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← ExitThe Manly Hall Manuscript Collection, Volume I

Reading language

Herod and the Reduction of the Elements

Explanation of the figure on the fifth page, containing the story of the children massacred by Herod and the principles of the philosophers’ art. — Reduction of the elements.

What is said of

King Herod in this emblem is terrifying. He is represented as crueler than Hercules himself, who massacres his wife and children; more inhuman than Saturn, who devours them; more unnatural than the giant Phorbas, who strangles men; harder than Jason, who cuts Apsyrtus into pieces; more voracious than Typhon or, so to speak, than Tisiphone, who feeds upon the flesh of her own brother; and finally thirstier for blood than the Erymanthian boar, which, raging against Adonis, devours his entrails. This king orders two soldiers to massacre children torn from their mothers’ breasts, two others to receive the blood flowing from their bodies, and finally two more to put this blood into a great bath, to wash Phoebus and his wife or sister, so that they may be renewed like this king tormented by a thousand afflictions, and regenerated into a better product.

Although human blood possesses a sovereign power—which has led profane physicians to say that a bath of human blood is very good for watering the earth—please do not therefore believe that our philosopher

means human blood. For the emblem must not be taken simply as it appears and without preparation: beneath its outer rind profound secrets lie concealed. By this blood he means mercurial, sulfurous, or metallic spirits, in which the poets say Vulcan bathed the Sun to cleanse it of its leprosy. Thus we read in Holy Scripture of Naaman, who was plunged seven times into the Jordan, or into the pool whose water the angel had stirred, to be cured of his leprosy. Those who search more deeply into these mysteries, which lie beyond everything we can say, understand by the king’s head crowned with a golden diadem and by his golden throne the sulfur of gold, the principal substance and foundation of the work. By his purple robe, descending to his feet in the manner of the Jews, they understand quicksilver’s outward color, in which the spirit of our king is clothed; and they indicate that the inventor of these figures is our Jewish philosopher. Through his throne we compare him with the prince of the underworld, who is the sulfur of gold, where he is

seated in his royal majesty, and from which the four rivers of hell that spread through Tartarus take their source. This has led some to represent Ophs, Saturn’s wife, or Venus seated upon a golden throne. At her right they painted lions, and at her left serpents, the first principles of this work, as we shall explain more fully elsewhere. In her right hand she held a great and very black toad, and in her left a stone shaped like a human head, tacitly making known through the shadows and characters of these figures nature’s corruption and the creation or generation of sulfur. By the broad cutlass in this king’s hand we must understand what we have said of Hercules’s club, Perseus’s sword, Cadmus’s arrow, Pallas’s spear, Mercury’s caduceus, and Vulcan’s axe, as also of the nails fastening the serpent to the cross. These signify nothing other than water, or our natural, celestial, and generative fire.

Vitriolic earth, or the sulfur of Mars, is

represented by these unfortunate women lying half dead upon the ground. These children, torn from their bosoms and breasts, are the seven parts of sulfur, for it is formed from the pure substance of vitriol; and its blood is the name given to the metallic spirit of perfect bodies. Just as a child is nourished by blood within its mother’s body and by milk after birth, so our sulfur is nourished within its mother’s body by the spirit of red vitriol. Once it has seen the light of day, it must be fed and reared through frequent imbibitions until, having reached adulthood, it is strengthened by more solid nourishment: that is, a metallic body through fermentation.

Is it surprising to see these unhappy mothers lying half dead and motionless upon the ground, since they are deprived of their own blood and that of their children, in which reside their spirit, soul, and life? To this emblem we may refer what has been said of the deaths of Adonis and Osiris. They are killed not by these soldiers, but by a boar’s tusk and Typhon’s claw, which signify the same thing as the subtle spirits of

our water, or our natural fire, which tear Adonis and Osiris to pieces: that is, dissolve and radically corrupt gold, or Adonis, who is Venus’s son.

Such barbarity and inhumanity befit only the children of the dead. They are clad in iron and armed with daggers, representing the young man depicted in the first emblem and thus signifying the mercurial spirit, to which is attributed the power of dissolving bodies. For nothing except Mercury can draw out Venus’s true tincture. The number of attendants corresponds to the number of massacred children if the king is included. They are required in the first operations. The two women also signify the two kinds of sulfur. It remains to explain why only two of these soldiers devote themselves so cruelly to massacring the children, only two receive the blood, and two pour it into a great bath. As we have said, this marks not only mercury’s quantity but also the effect and property of this work. Not only is its dissolving and calcining power represented by the two soldiers

who perform the massacre; the receiving of tinctures and the medium that carries it afloat are also signified by two other soldiers. It is further called the carrier of tinctures and souls, represented by the last two, who pour the blood into a great vessel. The diversity of persons shown in this emblem reveals the diversity of substances contained in the matter: the body of sulfur through the two half-dead mothers; that of golden and metallic sulfur through the Sun and Moon descending into the bath; sulfur’s dissolving spirit through the blood of the massacred children; and mercury’s spirit through the swords and cutlasses of those who kill them. In accordance with this multiplicity of sulfur, the poets devised and established several Venuses: one they called chaste, celestial, Urania, and, together with the Sun, mother of the Sun and Moon; another they called terrestrial and androgynous, born from the sea’s foam, who, with Mars, Vulcan, and Mercury, is the principle not only of plants but also of minerals and metals; and a third, whom they call natural, from whom, joined with the Sun and Mercury, Adonis is born. He is nothing

other than the hidden and invisible spirit of gold, vitriol, and mercury, and his son who presides over the other gods.

This is why the poets say that Saturn cut off his father’s private parts and cast them into the sea, and that foam arose upon the troubled waves, from which this goddess was born. By the private parts, and by Heaven, Saturn’s father, from whom they descend, they signify the prolific power of sulfur or mercury. By the sea’s foam they signify aphronitre, because generative power is first communicated to niter, from which sulfur and vitriol have taken their origin; these, together with quicksilver, are the beginnings and principal causes of metals. All philosophers have maintained with warmth and persistence that the seeds of all created things descend from heaven through the elements of nature, from which, as from the union of male and female, arise the most celebrated and first marriages of things. To all this they add that seminal power, or a celestial power, through

a mixture lasting a few hours, supplies the first origin of the great and little world that we call our stone. This is why they take sulfur for Heaven, the genitals for Mercury, and its corrupting and dissolving power for the sickle. Without it, sulfur or tincture, otherwise invisible, cannot be separated from its extremities—that is, water and earth—to be transplanted into the Sun’s field, nobler and more fixed; and without it gold likewise cannot be corrupted, made to grow, or multiplied without limit. This is undoubtedly the germinative power of the generative spirit descending from heaven into the sea. From its foam—that is, from our niter—Venus is born. As the inward and radical sulfur of metals, it mingles with them; without it no silver can coagulate into metal, which is why some call it metal.

We must now show what these things signify within the world of our stone. By the father’s private parts we perceive sulfur at the head of the alembic, represented by heaven,

123.Matthew 2:16 supplies the biblical massacre by Herod; the bath of blood and the sequence of mythic cruelties belong to this manuscript’s emblematic elaboration. The source’s particular names and episodes are preserved without harmonization.

124.The next page explicitly rejects a literal interpretation of this blood as human blood. Here the text’s distribution of the soldiers into three pairs prepares its explanation of the operation.

125.The text expressly defines its ‘blood’ as mercurial, sulfurous, or metallic spirits. It therefore supplies its own rule against reading the depicted massacre as an instruction to obtain human blood.

126.The sentence joins two different biblical healing accounts: Naaman’s seven immersions in the Jordan (2 Kings 5:14) and the angel’s stirring of the pool in John 5:4. The latter verse belongs to the textual tradition familiar to the author and is omitted or qualified in some modern editions. The combination is retained rather than corrected.

127.The identification of the figure’s inventor as a Jewish philosopher is the manuscript author’s inference from the robe, not independent evidence establishing authorship.

128.The manuscript spells the name Ophs and identifies her as Saturn’s wife. That source spelling is retained here.

129.The author gathers weapons and the nails of the cross under one interpretation: the agent he calls water and also fire. ‘Generative’ renders végétable in this account of nature’s productive power.

130.The text names seven parts of sulfur and distinguishes their nourishing matrix from the metallic spirit called blood. It does not enumerate the seven parts in this sentence.

131.The stages of infancy and adulthood explain successive feeding: repeated imbibition first, followed by the more solid metallic nourishment called fermentation. The developmental image governs the account.

132.The manuscript calls Adonis Venus’s son here. That relation is retained as part of its allegorical account rather than altered to another mythographic version.

133.The source reads enfants de morts, literally ‘children of the dead’. Its unusual phrase is retained, without supplying an unrecorded explanation.

134.Recette here concerns receiving or collecting the tinctures, as shown by the soldiers’ vessels; voiturier means their carrier. The passage assigns different operations to the three pairs rather than treating all six soldiers as identical agents.

135.The phrase ‘and his son’ is present in the French, although its connection with the preceding identification is compressed. The translation retains it instead of supplying an unstated genealogy.

136.The manuscript names aphronitre in explaining the sea’s foam, then connects the generative power with nitre and the origin of sulfur and vitriol. The technical name is retained in its source spelling.

137.The source reads peu d’heures, ‘a few hours’, not a word for fire. The uneven construction is continuous with the end of the preceding page; its central assertion is that a brief mixture gives the stone’s world its first origin.

138.The source says aucun argent, ‘no silver’, in this sentence. It is retained rather than silently expanded to vif-argent. The text moves between Venus as a figure and sulfur as its material interpretation.