SUGILITE, HEIRONYMUS BOSCH AND THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS

Heironymus Bosch, for the uninitiated, was most definitely not a British rock star of the 1970s who had a goatee beard, wore two large gold earrings, looked a bit like Bob Marley and called everyone dude. The name was a pseudonym for a man born around 1450 at Hertogenbosch, a small Flemish town near Antwerp, who went by the even better name of Jeroen Anthoniszoon van Aiken. However it was the pseudonym with which he signed his enigmatic paintings. Yes, you know who I’m talking about now. Most of them are so jam packed with what to our modern eyes is psychotic religious imagery that half an hour looking at any of them makes you think that either someone’s put something in your drink or the guy himself was on LSD.

There’s no two ways about it. It’s either you or him! It’s up to you. You make the decision! What is true is that the man was a great artist whose work leaves us with a permanent psychological riddle of interpretation. Why the endlessly grim symbolism of hell and all the medieval religious nastiness that happened to you if you put a foot wrong or the cloying pullulating expressions of virtue and all the good things that came with righteousness? Why the intense dichotomy. The bad wasn’t just bad, it was meant to terrify, while the good offered you the prospect of God, Christ and the angels, to say nothing of the virgins. And all the way through there are some of the most fantastic images that any human being has ever created. Things so far flung in imagination that it’s genuinely impossible to get your head round them all. Stuff that’s not just plain weird but strongly borders on the alien.

All his paintings are riveting but The Garden of Earthly Delights is seriously mind boggling. It comes in three parts, a triptych, which I’ve looked at over and over for hours, taking it in bit by bit and trying to make sense of it then studying it as a whole thing. It’s so packed with imagery that you need a powerful degree of self-control not to get carried away by it all. You are bombarded by countless peculiar presentations, one after the other, that you have absolutely no reference to in ordinary life or even your wildest imagination. All the way through you’re in an endless state of wonder and at the end you can only ask, where on earth did he get it all from? And there’s the clue really, because what you’ve been looking at is really like nothing on earth.

Once you’ve got that far and you are just coming out of being mind-boggled you still come back to the question… Where did he get it all from? For one thing there’s no contemporaneous imagery of the kind he presents for him to work from. Sure, his ethos is stuffed with all the delights and horrors of medieval Catholicism. Heaven, hell and damnation… virtue and its rewards… the whole uncompromising spectrum of the good, the bad and the ugly, only there was nothing artistically graphic around at the time for his imagination to feed off. Therefore we’re still left with the question. What fired it up? What made him create such an uncompromisingly hypnotic panoply of the grotesque? Sure, there’s room enough for artistic interpretation galore but what there isn’t any room for is doubt. He makes sure you know what’s good and what’s bad and you definitely know what side he comes down on.

So what drove him to do it? Work so intensely packing a painting like The Garden of Earthly Delights with so much spiritual imagery? The more you look at it the more you realise that the focus and concentration needed to do such a thing must have been immense, almost bordering on the superhuman. And that’s saying nothing about having the phenomenal technical ability to put it all into place and say what you want in a piece of perfectionism bordering on the psychotic. If the Garden of Earthly Delights says anything about Heironymus Bosch it’s that he’s a man on a mission.

There’s been much speculation that Bosch, though part of a religious order known as The Brotherhood, dabbled in some of the various ‘cures’ that doctors of the time prescribed. One being a kind of ‘witches ointment’ that induced powerful hallucinations similar to the imagery expressed in his paintings It’s possible that a bit of sniffing fired up the religiosity already there in his mind. We well know today that a fair bit of modern popular culture was inspired, let us say, by an involvement with certain prohibited substances, so five and a half centuries back, Bosch could have got into the habit. However substance abuse on its own wouldn’t explain the effortlessly broad spectrum of spiritual energy found in his work, especially The Garden of Earthly Delights. Not even if he was permanently high as a kite. No, there’s got to be something more here.       

With recent scientific advances in the chemistry of spectral analysis and a better understanding of the spiritual dynamics of crystal healing, it is now possible to comprehend the complex relationship between Sugilite, Heironymus Bosch and the Flemish Master’s greatest painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, both on a factual basis of science and on a level that is essentially spiritual. Both, crucially, are integral to the process and cannot be separated.

Because of an ongoing interest in dating his work in recent years, those engaged in preservation have increasingly called upon the expertise of science to explore certain aspects of its material structure, digging under the surface imagery as it were to show what it is actually made of. The chemistry of the paint, as is well known, has a direct bearing on its colour so it was really no surprise that spectral analysis revealed sodium for reds and flesh tints, one of the main compositional colors of the central panel, along with potassium, lithium, iron and manganese for the darker hues of that on its right. Despite pigment fading of  five hundred years it all seemed to fit into place and nothing more was made of it. A scientific approach to cleaning and preservation with an eye to the chemistry of the paint could proceed.

It was now that fate lent a hand. One of the team engaged in the process, like so many others engaged in art preservation, had a multi-disciplinary training in the sciences and purely by chance one of his subjects of choice was mineralogy. With his eye running down the chemistry of its pigmentation he was sharply drawn by its overall mineral composition. For confirmation of what at first seemed supposition he consulted a text book in the field and was immediately rewarded. The chemical structure completely conformed with the alumino-silicate mineral Sugilite and its content of potassium, iron, sodium, manganese and lithium!

Now this was a real surprise. Sugilite was a rare mineral, usually massive in form though sometimes containing even rarer tiny prismatic crystals. The question of how it became part of the paint Bosch had used for his masterpiece was interesting but not especially significant. It simply may have come from or been part of other sources supplied to the artist. Our preservation expert, however, was entirely unaware of the spiritual, healing character of the mineral. Why should he be? This kind of thing wasn’t part of his background and anyway only came later.

That, precisely, is where one part of the story ends and another more fascinating revelation begins, namely the spiritual relationship between Sugilite and the extraordinarily spiritual fifteenth century Flemish artist Heironymus Bosch. For those associated with crystal healing Sugilite is special, particularly in matters of spiritual protection, dreams and purification where it becomes an illuminating beacon of light. In this respect it will certainly be interesting to consider these functions alongside what has already been said about the artist.

First and with any such connection in mind, it will be useful to consider some of the mineral’s beneficial properties from the standpoint of healing. As is well known, its protective quality for those who possess it from negative aspects in their environment are exceptional. It is deemed to create a shield of light, maybe even a force field around a person making them immune to the disharmony of others. Its protective quality may indeed have guarded Bosch from the spiritual turbulence around him at the time, especially as, by 1500 he was facing a world of religious reformation.

Then again, Sugilite helps advance our ability to ground spiritual energy. In other words assists us in giving it the focus we need to take us where we want to go. This may have been particularly important for someone like Bosch, determined absolutely to promote his very own thoroughly distinctive religious message in his art.

Other functions though create an even more profound connection. Sugilite plays a key role in meditation and dreams, greatly increasing the depth of inner experience. This is especially important because the images experienced are more than usually packed with symbols and symbolic meaning. Meditation and dreaming with the artist maybe on some kind of high that I alluded to earlier, all of this, with the spiritual energy of Sugilite driving it on, would buzz up the densely packed soaring psychosis seen in the Garden of Earthly Delights. The connection is so powerful, so clearly shown by the colors that went into the painting that there’s little room left for doubt. There might not have been any seismic activity in 15^th century Flanders or any meridians or ley lines anywhere near that part of the world but clearly Bosch used Sugilite pigments in his painting and they could have come from anywhere!

The final connection for crystal healing enthusiasts is that Sugilite happens to be one of the most powerful stones for calling up what is known as the Violet Flame of Purification, a very special energy of exceptional value to those engaged on a spiritual pathway, indeed on a spiritual quest. Contact with the mineral initiates a cleansing process in which negative influences from a person’s inner psyche and external environment are purged, leading them back in the direction they need to go. Meaning is found in dreaming, possibly in hallucination where imagery is better understood, guiding the seeker on a path to communion with their soul and harmonious accord with its purpose.

Absolutely ideal for Bosch, helping him confirm ever again his chosen religious pathway and means of expressing it. There’s no conflict within him, no conflict with those around him or his peers in The Brotherhood. No trouble with the local powers that be. As I have said, many of his family were painters. Maybe they were getting their spiritual energy and guidance from Sugilite too but without indulging in that little extra! With that in mind, Heironymus Bosch might have said the same kind of thing as kids in California four hundred and fifty years later. Send for the policeman… Love and peace man!

I want you to think of that next time you look at the painting in Lisbon or see a copy of it in a book. Get yourself a Sugilite pendant and light up a spliff. If you don’t go psychotic in ten minutes I suggest you ring up Nick Clegg, and tell him how much you love the Liberal Democrats. It’s only then that you realise you’re somehow inside the painting! You’ve become one of its figures. Going to hell with a poker up your arse or stuck in an orange with a glass tube in your eye and a rat running down it!