I’m a little excited - I think I’ve made a discovery that solves a puzzle I’ve been worrying at for some time. It’s to do with the Ovid tales. Two of them, the difficult ones, @KoenG found: Philomela and Callisto. Two of them, I’ve discovered: Hermaphroditus and Myrrha. I can’t see any others that could be candidates so that is four in all.
When I was researching the use of Ovid in alchemy, I was struck by the fact that often alchemists might use Ovid stories in their works, but if so, there would always be something “off” about them that signified they were being used alchemically.
And that holds true for all four of these stories. Koen himself wondered about two images that were out of place in each of his stories, and I had the same thing happen in my stories.
In the Callisto story You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. and should have been a bear, because Callisto ascends to heaven as Ursa Major. But it looks nothing like a bear. I’ve heard it called an armadillo, and read arguments about whether it might be a ram, a sheep with a huge fleece, a wolf, Agnis dei, and for me it just looked like a sacrificial beast because of the nymph below with the bloody ring. In that context, I did wonder if this represented Christ as the ultimate sacrifice, and could that fleece possibly refer to his scourged back?
Scourging
In the Philomela story You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. is the bloody flower head, or purse, or any number of things that have been attributed to it. This should have been the head of her son, Itys, presented to her husband but it’s not a human head. But I had read a different version of the Ovid tale than Koen. In it, the boy Itys is resurrected as a goldfinch. And the goldfinch in medieval iconology always represents the Crown of Thorns. You find it in picture after picture with Christ as a baby,foretelling his ending. (The goldfinch’s red mark on its face is the result of being pricked by one of the thorns).
Crown of Thorns
In the Hermaphroditus tale on You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. the image out of place is a second spike in the horizontal tree trunk. The first spike combines with the hermaphrodite’s crooked arm to form a phallus and vulva combination revealing their new gender. But why was there a second spike? At this point, I thought the theme was stigmata, as something similar happened in the Book of the Holy Trinity, but I was never able to find other stigmata. So perhaps it wasn’t just stigmata of the hands, but representing the Crucifixion itself?
Crucifixion
In the Myrrha tale on page You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. the image out of place, that I could make no sense of at all, is the woman that seems to be drinking using a third arm.
Thirst
But now I know what these images have in common: The scourging, the crown of thorns, the crucifixion and … thirst.
I’m reading Lawrence Principe’s The History of Alchemy 2013 (free on Amazon if you have Kindle Unlimited. He has a section on Alchemy and Christianity and quotes from pseudo-Arnaldus (13th century, predates Rupescissa because Rupescissa quotes from the same text, Metaphorical Treatise, in his own work). Mercury first becomes formally associated with Christ as extended metaphor in this work.
“For Arnald, quotations from Old Testament prophets bear witness not only to Jesus Christ as the Messiah but also to mercury as the correct starting point of the material for the stone. Just as Christ bore his torment in four stages - scourging, crowning with thorns, crucifixion, and thirst on the cross - so too must the mercury undergo a four-fold torment to be prepared into the stone” (67).
You might ask, why couldn’t these just be Christian symbols without alchemy? For me, the answer lies in the alchemical use of Ovid and the story features always having something “off” to signal the alchemical.
Anyone interested in VMs alchemy should read this book if they can. There is much more. For me, I’m finally satisfie: scourging, crown of thorns, crucifixion, thirst. Not only might the VMs authors have read this text, if interested in alchemy at all, they would have. Lots of copies floating around.
