The Longevity Figure, part one: a portable eclipse
The Triangular Book makes three promises: to recover what is lost beneath the sea, to find what lies hidden in the earth, and the famous one – to prolong life to a century and beyond, with the freshness of fifty.
The first two promises come with a hard condition: you may work them only when the sun, the earth and the moon stand in conjunction on the same line and in the same plane. Three bodies on one line, in one plane – that is an eclipse, and an eclipse may not come round for years.
The third promise offers a way out. For long life, the book says, you may work at any other time – but only if you wear on you a figure like the one shown here.
The talisman offers freedom from the timing constraint: it is your own portable eclipse, available any time. At the top, the sun. Below it, a crescent moon. Between and around them a course of small stars, strung on a single vertical line the pen never quite draws but the eye can feel – the same line the text demands the three bodies stand on. It is the alignment made portable: an eclipse worn on the body, so the third work need not wait for the real one in the sky.
The French draws the geometry and never uses the word eclipse. But three bodies on a line and in a plane is what an eclipse is, and the figure sets the sun, the moon and a plumb line down in exactly that arrangement.
Next: the two red arcs that curve around the figure, which spell something, and point back at the sky.