Eagle with wings outspread

Meaning

Via names the outspread eagle while warning the reader not to be distracted by the ancients’ changing names. Its own immediate explanation is elemental fire with elemental liquor. The winged image thus belongs to a polemic about naming, not to an independently identified bird ingredient or a decoded heraldic emblem. The following argument concerns the liquor’s protective relation to fire and their eventual inseparability. The English “eagle with wings outspread” makes explicit the bodily posture compressed into the German adjective. The passage supplies this functional explanation but no warrant for expanding the eagle into an unmentioned metal, planet or laboratory vessel.