Thursday 02 May 2019 at 8:15pm - 9:15pm

Art Week - Port Talk with Tom Bree "The Cosmos in Stone"

London House, Churchill Room

“The Cosmos in Stone - Cosmological Symbolism in the Design of Wells Cathedral”

Gothic Cathedrals are often looked upon symbolically as architectural images of the Heavenly Jerusalem: to enter such a cathedral is to walk among the stars. It is where God’s Will is done ‘on Earth as it is in Heaven’– a place in which ‘the Morning Star rises in your hearts’.

Modern cosmology is essentially a materialistic description of matter and its movements: medieval cosmology was a study by which the soul contemplated the eternal Reality of God – the ‘Divine Geometer’ – via the ordered Creation. It was with such a ‘way of seeing’ that the Master Mason would then emulate God the Creator by employing the eternal laws of mathematics and geometry to fashion a Gothic cathedral to be an image of the Cosmos with Jerusalem at its centre.

This illustrated talk will look at the underlying geometric design of the ground plan of Wells Cathedral and the way in which it embodies a Jerusalem-centred cosmological symbolism that is still used today in the symbolic layout of a Freemason lodge room. The design fuses pre-Christian cosmological symbolism with the Paschal storyline in such a way that Christ’s journey from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday follows an equinoctial Piscean middle way between the extremes of Cancer and Capricorn. The journey then culminates in the rising of the Bright Morning Star.

Tom Bree is a tutor at The Prince's Foundation School of Traditional Arts.

Presentation will be held at London House Churchill Room.
Mecklenburgh Square, WC1N 2AB