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ArtistAn ancient alchemical gateway in Rome, set into a rough, weathered brick-and-stone garden wall. A narrow rectangular portal is framed by pale aged marble carved with mysterious seventeenth-century alchemical, planetary, geometric, and Hermetic symbols. The doorway itself is completely sealed with dark, worn masonry, suggesting a passage that once opened somewhere impossible. Above it rests a circular stone medallion bearing an enigmatic geometric emblem. Beside the gateway sits an archaic stone figure inspired by the Egyptian god Bes: squat, muscular, bearded, broad-faced and protective, weathered like an archaeological artifact, seated upon an irregular ancient stone. Mediterranean weeds and grasses grow around the base. Palm fronds and fragments of ochre Roman architecture rise beyond the old wall. Make the scene feel like an accidental survival from a 17th-century cabinet of curiosities—part archaeological ruin, part forgotten alchemical laboratory, part portal outside ordinary time. Strong Italian afternoon sunlight, deep shadows, mineral textures, faded limestone, volcanic earth, quiet uncanny atmosphere. Historically suggestive rather than fantasy-costume imagery. Photorealistic archaeological photography with subtle magical realism. No modern objects, no people, no captions, no readable text, no typography.
I had just left Rome. The day before, I was in Napoli, back from Pompeii and wandering downtown thinking: I could live here. This is my kind of place. With my new tan I fit right in, although I’m 64 and apparently most Italians are only 59.
Naples is a gigantic cabinet of curiosities. No wonder Caravaggio went there.
Years ago I dreamed of collecting scoria from Vesuvius. The dream showed me exactly where to pick it up. This time I never made it up the volcano. Instead, at Pompeii, I photographed the surviving head of Jupiter near his ruined temple.
Waiting for a bus in Naples, I ran the image through Google.
Bingo.
PORTA MAGICA. THE MAGIC GATE.
And where was it? Practically around the corner from where I had been staying in Monti.
I had missed it.
But perhaps missing it was better, because now the story became part of the machinery.
I began reading about Francesco Giuseppe Borri, born in Milan in 1627: Jesuit-educated in Rome, where Athanasius Kircher was teaching; physician, alchemist, visionary, heretic, wanderer. Borri claimed commerce with angels, called himself Prochristus, fled the Inquisition, moved through Strasbourg, Amsterdam and Copenhagen, associated with the intellectual world around Queen Christina of Sweden, and fascinated people connected with Oldenburg, Hooke and eventually Newton.
Borri told Monconys that everything has a center, yet the center is somehow one—like infinitely many circles of different diameters sharing the same point.
Omnia in uno, in omnibus unum.
Everything in one; the one in everything.
Now we’re talking.
The legend says an alchemist associated with Borri left behind mysterious writing connected with the Philosopher’s Stone, and the symbols were preserved on Palombara’s Porta Magica. There is even John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica among its strange symbolic vocabulary. Later the gate acquired those wonderfully inappropriate Egyptian Bes figures standing guard like two cosmic bouncers.
And somebody eventually blocked the doorway.
Probably sensible. People might have been disappearing into seventeenth-century Rome.
Three days earlier I had stood inside the Pantheon watching the one-o’clock sunlight approach the doorway. Everyone was photographing an astronomical curiosity. I was making an incantation.
The Pantheon itself feels like a machine for this purpose. You stand inside an enormous sphere beneath the oculus—the great eye—and for a moment you occupy something resembling the zero point. Through the doorway: two columns. Sunlight. Geometry.
Except nothing lines up absolutely perfectly.
I think that matters.
Alchemy interests me precisely there. Not gold-making, not mystical fog, but al-kīmiyāʾ: the black earth, matter undergoing transformation. I’m suspicious of Rosicrucian obscurity and mysticism that refuses to say what it means. I want to nail the thing down and ask: What world are we actually participating in?
Yet poetically I love the whole apparatus—the Bes guardians, Dee’s monad, Borri’s disappearing philosopher, Jupiter’s broken head, Vesuvius, the Pantheon’s eye and the doorway I somehow failed to see.
So into the cabinet it goes.
No—the warehouse.
Because whatever this practice of mine has been doing for forty years, the image keeps returning:
a portal outside ordinary time and space.
And suddenly the Pantheon door and the Magic Gate seem to occupy the same impossible center.
Borri would have appreciated that.
I have always had a good relationship with Jupiter and Venus.
