The Hermaphrodite

The conjunction completed. One body, two heads, and the end of the argument between sun and moon.

Two works here carry the hermaphrodite, and Maier's two emblems name it. The thirty-eighth shows a naked figure with two heads, a man's and a woman's, standing on a hilltop above Mercury and Venus embracing, and the epigram names it twice: “Rem geminam REBIS veteres dixere, quod uno / Corpore sit mas haec faeminaque, Androgyna”, the ancients called the twofold thing Rebis, because in one body it is male and female both, an androgyne; and “Natus enim binis in montibus HERMAPHRODITUS / Dicitur, Hermeti quem tulit alma Venus”, for the one born on two mountains is called Hermaphroditus, whom kindly Venus bore to Hermes.

The name is the recipe. Hermes and Aphrodite are the parents, and the child of their two mountains is one body of two sexes. Maier tells the reader not to be put off by it: “Ancipitem sexum ne spernas, nam tibi Regem / Mas idem, mulierque una eademque dabit”, do not despise the doubtful sex, for the same male, and the woman one and the same with him, will give you a king.

The thirty-third emblem shows the same body dead. “Ille biceps gemini sexus, en funeris instar / Apparet, postquam est humiditatis inops”, that two-headed thing of double sex, see, looks like a corpse once it is drained of moisture. It lies on a board over a fire, and the fire is the cure: “indiget igne, / Hunc illi praestes, & modo vita redit”, it needs fire; give it that, and life comes straight back. The conjunction, once made, has to be dried out and then revived.

So the hermaphrodite in this archive is a stage and not a marvel: the king and the queen of the earlier emblems made into one thing, first born on its mountain and then laid out over the fire. Maier's last couplet on the dead one is the doctrine in three clauses: “Omnis in igne latet lapidis vis, omnis in auro / Sulfuris, argento Mercurii vigor est”, all the power of the stone lies hidden in fire, all the power of sulphur in gold, and the strength of mercury is in silver.

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.

• The Divine
• Fire