Symbolica
The Green Lion on Tria sufficiunt ad magisterium, fumus albus, hoc est, aqua, leo viridis, id est, æs Hermetis, & aqua fœtida, the rest of the plate faded

The Green Lion on Tria sufficiunt ad magisterium, fumus albus, hoc est, aqua, leo viridis, id est, æs Hermetis, & aqua fœtida. Tap the picture to open it.

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The Green Lion

viridis leo, leo viridis, the copper of Hermes

Maier's name for the copper of Hermes, one of the three things he says are enough for the whole mastery. Drawn as a lion crowned with leaves, because a print cannot be green.

The green lion is named in one place in this archive, and it is the place Maier named it. His thirty-seventh emblem gives the whole mastery three ingredients, “Tria sufficiunt ad magisterium, fumus albus, hoc est, aqua, leo viridis, id est, æs Hermetis, & aqua fœtida”: white smoke, that is, water; the green lion, that is, the copper of Hermes; and stinking water. The motto decodes its own lion in the breath that names him.

The epigram says it again with the three in order: “Terna magisterii sunt semina, foetida Lympha, / Et niveus vapor, ac pelle LEO viridi”, three are the seeds of the mastery, a stinking water, a snow-white vapour, and the lion in his green skin. And then, so that nobody mistakes the beast for a beast: “Aes Hermetis at est viridis LEO, petraque nota / Librorum capitlis”, the green lion is the copper of Hermes, the stone named in the chapter headings of the books.

Merian could not print green, so he drew a lion and crowned it with leaves. The colour is in the wreath. The white smoke rises in a column from the ground at the upper left of the same plate, and the stinking water runs at the right with vapour over it; the lion has the middle, which is about the share of attention Maier gives each.

The animal appears once more in the book, on a coat of arms. King Duenech of the twenty-eighth emblem, sweated clean of his black bile in a glass bath, is the king “viridis cui fulgent arma Leonis”, whose arms shine with the green lion. What the green lion is in the laboratory, this archive does not say, because Maier does not: he gives it a name out of the books, the copper of Hermes, and the books he means are not held here.

Contested

One author, and the identification of the green lion with the copper of Hermes is his; the chapter headings he says name the stone are in books the archive does not hold. Other alchemical books make the green lion vitriol and draw it devouring the sun, and no work here shows that, so the entry says only what Maier says. 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 · 2

2 works in the archive carry the Green Lion. First the 2 where it has been read, with the Green Lion itself picked out.