At the center, a leafless tree stands stark against a textured gradient—its yellow-green trunk and dark branches reaching upward like veins or antennae. Behind it, three ghostly layers of the same tree silhouette appear in cyan, magenta, and yellow, creating a misaligned four-color print effect. This chromatic distortion evokes the Oculists’ fascination with optometry—not as science, but as metaphor. For them, sight was ritual: a parallel to true vision, the act of perceiving beyond surface, through code, into concealed truth.

On the left, vertical bands of circular patterns pulse with color and texture—each filled with symbols and cryptic overlays. These forms echo the abstract glyphs used in the Copiale manuscript: a homophonic cipher blending Roman and Greek letters with invented symbols to encode German text. The manuscript described elaborate initiation ceremonies, including symbolic eye operations and blank-page readings—rituals of forced insight and theatrical blindness.

Fragments of the actual cipher saturate the canvas—not as decoration, but as transcription. Their presence turns the painting into a partial reconstruction, a visual reenactment of encrypted ceremony. But even decoded, the Copiale Cipher remains elusive. Its rituals, once revealed, are no less strange—layered with theatrical gestures, symbolic blindness, and cryptic authority. The solution does not resolve the mystery; it reframes it.

Tree of Strife is part of the Secret Codes series, treating ambiguity as material and secrecy as violence. A tree that sees but cannot speak. A cipher that resists translation. A ritual that leaves no one unchanged.