Angel's Egg

“Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man. 'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?'—thus asks the last man, and he blinks. The earth has become smaller, and on it hops the man who makes everything small...'We have invented happiness'—say the last men, and they blink.” - Thus Spoke Zarathustra A prophetic eschatological vision of humanity's final bastion of innocence stranded atop Noah’s ark whilst undergoing an alchemical transformation toward a state of esoteric sublation. This film is the perfection of your least favourite English teacher's famous adage “Show, don’t tell.” Narrative exposition is almost entirely absent as each visual component of the film serves as a single vibrant thread in a masterful latticework of, albeit rather antiquated, esoteric philosophy. The colour palette structures this circulation through a truncated schema of the Magnum Opus, wherein Nigredo saturates the world as an ambient condition providing a sense of historical afterlife in which civilisation persists only as a sedimented remainder of a long-since withdrawn divinity. Within this, the girl and her egg represent Albedo as a contrasting force of clarity and purification. However, this is not to be taken in any moral or essentialist sense, as her egg is that of an angel’s. Serving as a Paracelsian womb of being, the egg functions as the literal and metaphorical vector of creative power, initiating how creation unfolds at all levels of reality. Moreover, the “Whiteness,” for lack of a better term, latent in Albedo can also represent the colour of the rib bone used to create Eve in biblical scripture. This homage to the material substratum of femininity restates Agrippa’s comparison of the fundamentally material origins of the sexes… "But to proceed; as in order and place, so also in matter of her Creation, Woman far excels Man. things receive their value from the matter they are made of, and the excellent skill of their maker: Pots of common clay must not contend with China-dishes, nor pewter utensils vie dignity with those of silver. […] Woman was not composed of any inanimate or vile dirt, but of a more refined and purified substance, enlivened and actuated by a Rational Soul, whose operations speak it a beam, or bright ray of Divinity.“ - Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex However, a more accessible register of interpretation would situate this movement within a broadly Jungian grammar of individuation or spiritual maturation, though this risks smoothing over the film’s more imaginative dimensions. The narrative of the film follows, in a displaced and fragmentary sense, from Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia: “The matter of the whole world, he calleth Pan; the soul, as it ingendereth things below, contemplateth things above, and retracteth itself into itself, he honoured with three names, viz. Maris, Neptune and Ocean, and more of this kind…”. - Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa ** Maris - The girl** Neptune - The boy Ocean - The oceanic emptiness of the setting itself ** **These represent the three modes through which being disperses, folds, and returns to itself amidst the transcendental matter of Pan. Maris “as it ingendereth things below” designates a relation of proximity to emergence, a mode of dwelling within not-yet-formalised meaning, where the Paracelsian womb of being (the egg) contains projection, attachment, faith, and ontological investment rather than a symbolic maternity in any crudely bio-essentialist sense. Neptune “as it contemplateth things above” marks a mediating or interpretive position, constituted through fragments of inherited discourse (religious, technological, mnemonic) without possessing access to their originary coherence, a figure of interpretive violence as much as interpretation itself. Ocean “as it retracteth itself into itself” names the condition in which distinction itself becomes untenable, where world, memory, and symbol collapse into an undifferentiated field most clearly represented by the film's dystopian depiction of Christ's “Fisher of men.” The symbolic significance of this depiction, of seemingly catatonic men throwing spears at the shadows of fish, rather thankfully extends beyond the confines of Biblical scripture when considering once more the words of Heinrich Agrippa, “Again thou must consider, that the virtues of things are in some things in the whole (i.e.) the whole substance of them, or in all their parts, as that little fish Echeneis, which is said to stop a ship by its mere touch, this it doth not do according to any particular part, but according to the whole substance. " - De Occulta Philosophia To conclude, the final sequence sees the girl drown and dissolve into a cluster of smaller eggs after The Boy uses his scrap-metal cross to break the Angel’s egg. She then becomes a central statue on a large mechanistic moon reminiscent of a floating spherical cathedral emerging from the sea. Thus, the soul which “ingendereth things below” as Maris (the girl) ultimately “retracteth itself into itself” through Ocean (literally) as a result of the actions of Neptune (The Boy) who “contemplateth things above.” Ultimately, we are left alone with the last man, a commissar of a godless land plagued by false visions. Gazing upon the inaccessible Rubedo sky with unmoving solemnity, “What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?”—thus asks the last man, and he blinks.” References: Agrippa, C., & Purdue, E. (2021). Three books of occult philosophy. Inner Traditions. Ferguson, J. (2014). Rosarium Philosophorum - The Rosary of the Philosopher. Volume Edizioni srl. Frederich Nietzsche. (1969). Thus spoke Zarathustra. Penguin Books. (Original work published 1883) Henricus Cornelius Agrippa. (2007). Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex. University of Chicago Press. Jung, C. G. (2014). Psychology and Alchemy. Routledge. **