The Ophan of Scotland (in its homeland)

This May, James D. Wenn was finally in the right environment to show his sculpture ‘The Ophan of Scotland’. This small sculpture shows an interpretation of the wheel-within-wheel of the Book of Ezekiel in the Bible. The white poised-hexagonal apertures are the projections of the rhombic dodecahedron — the natural shape formed by crystals of garnet, that in the ancient world was known as carbuncle or burning embers. Ezekiel called the conformed soul a burning coal, so reading Ezekiel’s vision as a geometric allegory involving garnets is possible. This was the subject of an explanatory video linked below.

A possible silhouette of an icosahedron is a hexagon, and in his book Timaeus, Plato associated water with an icosahedron and air with an octahedron. Mounting hexagons on an octahedron (as in our sculpture In Hoc Signo, I: Tetragrammaton) gives an inner rhombic dodecahedron. ‘The Ophan of Scotland’ references the vision of ‘water in air’ (an X shaped white cloud against a blue sky) that inspired the Flag of Scotland in the middle ages. The white ribbon helps with visualising the path of the geometric projections. This is James W’s sculpture, as this part of the research of the two Jameses is made following from the ‘Wenn’s Construction’ discovery; and James W also has proud Scottish ancestry (his Granny was a Munro).

The sculpture is paired with James Syrett’s ‘The Ophan of England’ that shows poised square beams making the Flag of the Resurrection, or St George — the Flag of England. The relationship between the flags (and the Union Flag that finally combined them) was discussed in James W’s lecture ‘Garnet as Emblem of Goodness’, linked below.

James W proudly took ‘The Ophan of Scotland’ with him on a pilgrimage to key Pictish and Scottish early medieval sites: the Rock of Dumbarton, Traprain Law, and the museum dedicated to the Scottish Flag at Athelstaneford.

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