treatise circulated in manuscript until a copy fell into the hands of Gregorius Richter, chief pastor of Görlitz, who deemed it heretical and threatened to exile Böhme if he did not stop spreading his writings. After years of silence, Böhme's friends and patrons persuaded him to keep writing, and new handwritten copies soon began to circulate. In a short period, between 1618 and 1624, Böhme produced a huge number of treatises and letters, including his major works De Signatura Rerum and Mysterium Magnum. Böhme's complete works were first published only in 1730.
Another common symbol of spiritual metamorphosis is the butterfly, which enters the cocoon as an ugly, slow larva and, after a period enclosed in itself, emerges as a new being, beautiful, winged and free of earthly constraints.
The illustration is of an Ornithoptera priamus (O. urvilliana), dates from 1849, comes from the "Dictionnaire universel d'histoire naturelle – Atlas Zoologie", and is by Delarue & Fournier.
