Bygone Beliefs [67]
or medium wherein the copulation of Gold with Silver is to be accomplished. Mercury, in fact, seems to have been everything and to have been capable of effecting everything in the eyes of the alchemists. Concerning gold and silver, KELLY writes: "Only one metal, viz. gold, is absolutely perfect and mature. Hence it is called the perfect male body. . . Silver is less bounded by aqueous immaturity than the rest of the metals, though it may indeed be regarded as to a certain extent impure, still its water is already covered with the congealing vesture of its earth, and it thus tends to perfection. This condition is the reason why silver is everywhere called by the Sages the perfect female body." And later he writes: "In short, our whole Magistery consists in the union of the male and female, or active and passive, elements through the mediation of our metallic water and a proper degree of heat. Now, the male and female are two metallic bodies, and this I will again prove by irrefragable quotations from the Sages." Some of the quotations will be given: "Avicenna: `Purify husband and wife separately, in order that they may unite more intimately; for if you do not purify them, they cannot love each other. By conjunction of the two natures you get a clear and lucid nature, which, when it ascends, becomes bright and serviceable.' . . . Senior: `I, the Sun, am hot and dry, and thou, the Moon, are cold and moist; when we are wedded together in a closed chamber, I will gently steal away thy soul.' . . . Rosinus: `When the Sun, my brother, for the love of me (silver) pours his sperm (_i.e_. his solar fatness) into the chamber (_i.e_. my Lunar body), namely, when we become one in a strong and complete complexion and union, the child of our wedded love will be born.' . . . `Rosary': `The ferment of the Sun is the sperm of the man, the ferment of the Moon, the sperm of the woman. Of both we get a chaste union and a true generation.' . . . Aristotle: `Take your beloved son, and wed him to his sister, his white sister, in equal marriage, and give them the cup of love, for it is a food which prompts to union.' "[1a] KELLY, of course, accepts the traditional authorship of the works from which he quotes, though in many cases such authorship is doubtful, to say the least. The alchemical works ascribed to ARISTOTLE (384-322 B.C.), for instance, are beyond question forgeries. Indeed, the symbol of a union between brother and sister, here quoted, could hardly be held as acceptable to Greek thought, to which incest was the most abominable and unforgiveable sin. It seems likelier that it originated with the Egyptians, to whom such unions were tolerable in fact. The symbol is often met with in Latin alchemy. MICHAEL MAIER (1568-1622) also says: "_conjunge fratrem cum sorore et propina illis poculum amoris_," the words forming a motto to a picture of a man and woman clasped in each other's arms, to whom an older man offers a goblet. This symbolic picture occurs in his _Atalanta Fugiens, hoc est, Emblemata nova de Secretis Naturae Chymica, etc_. (Oppenheim, 1617). This work is an exceedingly curious one. It consists of a number of carefully executed pictures, each accompanied by a motto, a verse of poetry set to music, with a prose text. Many of the pictures are phallic in conception, and practically all of them are anthropomorphic. Not only the primary function of sex, but especially its secondary one of lactation, is made use of. The most curious of these emblematic pictures, perhaps, is one symbolising the conjunction of gold and silver. It shows on the right a man and woman, representing the sun and moon, in the act of coition, standing up to the thighs in a lake. On the left, on a hill above the lake, a woman (with the moon as halo) gives birth to a child. A boy is coming out of the water towards her. The verse informs us that: "The bath glows red at the conception of the boy, the air at his birth." We learn also that "there is a stone, and yet there is not, which is the noble gift of God. If God grants it, fortunate will