Tingere l’anima

Abstract

In a little church of northern Italy (in Valdurna-Durnholz, near Bolzano) we can find paintings from the fifteenth century where we have ancient Gnostic-Alchemical themes, again. These works, show an angel washing a soul and gives it the heavenly baptism, something that we find also in a Nag Hammadi text as the Gospel of Philip. In this text, the soul’s purification is described as an act of washing and dipping in a cleansing substance; this is a lexicon coming from the washing and the dying of clothes, and particularly from the Alchemical manipulations. Alchemical Hermeticism, Gnosticism and Christianity share a common soteriological view which has been passed to the West in ways often difficult to understand.