FIGURE 1.

(Upper left): Alexander Scriabin composing (Belsa, 1986); signature etched digitally onto photo from a letter to publisher Mitrofan P. Belaïeff (1836–1904), dated February 11, 1895 (Franke, 1973). (Upper middle and right): Cover of Reports and Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Philosophy held in Geneva, and the page showing Scriabin’s name (French spelling) in the roster of members (author’s archive). The Congress was organized by the Swiss neurologist-psychologist Édouard Claparède (1873–1940), nephew of the comparative anatomist René-Édouard Claparède (1832–1871); President of Honor was the theologian-philosopher Ernest Naville (1816–1909). (Lower left): A sketch by Scriabin of the temple where the Mysterium was to be celebrated (Scriabine, 1979). It does not bear any inscription, but Scriabin had talked about it to Boris de Schloezer. The edifice, in the shape of a semi-dome, would be elevated over the water plane in the middle of a lake, such that, by its reflection, it would appear as a perfect sphere; color shafts of light would give the impression of a varying architecture. There are six portals (12 in total), and a crown of stars near the vertex. The meaning and function of the “pillars” is elusive. (Lower right): The color keyboard, executed by the physicist Alexander Moser upon Scriabin’s commission, and designed and constructed specially for the performance of Prometheus, the first score to include a color instrument. It is a wooden circle of 12 lamps: seven lamps according to the scale of the spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green, sky-blue, blue, violet) and five additional lamps linking the extreme colors of the spectrum and forming a transition from violet to red, rosy, rosy-red, etc. This circle corresponds to the circle of fifths in music, the red standing for C, the orange for G, the yellow for D, and so forth (Hope, 1970). The instrument is housed in the Scriabin Memorial Museum in Moscow. (Inset, center): Scriabin’s “mystic chord” in fourths.