The cloister of Le Puy

The cloitre is rectangular: 30,75 meters by 19. The report/ratio of these two numbers gives Phi. We thus have here a gilded rectangle. Other divine proportions: in the length, we have 10 arcades and 5 in the width, 153 capitals.

Unfortunately, the unit was restored with the XIX ème century and it became difficult to interpret symbolism.

The chapter house gives in the gallery is cloitre. The door is framed by 4 columns including two very rare, which is known as “heavy showers”. Their relief is not other than the metaphor of water of the styx which the Greeks were to cross after their death. To cross the threshold, between these two columns heavy showers, it is thus symbolically to cross Styx and to penetrate in the kingdom of the shades, the vault of deaths.

On the tympanum, the broken line translated the same concept, the rafter being symbol of water. It has 8 points (a number christic, of the future life) and 12 balls (allusion to the 12 months of the year, with the signs of the zodiac, consequently at the time rythmé by the race of the sun). The balls are also used for to éclatoir with energies.

One of the capitals of time represents two lions retained by a cord whose ends do not intertwine to do any more but one of them. The two lions draw each one on their side. They are attached against their liking and one sees well that they want to scratch and to bite. They are Cèrbère, the guards of the threshold, solar nature. Their bond is the cosmic axis because it goes down from in top, it links them in only one body. Identical but antagonistic, representation of the duality in us. On the alchemical level, they are the green lion and the red lion, two secret mercuries.