OCEAN CITY — Michele Pasciullo loves religious art. When she began to draw sacred geometry, she said “it opened the door to all this connection between these different religions.”
It also led her to create “Star Glyphs and Sacred Symbols: A Coloring Book for Contemplation & Awakening.” It is a coloring book that is much more than a coloring book.
“I’ve always been fascinated by it. I started to realize there was a connection between different cultures and religions but I didn’t at first see what that was,” she said. “When I started doing geometry, especially sacred geometry … that opened the door.”
Pasciullo was a graphic designer who prefers work by hand rather than on computer and has been a mosaic artist for more than 15 years, teaching classes locally. About three years ago she began to do the geometric drawing, which was related to mosaics because of the way she put things together in geometric patterns.
She had often stuck with beach and similar themes in her mosaics because this is, after all, the Jersey shore, and what is popular. Her heart, however, was more into metaphysical art, “into the religious kind of artwork which not everyone can relate to.”
She explained that wasn’t exactly the best seller, but she loved it, including the parts of mosaics that look like stained glass windows with dark grout from a church.
Pasciullo said there has been a growing interest in sacred geometry, symbols that have been used for thousands of years across many cultures.
“It’s the mystical measure of the Earth. What that means and how that evolved, especially the way they involved temples and sacred places, they all followed the same geometry that has to do with the measure of the Earth,” she said.
Her passion for the subject had an additional origin.
“I got really inspired when I found crop circles. That’s kind of a woo-woo subject too,” she said, laughing. “I started to call them geoglyphs. It’s like art in the Earth because the crop circles are made in fields of living grains. And most of them are in England but have been found all over the world.
“There have been over 10,000 of them in the last four years. They don’t know where they came from, but the majority of them follow the sacred geometry patterns. To me it was super-intriguing,” she said. “There is this very precise geometry in fields. And they appear overnight or there was nothing there and 10 minutes later they were there. Unexplainable by our current understanding of how things work.”
As for a coloring book with complex designs, Pasciullo had a simple reason.
“I was drawing these complex geometries and then I would color them. When I was done I wanted to color it again,” she said, but it had already taken her hours to create the drawn design in the first place.
“I thought what if I make them in black and white and reproduce them and color them? After doing the classes I thought maybe other people would enjoy them too without going through the whole process of drawing it,” she said.
But Pasciullo doesn’t just fill the pages of her 8.5”x11” book with the drawings.
“There’s like a whole story, lessons behind the sacred geometry that maybe isn’t so apparent when you look at it. I wanted to add in that part of it that’s connecting with nature and patterns all around us and the phi ratio and how our body is based on those proportions,” she explained.
On each page is the design and beneath that an explanation and the inspiration for it, but she doesn’t stop there. She includes a meditation and an affirmation.
One of the 33 designs is of 24 emanations radiating out from a zig-zag star in three waves. “A day in time contains 24 hours with segments of morning, afternoon and night,” she writes. The design is inspired by a geoglyph reported in England.
The accompanying meditation: “How does my energy change or switch directions at different times of day? Can I recognize and be comfortable with this shifting?”
The affirmation: “I am aware of my daily energy and easily navigate the highs and lows. I am comfortable with myself at all times.”
Pasciullo said she’s not sure where the affirmations come from.
“It was kind of an inspiration, a little voice in my head. Maybe it’s the same with whoever makes the crop circles,” she said, laughing again.
She brings this kind of light spirit and her easy laughter into the classes she teaches and that is why she included them in the coloring book.
“It would give readers a little bit of a feel for a class, to interact with me while doing the book without my being there,” she said. “When you color, you’re spending a lot of time drawing so you’re kind of absorbing it subconsciously while coloring it.
“I think it is something that speaks to our subconscious, so why not add positive affirmations because it’s kind of going into your subconscious while you’re doing it.” She noted it is akin to subliminal messages. “It’s kind of like advertising, but in a good way.”
Pasciullo has lived in southern New Jersey for the past 20 years, including Ocean City and Upper Township and in Atlantic County. Her self-description on the book includes that she is “an artist, mother, reiki practitioner, teacher and cosmic explorer.” An additional reason for creating the coloring book, she said, “is to hopefully have a positive impact on the world.”
“Star Glyphs and Sacred Symbols: A Coloring Book for Contemplation & Awakening” is available on amazon.com (search for “Star Glyphs”) and she plans to make it available at local retailers as well. It can be purchased via email by contacting her at purplelotusmosaics.com. She has time-lapse drawings on her Instagram as well at purplelotusmosaics.
– By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff