The Egyptian god-image Osiris appears in Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens (Fleeting Atalanta) as a placeholder for the alchemical king, a position of power that has to go through a process of death in order to renew; in the upper left corner his wife/sister/mother Isis is depicted contemporarily dressed and approaching the dismembered form of Osiris as if located perhaps in the recess of a cellar. The state of entombment correlates with the idea of a gestation phase, a suspension or disorientation in darkness. For Maier, Osiris is only one of many mythological aspects of the symbol of the sun that, as black sun, explores the underworld in order to ‘renew’ – like awaking from and absorbing the otherness of a dream scenario – after a journey through the night.
This post relates to the series Osiris Fragments.
from Michael Maier, ‘Atalanta Fugiens’ (1618), facsimile by fabric libri (2006)