David Sater

the invisible castle

no one (shade of my father lost in the book)

the blind alchemist (the invisible menagerie)

pup waiting for you beside the doorway of the Law

λύκος (who is that radiological child descending? Is it apollo come to hide from itself in the wolf?)

lodestone   (drawing from when i was a kid)

Timb (from my last day at the inn)

self-portrait as an alchemist (photogravure)

- Beneath the house of Tadeáš Hájek (the 16 century personal physician of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II) after a period of intense flooding in Prague in 2002, there was discovered a complete alchemical laboratory. It includes 3 tunnels which lead to different parts of the city. (One, created perhaps with the notion of escape in mind, leads out of the city under the river, another leads into a square in town-center, and the third goes to a tower in the castle. (The same castle, in some manner, which figures in Kafka’s novel by that name).

The laboratory is replete with rooms for glass making (pictured bottom left), the drying of herbs (above), the smelting of metals & distillation (across). A marble panel with the carved relief of a horsebacked rider (pictured bottom right by the homunculus) was found to open and contained an iron box. In the box was the alchemist’s manuscript, with all recipes enclosed - and by which czech benedictine monks have subsequently begun to make alchemical wines & elixirs.

(The lab was sealed after Rudolf’s death (whose purse funded the investigations) - a great patron of the Art, who fostered an international community, even bringing the likes of John Dee & Edward Kelley to town) but locally the house long maintained rumors of strange goings-on, even hauntings, and was associated with the sign of the goat. This seems to have been due to memories of the fumes & sulfurous smells that could be met leaking out from beneath the nearby street.)

Sampo, dream-mule

(his milk-brain inoculated soon with the images a mule receives in sleep)

Sanatorium drip (the honey sacrifice)

under world

is it the house of your person that provides the flame ?

the subtle flame (house inverted in the belly between the pyrs of day and night grows a tree)

sketch of the witch’s desk

Hum's portable wysard case

ink from the sorcerer’s finger seeping into the book (dark knot)

Athanor

2 late (thinking, after Robert Fludd's perpetual motion machine)

head of the king being broken down in an alchemical flask

drawing of a man on the amtrak reading a newspaper

the second tree (bat boat)

ox head cosmic fishing lure

subterranean village

circus

a sleeper in the carriage

the bird of hermes who eats it wings

+ s c a p e +

wooden gun (civil war reenactment)

Nap with hound 

a chymical wedding

self portrait at the home of nicolas flamel (oldest stone house in paris)

Asura

typhon (a stigmata in the book)

barren field

beneath the mounds (done on the train to paris on my own)

stigmata 

the unnamed third (dog shard)

thread house

(drawing on my 25th birthday at the table of the inn)

shade of his dad in a tree

At the home of Nicolas Flamel (oldest stone house in Paris)

kindness [tabernacle from harm]

inn

arbor caelum   |   the heavenly tree grows downwards

timb, years younger in those moments

gyre

Mint memories

Melanosis of the milksea - (from Dawn rips the dog a brother) 

                                           Laocoön waters of thought

split-tree

Apep (the drawing that broke my head)

the scorpion men dreaming

Sampo, dream-mule

(his milk-brain inoculated soon with the images a mule receives in sleep)

drawing in london on my 26th birthday