On Friday evening, as the sun goes down, observant Jewish families light candles, and in many synagogues the congregation turns toward the door to greet the Sabbath as one greets a bride. The custom is not ancient in the way many suppose. It owes much to the mystics of Safed in the sixteenth century, and it draws on an older book that spoke of the Sabbath as a royal wedding between heaven and earth. That book is the Zohar , "Radiance," the greatest work of medieval Kabbalah. A Book That Appeared in Spain The Zohar first came to light in Castile, in northern Spain, in the last decades of the thirteenth century. It is a vast commentary on the Torah, written in a strange and poetic Aramaic and set in the form of a story: the second-century sage Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai wanders through the hills of Galilee with his students, discussing scripture and its hidden meanings. The man who circulated the book was Moses de León, who lived in Guadalajara and died in 1305. He said tha...

"Truth did not come into the world naked, but in types and images." The line comes from a strange and fragmentary text found in the jar at Nag Hammadi, the Gospel of Philip . It is not a gospel in the usual sense, with a story of the life of Jesus. It reads more like a notebook of sayings, riddles and reflections on how sacred things work, and it has fascinated readers because of one phrase that returns again and again: the bridal chamber. A Notebook, Not a Narrative The Gospel of Philip survives in a single Coptic copy, the third treatise in the second codex found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945. Scholars believe it was translated from Greek and composed perhaps in the third century. The only mention of the apostle Philip appears once, deep in the text, and nothing else ties him to it. The name was probably attached later. Most scholars call the work Valentinian, after Valentinus, a teacher born in Egypt who came to Rome around the middle of the second century and gat...

Two fierce animals rear up and clutch each other on a hillside. On the left is a shaggy wolf with a long, thick tail. On the right is a lean dog with a plume of fur on its tail. Their jaws are locked at the neck, and their forepaws grip each other's chests. Behind them, the sun rises in the upper left corner over a wide landscape with a river, a boat and a ruined castle. This is the forty-seventh emblem of Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens, and its motto says: a wolf coming from the east and a dog from the west bit each other. The book was printed in 1617 at Oppenheim. It has fifty emblems, and each one joins an engraving, a Latin verse, a prose discourse and a fugue for three voices. The engravings are attributed to the workshop of Matthäus Merian. Maier, a physician at the court of Emperor Rudolf II, liked to place opposites face to face. The Motto The Latin line gives a scene with a compass. One animal comes from the east, where the sun rises. The other comes from the w...

Two stone fountains stand at either side of a town square, each topped with a child-like statue that spouts a thin arc of water from its mouth. Men crowd between them. One bends to catch the water in a dish, another reaches toward the basin with a rod, and others look on with their backs to us. Behind them, a pointed obelisk and a round temple rise over a distant bridge and rooftops. This is the fortieth emblem of Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens, and its motto gives an order: from two waters make one, and it will be the water of holiness. The book was printed in 1617 at Oppenheim. It has fifty emblems, and each one joins an engraving, a Latin verse, a prose discourse and a fugue for three voices. The engravings are attributed to the workshop of Matthäus Merian. Maier, a physician at the court of Emperor Rudolf II, set many of his scenes in places where people gather. The Motto The Latin line is a plain recipe: take two waters, make them one, and the result will be a holy wat...

Two mountains stand on opposite sides, one named for Mercury and one for Venus, and between them a single child is born with a double nature. So runs the motto of the thirty-eighth emblem in Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens : Rebis, ut Hermaphroditus, nascitur ex duobus montibus, Mercurii et Veneris , "The Rebis, like a Hermaphrodite, is born from two mountains, of Mercury and of Venus." The picture has everything a puzzle-loving reader of 1618 could want: a mystery, a pair of gods and a creature that belongs to neither side alone. What the Word Means Rebis is an alchemical term, usually explained as coming from the Latin res bina , "double thing." It names the product of the union of the two principles in the Great Work, a being with both a male and a female aspect. Many alchemical books show it as a figure with two heads, or as a body half male and half female. The term does not appear in ancient sources. It belongs to the late medieval and Renaissance ...

Two bodies lie side by side on a long wooden bench, joined into one figure with two heads, a man's and a woman's. Fires burn under the bench and all around it, and curls of smoke rise in the dark. A thin crescent moon hangs in the upper right corner over a rough hillside. This is the thirty-third emblem of Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens, and its motto says: the hermaphrodite, like a dead man lying in darkness, needs fire. The book was printed in 1617 at Oppenheim. It has fifty emblems, and each one joins an engraving, a Latin verse, a prose discourse and a fugue for three voices. The engravings are attributed to the workshop of Matthäus Merian. Maier, a physician at the court of Emperor Rudolf II, never shied from strange pictures. The Motto The Latin line gives three facts. The being is double, male and female. It is as still as a corpse. It lies in darkness, and what it needs is fire. The engraving obeys the line. The figure is pale and motionless, and the fire w...

The Two of Cups from the Rider-Waite-Smith deck: A sacred union of opposites and the birth of mutual understanding under the caduceus of Hermes.