The Vessel

the flask, the alembic, the glass, the egg, the cup

Never the subject. What is inside it is.

Thirty-nine works carry a vessel of some kind, and what unites them is that something is happening inside it.

Maier's emblems are the clearest. The third shows a woman at a tub over a fire, and the epigram tells the reader to “imitate her, and your art will not cheat you, for the wave washes the dregs from the black body.” The ninth shuts a tree and an old man “in a house of glass full of dew” and leaves them there “many days”. The fifteenth is a potter at his wheel, and its instruction is proportion: “let the water not overcome the earth, nor be overcome by it.” The twenty-second names the vessel's work in two words that became a term of art: “nothing remains but woman's work. Then COOK, as a woman does who sets her pots on the fire.”

Khunrath's Oratory and Laboratory of 1595 is the vessel as a room. The furnace and its flasks fill the right half of the picture, and the one word engraved on the pillar beside them is EXPERIENTIA. Dee draws the vessel as an egg with the heavens inside it and reads his monad along its axis: “we shall see exactly such an Anatomy of our Monad, showing itself to us always in the light and life of Nature.”

The tarot uses the same object for pouring rather than cooking. Waite describes Temperance “pouring the essences of life from chalice to chalice”, and the Star “pours Water of Life from two great ewers, irrigating sea and land.”

In the Splendor Solis flasks copied by Ibbs a peacock and a three-headed monster sit inside the glass. No text in the archive reads those two sheets, and they are recorded as seen. But they show the rule the rest of the entry states. The vessel is never the subject. What is in it is.

Contested

The English of Maier, Khunrath and Dee is the archive's own translation from the Latin on each record, marked as such there. Cross's Pot of Incense is filed under the vessel too, but its lecture in the monitor is not yet quoted, so it does not speak in this entry.

Sources

Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens: The mottoes and the six-line epigrams, read off the 1618 page on each record. The Latin is Maier's; the English quoted here is the archive's own translation and is marked as such on the records.
Heinrich Khunrath, Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae: The words engraved on the Oratory and Laboratory plate, read off the 1609 page.
John Dee, Monas Hieroglyphica: Theorem XVIII, read off the 1591 page; the English is the archive's.
Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot: Waite commissioned the 1909 designs and wrote the key to them, so his account is the closest thing the deck has to an author's statement.