The Fish
piscis, the fish in the flame
Living substance in a hostile element. In the flaming oval it is philosophical mercury, marked with Mercury's own glyph.
Prototype · stand-in text. The reading and contested paragraphs below are the Ouroboros entry, set here to test the type. The fish entry is not yet written.
The ouroboros is older than alchemy and was borrowed into it. Its earliest surviving appearance is on a shrine in the tomb of Tutankhamun, around 1323 BCE, where two of them enclose the head and feet of the king. It reaches the alchemists through Greco-Egyptian Alexandria, and the earliest alchemical drawing of it we have is in the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra, a papyrus of perhaps the third century, where the circle it makes is inscribed hen to pan, one is the all.
What it means inside alchemy is more specific than the pop reading of eternity. It marks a closed system. The work happens in a sealed vessel, nothing enters and nothing leaves, and the matter inside is repeatedly dissolved and recongealed by its own action. The serpent feeding on itself is a picture of that operation, not a picture of infinity. When it is drawn half light and half dark it is making a further claim, that the destroying half and the generating half are one substance.
It is worth being careful about the reading you have probably met. Kekule's dream of the benzene ring, told at a Berlin ceremony in 1890, is often given as evidence that the symbol carries some deep chemical truth. He told it twenty-five years after the fact, at a celebration in his own honour, and historians of chemistry have treated it sceptically ever since.
