“Lesser Light Rules the Night…”—an Early Picture of Multiple Universes?

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Blank and Empty Things #56

This sort-of famous image, found in a French Bible Mortalisee made in Reims in the 13^th century,

displays The Creator measuring its creation, a sphere of the universe containing all of the stuff of creation, and including the Earth (pictured at upper right).  At least that is what I think this is—Creator stepping into the frame (its right foot outside the drawn border of the image), holding everything that it has made, and holding it all in the midst of another environment of some sort.  What that place might actually be, I don’t know.  Is that the space in-between the light created on the fourth day (pictured below from Schedel’s so-called Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493), the space that wasn’t the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night?  In this spirit it was the stars that were supposed to separate these two lights, but the stars themselves in many of the concentric circle cosmologies weren’t part of the Heavenly sphere itself, which is what the Reim’s illustrations seems to say.  I suppose that it is all simply displayed somewhere in the OT, but from where I sit right now, this looks like a painfully early Western image of multiple universes. 

The other thing is:  what is the Creator looking at?  It is definitely very focused and wide-eyed, and is lasered on something about half of the diameter of the universe to the right, just on the other side of the dividers. Is this the biggest of the Blank and Empty Things that can be imagined? 

Comments

[green tea]

Amazing photo! I like this one. The French Bible Mortalisee image is really good. Thanks for sharing such nice snap here. Well it is nice to post here.

[Ray Girvan]

Wow! I have a tiny copy of this, and have been looking for a larger one for ages, except I couldn't quite guess the necessary Google keywords. Way back a correspondent drew my attention to the object's resemblance to some kind of Mandelbrot-style fractal.

Mr Velocipede http://mrvelocipede.blogspot.com/2007/09/distractions.html has a very nice colour image; it's a "Bible moralisée" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_moralis%C3%A9e by the way.