The Sacrifical Universe
David Chaim Smith has been known to students of kabbalah for more than a decade, but a recent return to art as a vocational practice has brought his work to a wider audience. His first book with us, The Sacrificial Universe, draws upon his experience to present us with a devotional approach to ecstatic visionary mysticism. Ranging from intellectual treatises on sacred geometry, biomorphism and the symbol of the serpent in kabbalistic theory and practise, to a poetic twilight language of ecstatic devotion, The Sacrificial Universe is unlike any other book we have offered to date.
Produced as a lavish small folio with generous margins and a classic typographic style, The Sacrificial Universe presents David’s key artworks of the last four years as full-page images, with the triptychs and quadriptych offered as folding plates. The complex and evocative iconographic symbolism is also explored through commentaries. And yet The Sacrificial Universe is more than a homage to those seventeenth century books of hermetic mysticism. Structured according to the classic kabbalistic text Sefer Yetzirah, The Sacrificial Universe may be approached on three levels (world, year, and soul) to offer the reader a view of gnostic surrender within a vision of the self-consuming nature of phenomena.
Hardback edition
33.5cm x 23.3cm
120 pages
35 monotone plates, including six folding
28 vignettes in text
Deluxe edition
Quarter-bound leather hardcover with dust-jacket and slipcase. Limited to 88 copies.
