Alchemical Symbolism in the VMS

[Barbrey]

I don’t remember, R. Sale, and the free copy of the article I found has been taken down. It’s $40 on Brill (which my small college’s library does not have access to).

Which article are you referring to?

Variously colored dragons in the Book of the Holy Trinity:
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Let us first look at the Antichrist, Diabolic or Luciferic hermaphrodite, and we will here use the illuminated image from possibly the earliest version that in Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Hs. 80061, dated to 1420 by the scholar Barbara Obrist, and on the right that of the beautifully illuminated manuscript in Munich which is some fifty years later. The figure is entitled 'Contra justiciam' (against justice).

Cutest little monster ever to replace the dragon (not green, with two heads and lion's legs) (1517)
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So identifying the green pool that is not shaped like a dragon with a dragon/monster that is not generally green is a bit risky.

Ha, yes it is risky as well as more tentative than the assertion sounded perhaps. However, to my mind the VMS authors likely had never seen the Buch. It’s not the illustrations I believe are similar; I think the authors of each were working with similar ideas, and as they’re of similar periods and possibly locations, some similarities in concept are likely identifiable but not identical in the two. I already had a working hypothesis that the blue and green waters were possibly celestial/fantastical and earthly. Thus, when I reached the end of the Hermaphroditus tale, I wondered: why is the hermaphrodite (no apologies for using the term!) standing in green water?  I turned to other pictures of the hermaphrodite, and the ones I viewed, including some in the Buch, all had the hermaphrodite standing on a green dragon, or if the dragon was not green, it was against the backdrop of a green hill. I looked into it and that’s when I found that dragons not biting their tails were usually symbolic of prima materia.

  So it’s more the positioning of the hermaphrodite that I thought comparable. One on a dragon symbolizing prima materia, signifying the emergence of the philosopher’s stone from its origin; the other from a green pool of water in a book with a hundred pages of plants - what other colour but green would be used to signify prima materia of a vegetative nature?  - signifying the same thing. If anything, I find the VMS illustration more straight forward than the others. The half-in, half-out positioning, which will be repeated on the following page with Melusine and her fish, includes the additional meaning that philosopher’s stone was already present in the prima materia; it just took the alchemical arts to distill it.

The article you asked about is called “The Alchemical Transformation of Melusine” in a collection of essays called Melusine’s Footstep.  The essays trace the changing symbolism of Melusine in late medievalism and the Renaissance.