The Hand
the hand of the philosopher, the hand of the Mysteries, the hand of the Master Mason
An open right hand, a sign on every finger and one in the palm. Hall calls it the hand of the philosopher, extended to those who enter the Mysteries.
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.
Contested
Where it appears
Across the archive · 3
Plates that carry the symbol, tagged by eye and not yet decoded: first where it is the central motif, then where it plays a secondary part. Each opens in the viewer; the key and the notes come with the entry.
Central motif · 1
Secondary motif · 2
The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise
The creation of Eve who emerges from behind Adam