Alchemy Illustrations: Manuscripts - Aurora Consurgens
One of the vexing questions of literary alchemy is how did writers, poets, and dramatists get so many ideas from a metallurgical process that involved at most one human being, the alchemist. How did the ingredients of a chemical process become characters and forces in a story? How did Sulphur and Mercury become the Red King and White Queen? The most common Ask I get is about the Chemical Wedding--which I suspect is people trying to figure out how an alchemist bending over a fire cooking his piece of rock in an alembic (flask) ends up as Romeo and Juliet or Harry and Hermione or Will and Lyra.
In some cases it seems likely that writers were familiar with alchemical treatises--Shakespeare’s works show familiarity with George Ripley’s Compound of Alchemy, for instance. And we know that Masonic ritual at the time Mozart and his librettist wrote The Magic Flute included the principles of alchemy. But for many writers, I suspect that alchemical ideas reached them through alchemical imagery. Artists and engravers created visual symbols, personifications of the alchemist’s inert elements; writers were then inspired by these symbols and used them in their works.
There are two kinds of alchemical images.
First, manuscript illustrations, hand painted, in colour, generally by monks, before the coming of printing to the West,
Second, printed books, most notably the black-and-white emblem books printed in the German lands.
The best source for alchemical images, with hundreds of illustrations, is Jacques van Lennap, Alchimie, 1985. See also the works of Stanislaus Klossowski di Rola. The best online resource is Adam McLean’s alchemy website: https://www.alchemywebsite.com/aurora.html
So I thought I would reblog the most important illustrations, now scattered in hundreds of my posts, but organize them by specific work. You can find lengthier explanations of all of these images by searching my archive for the name of the work. Let’s start with Aurora Consurgens, “Rising Dawn,” the influential manuscript created around 1410 and wrongly attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas. The Jungian psychologist Marie Louise von Franz wrote a whole book about it.
Aurora consurgens
Mercurius “killing” (decapitating in this case) the Red King and the White Queen to create the Philosopher’s Stone (silver and gold flowers in the flask).
The rebis/hermaphrodite/androgyne, the product of the final Chemical Wedding.
Chemical Wedding of Sun (on a lion) and Moon (on a griffin)
The ermine “kills” the basilisk by showing it its own reflection. Chopped up snakes on the right.
Mercurius as the dragon.
Sophia dispensing wisdom through the lac virginis (virgin’s milk).
Peacock’s tail stage of the alchemical process.
What you notice right away is how bright and well-preserved the colours are. The only change is that the original silver paint has tarnished to black (noticeable in the first image with the silver flowers in the flask).
The other key point is that there are different ways of depicting the various processes. The Chemical Wedding, for example, is represented here by a decapitated Red King and White Queen, Sun and Moon knights in a joust, and the rebis. And there are many other ways in other treatises. Writers can pick and choose what images they want to use for their story.
Next will be the Book of the Holy Trinity (Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit), created around the same time as the Aurora Consurgens.
