Celtic Cosmos

Traditionally, the Celtic living universe consists of seven creatures: plants, insects, fishes, birds, reptiles, mammals and human beings. That's what I had in mind while drawing "Celtic Cosmos". But it didn't seem evident to me to construct a knotwork with ladybugs or cockroaches. Or with fishes: they even don't have legs or antennae to tangle. So my Celtic Universe is the trimmed down version, minus the Swimming and the Crawling Kingdom.

At the base there is a Celtic Tree of Life of the conservatory variety. (It seems there are scarce but widespread examples of Tree-of-Life's that grow out of a pot: according to George Bain they occured in prehistoric Greece, Crete, with the Maya in Central-America and on Buddhist artifacts in India. Usually, a Tree of Life is depicted as a mistletoe-like plant (mistletoe being a symbol of fertility, of blossoming life, of healing power, and probably of a lot more), but more often than not with leaves of a trilateral symmetry, which are easier to interweave than the realistical ones that have a bilateral symmetry.

Four elements: Water, Air, Earth, Fire. My interpretation: Watersnakes (for want of knottable fishes) or, if you like, eels. They dominate the Water…

The rather undefined, almost heraldic birds are of course symbolic for the Air.

Earth is represented by my two lamaneck-hounds. I hope this doesn't give ideas to dogbreeders...

The fourth element is fire. Here in the sense of consciousness and represented by the passion of a lovemaking couple. (If you think the two little human beings are a little bit stiff and serious-looking, I advise to try out this position yourself.) The whole design is hold together by a interwoven pentagram that changes towards the middle from celtic to arab knotwork in one continuous path, thus symbolising the Universe.