De Secretis Naturae:
The Secrets of Nature
from Michael Maier's 1617 alchymical emblem book — “Emblem 39. The Secrets of Nature.”
Alchemy is simple. It is about secrets.
Carl Jung wrote 600 pages of dense, foot-noted text to explicate the simplicity of alchymy’s prime secret. He states in Mysterium Coniunctionis* (The Mystery of Conjunction) that the human psyche is beset with “an imperative need to participate in a or perhaps the secret without which life loses its supreme meaning. … The thing hidden is always more or less irrelevant. … The essential thing is the hiding.”
The word occult comes from Latin, occultus, meaning to cover over or conceal. Occultists must hide something or life is not worth living, a compulsion that drives the eternal popularity of the conspiracy theory and the mystery/detective novel.
Alchymists were masters of the occult. They hid everything in layers of obscurity. Not even the great riddle of the Sphinx was safe from alchymical duplicity. Michael Maier concealed a double meaning inside Oedipus’ famous solution, the equivalent of nesting a mystery inside a puzzle inside an enigma. Maier retells the riddle as follows:
What is that which in the morning goeth upon four feet; upon two feet in the afternoon; and in the Evening upon three?
The usual answer — crawling infant, upright adult, elder on a cane — was, according to Maier, merely a clever hoax designed to mislead the uninitiated. In Emblem 39 Maier stamps geometric shapes on the foreheads of the riddle people, figures that conceal a private code. The shapes act as visual devices for summarizing alchymy’s most basic premises.
Baby’s quadrangle represents the 4 states of matter, Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. Maturity’s semicircle joins 2 unlike types of line, curved and straight, a coupling process to symbolize mixing/mating unlike or opposite materials. It is called, metaphorically, the Chymical Wedding. Lastly, the aged person’s triangle refers to the 3 fundamental ingredients of matter: Salt, Mercury, and Sulfur. They embody the 3 attributes of our universe: the mundane, the sacred, and the energy which bridges them. A human being replicates the universe’s design through a personal trinity of body, soul, and spirit.
Each of these objects refer to a cascading number of multiple symbols and processes. Whole charts and tables are made to catalog them. Maier describes it as “the Obscurity and intricacy of this Art.” Yet the basics are simple — 4 states of matter; 2 opposites needing to be joined; 3 elements making up the universe. Here is the meaning of life in a nutshell. Know this, and the Alchymist understands the fundamentals of existence. Know the secret, and life is worth living.
“Emblem XXI: Make of the man and woman a Circle, of that a Quadrangle, of this a Triangle, of the same a Circle and you will have the Stone of the Philosophers.”
Geometry of creation: man & woman = 2 incomplete parts that when fitted together create the whole; interior Circle = the whole; Quadrangle = 4 elements; Triangle = 3 realms; exterior Circle = Stone of the Philosophers