This engraving—Empedocles Breaks through the Crystal Spheres—resonates powerfully with the Eris–Pluto archetype: the moment when suppressed truth collides with entrenched cosmology and forces a rupture in inherited reality. Like the discoveries of Nicolaus Copernicus, the image symbolizes the irreversible threshold at which dominant worldviews fracture and consciousness is compelled to confront what lies beyond sanctioned belief. First published in 1888 by Camille Flammarion, it appeared with the now-famous caption: “A missionary of the Middle Ages tells that he had found the point where the sky and the Earth touch.”
I have created a fully colorized, original, and copyrighted interpretive version of this engraving, transforming the original black-and-white woodcut through a deliberate symbolic process. Drawing inspiration from the cinematic technique used in The Wizard of Oz, the image moves from a near-monochrome, desaturated palette into vivid color—an intentional visual metaphor for Eris breaking containment and Pluto catalyzing irreversible awakening. The transition marks consciousness crossing a threshold: from conditioned perception into direct encounter with forbidden or previously excluded truth.
Nicolas Camille Flammarion (26 February 1842 – 3 June 1925), who introduced the image to the public, was a French astronomer, author, and one of the great scientific popularizers of the nineteenth century. He authored more than fifty works spanning astronomy, cosmology, speculative fiction, and psychical research, and founded the magazine L’Astronomie in 1882, helping to dissolve the boundary between academic knowledge and public imagination.
The engraving itself is a woodcut by an unknown artist, first published in L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire (1888). It depicts a traveler crawling beneath the edge of the sky—conceived as a solid crystalline dome—to peer into the Empyrean beyond. Though often misattributed to the medieval period, the image is a nineteenth-century allegory of epistemic rupture: the human impulse to violate sanctioned limits of knowing in order to apprehend a deeper cosmic order.
The figure is traditionally identified with Empedocles (c. 494 – c. 434 BCE), whose cosmology anticipated the Eris–Pluto dynamic long before its astrological articulation. Empedocles described reality as governed by two opposing forces: Love, associated with Aphrodite, which binds and coheres; and Strife, associated with Eris, which separates, disrupts, and compels differentiation. In evolutionary terms, Strife is not destruction for its own sake, but the necessary force that breaks stagnant unity so a more complex order may emerge.
Seen through the lens of Eris–Pluto, this image becomes a precise archetypal statement: the soul breaking through imposed cosmologies, social contracts, and psychic ceilings under evolutionary pressure. What is revealed beyond the sphere cannot be unseen. Like all genuine thresholds, the act is irreversible—and the cost of remaining inside the dome becomes greater than the risk of stepping beyond it.