Art and Travel Notebooks: Sacred Geometry, Crypts and Moon Symbols

The great Art of Architecture at the service of Sacred Geometry. In the same way, that metaphorically and comparatively speaking, we could consider the great Gothic cathedrals such as the Light or the Sun of Christianity, its Moon, or its counterpart, we would find it in that nocturnal, underground and generally forbidden part of the visits, which They are always the mysterious crypts.

Starting from this base, and entering, even slightly and superficially in the slippery paths of elementary psychology, we could consider the crypts - metaphorically and comparatively speaking - as the Mirdah (1) or the Sancta Sanctórum, of that Collective Unconscious , alluded to by the great Swiss psychologist, CG Jung in a multitude of his works and that Goethe, in his immortal work ‘Faust’, called as the dark kingdom of the Mothers, place where the ‘old yeast’ was still hidden; that is to say: the still unknown world of the Archetypes.

The semicircular arch, inherited from that brilliant Roman engineering that conquered the known world in its time, and from which few written references have survived, except for the famous Vitrubio architecture treaties - models, however, of which builders and architects from different eras were served, until relatively modern times - it was also used by Muslim architects, those who served not only under the mandate of the crescent banners, but also did so under the symbol of the cross, as the Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula progressed, constituting what has been called the Romanesque Mudejar.

It is still interesting, in this regard, to review that a succession of arches arranged in a row and with the collaboration of adequate lighting, offer, as a result, this enigmatic half-moon model

Model, which represented, in addition to that Era of Taurus, under whose invocation aroused passions of cult to the bull in cultures as interesting as the Minoan, to the ancient gynecological cults, reviled by Christianity, as can be seen in virtually all Representations of the Immaculate Conception.

A good proof of what is exposed here, can be found by any traveling photographer who visits a cosmopolitan and open city, such as Madrid and falls through that cultural and spiritual space that is the Almudena Cathedral and, above all, visit, an essential premise, its spectacular neo-Romanesque crypt, a metaphorical Valley of the Kings, in view of the buried personalities there.

In the crypt, you can also contemplate a spectacular and mysterious 12th century canvas, recently restored, representing the Virgin of the Flor de Lis, found casually on the walls of the old Romanesque church on which the current cathedral was raised.

Notes, References and Bibliography:

(1) It is a metaphor, to describe what in a Muslim mosque constitutes the most secret, sacred and inaccessible place. In short: his sancta-santorum.

NOTICE: Both the text, as well as the photographs that accompany it, and the video that illustrates it (except music, reproduced under YouTube license) are my exclusive intellectual property.

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