The black cube of Saturn: every piece of it is old, and no book here joins them
Saturn is lead in the Encyclopedie, blackness in Maier, the outermost sphere in Fludd and Dee, and Fear on Kircher's tree. Cartari spends four blocks listing his parts and names an authority for each, and refuses to guess at the one he cannot source. Plato hands the cube to earth because earth is the most immoveable thing there is. The hexagon is a storm that Voyager photographed. Every part of the claim turns out to be real and datable, and across five centuries of plates not one of them draws Saturn as a cube.
The claim goes like this. Saturn is the black cube. The cube is matter, and matter is a prison. The hexagon photographed at Saturn's north pole proves the planet is a cube seen from above. The Kaaba is a cube and so are the boxes a Jew straps to his head to pray, and there you have it, one cult running under every religion since the beginning.
Take that apart and something unexpected happens. Almost every piece of it is a real thing with a date and a named author, sitting in books this collection holds. What has no date and no author is the joining.
Saturn is lead, and lead is black
Michael Maier printed the working instruction in 1618, and he leads with colour. His twenty second emblem tells a man what to do with Saturn.
Saturni in faciem (quae nigra) sparge nives: Et dabitur tibi materies albissima plumbi
Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens, 1618, emblem XXII. Scatter snow on the face of Saturn, which is black, and you will be given the whitest matter of lead.
Black face, white lead. Saturn is the blackness the work starts from and the metal it starts in, and Maier's instruction is to whiten him. A century and a half later the Encyclopedie's table of chemical characters is still filing him the same way, with no mysticism attached at all: the salts of lead take the sign of Saturn, in the same column where iron takes Mars and tin takes Jupiter.
So the first piece of the claim is true and dull. Saturn is lead, Saturn is black, and everybody in the trade knew it because it was printed in the manuals.
And Saturn is the top of the ladder
The second Saturn is a position rather than a substance, and three separate men here draw the same ladder. Robert Fludd's monochord runs the planets up from the moon at the bottom to Saturn at the top. John Dee sends the Monas down the axis of his cosmic egg with Saturn at the head and the moon at the foot. Knapp, charting Dante's universe for Manly Hall in 1928, ends the rings at Saturn before the fixed stars begin.
Highest, slowest, coldest, last. And Agrippa, laying the planets over a man's body inside a pentagram in 1533, puts Mercury and Saturn at the feet, which is the other way of saying the same thing. Saturn is the heavy end.
Kircher puts him next to Fear
In 1653 an engraver working for Athanasius Kircher ran the seven planets down the Tree of the Sephiroth and had to decide which power each one answered to. He gave Jupiter to Mercy. He gave Saturn to Fear.
That is as close as this material comes to making Saturn sinister, and notice what it actually is. Severity is a quality God is said to have, sitting opposite mercy, and a tree that did not have it would be lopsided. Kircher is not warning anybody about a planet. He is balancing a diagram.
Cartari empties his pockets, and no cube falls out
One book here exists to do nothing else. Vincenzo Cartari's handbook of the gods, printed at Padua in 1615 in the edition Lorenzo Pignoria revised, draws a deity and then walks through him part by part, naming an authority for each. Painters worked from it for two hundred years because it told them what to put in a picture and why. Saturn gets four blocks, more than almost anybody in the book, and Cartari turns out his pockets over all four.
He hands him a sickle and says what it does: “Mostra la falce in mano di Saturno, che'l tempo miete, e taglia tutte le cose”, the sickle in Saturn's hand shows that time reaps and cuts all things. He hands him a serpent bent into a ring with its tail in its mouth, on Martianus's authority, “mostrando in questa guisa, che per lui s'intende il tempo”, showing in this way that by him time is meant. He gives him a green veil and white hair, and slows his walk to match a sphere that takes “in trenta anni, tarda à compire il suo giro”, thirty years to finish its circuit. He sends a traveller up to him and finds him “in luoco freddo, tutto agghiacciato, & coperto di brina, & di neue”, in a cold place, quite frozen, and covered with frost and snow. He ties his feet: “con i piedi legati con filo di lana, & lo teneuano così tutto l'anno, se non che lo scioglieuano poi di Dicembre in certi dì, che erano consecrati a lui”, the ancients made him with his feet bound with a thread of wool, and kept him so all year, except that they loosened him in December on certain days consecrated to him. He adds four eyes and four wings, a vine hung with grapes, a temple with tritons blowing shells on its roof, and three heads on one neck.
Then the sentence that settles it. Of the three heads, which he has just drawn, Cartari writes “ilche non affermo, perche non lo trouo scritto da Autore degno di fede”, which I do not affirm, because I do not find it written by an author worthy of belief. A man who will not guess at a monster in his own woodcut does not leave a cube out by accident. Four blocks, a dozen attributes, an authority against each, and a printed refusal to invent the one he cannot source. No cube anywhere in them, and no hexagon either.
The cube belongs to Plato, and it belongs to earth
Now the cube, which is not in any of these books at all. It comes from a different place entirely, and Plato is unusually direct about why.
To earth, then, let us assign the cubical form; for earth is the most immoveable of the four and the most plastic of all bodies, and that which has the most stable bases must of necessity be of such a nature.
Plato, Timaeus, in Benjamin Jowett's translation. The cube is given to earth among the five regular solids.
Read the reason rather than the assignment. The cube gets earth because a cube sits flat and will not roll, and earth is the element that stays put. Plato is arguing about stability. Nothing in the passage mentions prisons, or matter as a trap, or Saturn, whose name he does not raise anywhere near it. The cube is the shape of the thing that holds still.
The hexagon is weather
The hexagon is the piece people find most convincing, because a six sided shape at the pole of a planet does look like something arranged. NASA describes what it is.
The hexagon is similar to Earth's polar vortex, which has winds blowing in a circular pattern around the polar region. On Saturn, the vortex has a hexagonal rather than circular shape.
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 27 March 2007, on the Cassini images
A vortex nearly twenty five thousand kilometres across, first imaged by the Voyager craft at the start of the nineteen eighties and photographed properly by Cassini a quarter of a century later. It is a jet stream. Nobody who drew Saturn before 1980 had seen it or could have, which puts it outside every book on this page by three hundred years or more.
The other half of the claim runs through Moloch
The telling has a second half. Saturn eats his children in the myth, Chronos and Saturn share that story, Moloch takes children in the Hebrew Bible, and the modern version runs the three together and arrives at one cult that never stopped. Both ends of that chain sit in this collection, and both arrive with their key printed beside them.
Cartari draws the devouring and glosses it in the same breath. Four children got past the throat, and he names them: “da gli elementi in fuori, che sono i quattro figliuoli, Gioue, Giunone, Plutone, e Nettuno, cioè fuoco, aria, terra, & acqua, li quali non passarono per la vorace gola, perche questi durano sempre”, apart from the elements, which are the four children Jove, Juno, Pluto and Neptune, that is fire, air, earth and water, which did not pass down the greedy gullet, because these last for ever. Time eats everything except the things that do not end. A reader of 1615 got that under the picture without having to work for it.
Moloch arrives in 1738, in Johann Lund's book of Jewish antiquities, on two copperplates that contradict each other across facing leaves. Lund's sources make the idol “ein eherner oder kupfferner Götze gewesen, mit einem Ochsen- oder Kalbes-Kopffe und ausgestreckten Händen, wie man die Hände ausstrecket, wenn man etwas empfangen wil”, a brazen or copper idol with an ox's or a calf's head and hands stretched out as one stretches out the hands to receive something. Some of them, he adds, “Denn etliche machen dieses Bild inwendig hohl, und theilens in sieben Räume, oder sieben kleine Capelchen ab”, make this image hollow within and divide it into seven chambers or seven little chapels, and the tariff climbs through them: a bird in the first, a sheep in the second, a ram, a calf, a young bullock, an ox, and in the seventh a human child. Fire underneath until the whole figure glows. Drums and kettledrums beating over the top so the parents would not hear.
Brazen, bull headed, hollow, seven chambered. Lund credits Kircher and two others by name and not one of them makes the idol a cube, and not one of them makes him Saturn: the chapter belongs to biblical antiquities and the planet never enters it. Then Lund turns on his own plate. “Andere aber zweifeln an diesen sieben Räumen oder Capellen”, others doubt these seven chambers or chapels, he writes, and prints a second drawing beside the first. A source arguing with itself in public looks like this, and nothing in the modern telling of Moloch preserves the argument.
So who joined them?
Every part of the claim carries a date and an author, and not one of the documents reaches the next. Maier never mentions a cube. Cartari lists a dozen attributes and refuses to invent a thirteenth. Plato never mentions Saturn. The Encyclopedie files a metal. Kircher balances a tree. Lund's Moloch has an ox's head and no planet attached. The hexagon is a photograph of weather taken after every one of them had died.
The joining is recent, and it happened in lectures, videos and forum posts rather than in books, which is exactly why it arrives without a citation. Nobody is hiding a source. There is no source to hide. Somebody in the last few decades noticed that Saturn is dark in the old chemistry, that a cube is heavy in Plato, and that the pole of the planet has six sides in the photographs, and stacked them, and the stack has been passed along ever since with the joins invisible.
What this collection can say stays narrow, and it is worth saying. Five centuries of plates here, and Saturn turns up in them as a sign, a metal, a colour, a sphere, a severity, a reaper of all things and a god who eats his own children. He never once turns up as a cube. Not in Maier, not in Fludd, not in Dee, not in Kircher, not in Agrippa, not in the Encyclopedie, and not in Cartari, who lists everything. The pieces are real and nobody ever drew the picture.
Maier's Saturn does carry a stone, as it happens, and so does Cartari's: Ops wrapped one in a cloth, told him it was the son he was asking for, and he swallowed it without looking. He brought it back up, and they carried it to Helicon and stood it there as a monument for mortals. Not black, and not a cube, and Maier printed underneath it exactly what it was for, so nobody ever had to decode it.