Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism

Revealing Analogies: The Descriptive and Deceptive Roles of Sexuality and Gender in Latin Alchemy

REVEALING ANALOGIES: THE DESCRIPTIVE AND DECEPTIVE ROLES OF SEXUALITY AND GENDER IN LATIN ALCHEMY Lawrence M. Principe Sexual and erotic language and imagery is extremely common in alchemy. Its most visible form occurs in oft-reproduced alchemical emblemata that routinely contain graphic depictions of gendered entities and copulating couples. Alchemical texts regularly employ erotic language as well, often describing extended allegorical sequences that occasionally involve sexual intercourse of various kinds or at least employ highly gendered imagery. Even at the most basic level, alchemists frequently speak of their substances as gendered—some as female, some as male, and some, rather famously, as hermaphroditic. Among modern commentators, the presence of such imagery has engendered a variety of explanations—of divergent plausibility and historical sensibility —for its origin, purpose, and meaning. This chapter addresses fundamental questions about such imagery: What do these erotic or gendered images really mean? What purposes do they serve in texts? How and why are they constructed by their authors? Why should gendered and sexual language and images be so widespread in alchemy? And how integral in fact is sexual language and thought to alchemical aims and practices? The wide diversity of writers, practices, aims, theories, and cultural contexts present in the long history of alchemy means that exhaustive answers to these questions would extend far beyond the bounds of this chapter. Nonetheless, if we limit ourselves to the epoch of alchemy for which sufficient textual resources for broad scholarship currently exist—namely, the Latin West from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century—then an examination of some representative sources and their contexts should provide at least an outline of answers. A contextualized examination of these sources promises to correct various facile misconceptions that remain widespread. Indeed, while the subject of sexuality in alchemy has long been a subject of study, much of the writing on this topic—as is the case for alchemical imagery more generally —gives unnecessarily contrived readings or attempts to explain 210 lawrence m. principe obscura per obscuriorem. In contrast, this chapter strives to present more historically contextualized and more plausible origins and roles for the gendered and sexual language of alchemy. It seems useful to begin with a short inventory of some of the sexual themes found in alchemical imagery and the various forms in which this imagery occurs. The most striking examples are those cast into pictorial form, whether printed engravings and woodcuts or manuscript drawings and illuminations. Such images first appeared in the context of alchemy in the fourteenth century; by the seventeenth century, entire books of such illustrations were being produced.1 In some cases, as in the 1599 Von den grossen Stein der uhralten Weisen (better known as the Twelve Keys) of “Basil Valentine,” the emblems were clearly subordinate to the written text. This secondary status is witnessed by the much greater amount of space accorded to text, and by the fact that the emblems appeared for the first time only in the 1602 second edition of the work.2 In others, like Lambspringk’s De lapide philosophorum, the emblems carry a much greater proportion of the message of the book, being accompanied only by short texts in verse. As an extreme case, the famous Mutus liber contains a long series of pictorial engravings and only a single line of text urging the reader to “pray, read, read, and reread the work and you will find it.”3 There are also collections of emblems with the character of florilegia, where elements of the imagery—and in some cases, entire emblems—can be traced to multiple earlier sources. A well-known example is the 1617 Atalanta fugiens of Michael Maier with its fifty beautiful copperplate emblems.4 But a more extreme example is the Chymisches Lustgärtlein and Johann Daniel Mylius’ Philosophia reformata , both of which amass and co-opt a wide miscellany of emblems from quite diverse (and often easily identifiable) sources.5 Thus there exists a range of deployments for alchemical emblems, placing greater or lesser reliance on pictorial representation, showing greater or lesser originality and coherence, and directed to a variety of purposes and audiences. 1 See in particular Obrist, Les débuts de l’imagerie alchimique. 2 Basil Valentine, Von den grossen Stein der uhralten Weisen. On Valentine see Priesner, “Johann Thoelde und die Schriften des Basilius Valentinus,” and on contemporaneous interpretations of his emblems see Principe, “Apparatus and Reproducibility in Alchemy,” esp. 59–62. 3 Lambspringk, De lapide philosophorum; Mutus liber. 4 Maier, Atalanta...