Original acrylic Unicorn chakras surreal art painting

This is my first Unicorn painting. I saw a neat book called "The Unicorn" by Nancy Hathaway which had all sorts of ancient paintings and images as well as mythology and stories from various places in the world (from the usual Unicorn of European to the Chinese K'i-lin).

Anyway, within my painting I have the Unicorn at the top with the horn pointing in a line through the Moon, to Mercury and then to Venus (those two bright stars at top are really the planets Mercury and Venus.

The ancient Earth-centred model of the cosmos is usually seen in modern times as merely a false physical model people had at one time to describe the physical cosmos. The interesting thing about that model is that it was not merely a physical model but the arrangement of the 5 known planets at that time (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) and 2 luminaries (Moon and Sun) were seen to be ordered circling the central Earth in a way that is very similar to an arrangement of the chakras within Indian yogic thought.

The ancient Greeks did have similar ideas to energy centres going up the body which corresponded to "spiritual" development (their staff of Hermes or Caduceus is a symbol for that whole concept)

The arrangement of the 5 planets and 2 luminaries was like this (with Earth at the bottom - these are given as the Roman names which are the names we use):

This geocentric arrangement was like a symbolic ladder of spiritual development designed to correspond to the knowledge of the energy centres experienced within the human body.

And so in my painting I wanted to show these first three levels being pointed to by the Unicorn's horn ... Moon, Mercury, Venus.

The Moon here is a half. This is a balance between the illuminated side and the dark half.

Mercury here is shown with three spikes of light with two pointing down. These two point down to the right and left  to represent the two directions downwards towards "Earthly" spiritual understanding where aspects of 'duality' tend to govern things. Everyone is clinging to a particular side of an argument, believing one thing is better than another, thinking that one aspect must prevail over another.  The third spike of light points upward which is the direction where the next level of Venus would be found (and this one spike implies that a unification of the seemingly opposing aspects of duality can be merged for a complete view)

Venus here is shown with 4 spikes of light at the four cardinal directions. This is similar to how a Mandala in Buddhist and Hindu imagery is often a circlular form with four directions made prominent (with these 4 directions being a symbol of stability).

The painting shows a woman climbing the ladder from the lower ground towards where the Unicorn stands. This could be seen as a symbol for a spiritual acsension towards higher chakras.

The inclusion of the two dogs beside the ladder and the scorpion in the water are references to the Tarot card called "The Moon". In that card, a crustacean with it's protective shell and defensive claws crawls out of the security of the water onto land where two dogs guargd either side of the path  towards the Moon. I always see these dogs as a danger on ether side of the path towards the goal. I made this crustacean into a scorpion

This is related to another set of symbols I feel may also represent an ascension through spiritual levels as represented within certain constellations in the sky (constellations being invented by ancient humans which often have a lot of symbolic meanins attached to them). None of this is shown in this painting however, but I still added the scorpion as the crustacean here because of Scorpius in the actual sky.

The line from Scorpius, through Ophiuchus (The serpent handler), through Hercules above him, and through Draco the dragon (the constellation Hercules is said to have his foot on the head of that dragon) appears to me to be a symbolic representation of something very similar to the chakras. The fact that this line of constellations ends up pointing to the northern ecliptic pole may be a symbol of the enlightenment at the top chakra. Of course I am just speculating here but it is something I am trying to look into (but the whole thing gets pretty vague as some of these ancient details have been obscured by time and alterations by people)

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The Mountain in the background also contains some meaning. Theoretically, the peak comes to a point with perfect zero width. This would be a symbol of pure enlightenment with no attachment to duality.

As one gets nearer to the base of the mountain, it fades away into the background and disappears. This is a symbol pointing to the very real occurance within our "definition" (our word we stick onto a seemingly "real" separate object within Reality) of a mountain. We will agree when we see a mountain that it is "really" a mountain (it seems obvious to us and silly to question this) but we never think enough about this at all. In actuality, our definition of that as a "real" separate object dissolves as we look closer to the base of the mountaind where the valley or background terrain are located . We .can no longer decide where the mountain is and where the valley or just background terrain is.. it all becomes vague and so any decision is purely arbitrary (and so, the whole labelling of some zone of terrain as a mountain is not really a real separate "object" but is a product of our own thinking and language). And so, the mountain is a good example of seeing how our definitions of how we break up Reality into "objects" is a decision made by us  ... and not because those objects are really the objects we decide they are.

If you think enough about this, you can see how so many (and I'm pretty sure all) of the so-called objects we believe are *really* separate objects are actually all one immense whole. The illusion of separate objects is created in our thoughts.

Of course, this isn't a very practical way to get along in usual human society, so many people aren't aware of this (and probably think it's silliness or craziness) and other people who are aware of it continue to label bits of Reality as separate for conveniance sake ;-)

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And so the sharp pointed horn extending from the forehead of the Unicorn may also be a symbol of a  projection from the upper spiritual centre ... coming to a theoretical perfect point with zero width.