Cadmus, Mars, dragon’s teeth, and armed soldiers

Meaning

Cadmus’s killing of the watchful dragon is explicitly glossed as fixing universal mercury. Mars’s field becomes the vessel; the martial serpent’s teeth become the source of the armed soldiers whose sharp spears seem to rise and confront one another within it. Nuysement interrupts his account to reject Polydorus’s glass-alembic interpretation and offers another shape. His concluding boast makes an important limit explicit: the phenomenon would be familiar and unremarkable if he named it, but he does not. The lexicon should therefore explain the stated mappings without completing the withheld material’s identity or turning the fable into a reconstructed apparatus.