Symbolica
The Black Crow on Audi loquacem vulturem, qui neutiquam te decipit, the rest of the plate faded

The Black Crow on Audi loquacem vulturem, qui neutiquam te decipit. Tap the picture to open it.

stages

The Black Crow

the raven, caput corvi, the vulture

Nigredo, the blackening. The first stage, and the one everyone wants to skip.

The raven does not appear in this archive under its own name. It appears as a vulture, and Maier says the two are one bird. His forty-third emblem stands a great bird on the summit of a crag with a banner unrolling from its beak, a second, darker bird on the rock below it, and the motto is an order to listen: “Audi loquacem vulturem, qui neutiquam te decipit”, hear the talkative vulture, who does not deceive you at all.

What it says is its colours, and the engraver lettered them on the ribbon: “EGO SVM NIGER, ALBVS, CITRINVS ET RVBVS.”, I am black, white, yellow and red. The epigram says it again in verse, “Albus ego atque niger, / Citrinus, rubeusque feror nil mentior”, I am white and black, I am carried as yellow and as red, and I tell no lie. Then the sentence that puts the bird here: “idem est / Corvus, qui pennis absque volare solet / Nocte tenebrosa, mediaque in luce diei”, the same is the raven, who is used to flying without feathers in the dark of night and in the middle of the light of day, “Namque artis caput est ille vel iste tuae”, for that one, or this one, is the head of your art.

The head of the art is where the work begins, and the raven's head, caput corvi, is the alchemists' name for the black stage at the beginning of it. Maier's bird carries all four colours at once and names black among them. The entry is filed at the black end because that is the stage the raven stands for, and because Maier's own word for the bird is caput, head, the beginning.

Two birds on one plate, and the upper one speaks for itself, which is the reason the motto gives for trusting it. The silent bird below is the raven the epigram names, and Merian drew the two so that the reader would see they are one.

Contested

The identification of the vulture with the raven is Maier's, made in the epigram. That the raven's head names the black stage is the archive's gloss from the alchemical vocabulary and is not stated in this emblem, which gives the bird four colours rather than one. Three letters of the banner are hidden in the folds of the ribbon and are supplied in the archive's transcription, which says so. The Latin is quoted from the 1618 printing and the English is the archive's.

Sources

  1. Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens, 1618: The mottoes and epigrams of the fifty emblems, Oppenheim 1618, read against the page images of the Getty Research Institute copy; the English is the archive's own and is marked as such on every record. Maier's discourses, in which he explains each emblem at length, are not yet transcribed.

On the same plate

Where it appears · 1

1 work in the archive carries the Black Crow. First the one where it has been read, with the Black Crow itself picked out.