The Devil as such is not shown in alchemical works, that I can find.. There are dragons and serpents aplenty, as in the legend of Apollo slaying the Python. O'Neill compares them to the errors that plague the alchemist's work, and also to the "repressed contents" hidden in the unconscious mind.
O'Neill finds one alchemical image that he says is "closest to the tarot," meaning I think the Marseille version of the card. It is late in the history of alchemical imagery, the 1678 Mutus Liber. It shows Neptune and two smaller figures, the young Apollo and Diana, sun and moon, inside a large drop of water being held up by two angels. Below, the soror directs our attention to the scene (image from Fabricius, Alchemy p. 27, de Rola Golden Game p. 268).
There are no cords around the young persons' necks, but all seem trapped in a drop of water, or perhaps a drop-shaped retort, which the angels are holding up for us to see. I suspect that the drop is meant as an enlargment of what is inside the castle shaped oven.
What O'Neill is comparing this image to is of course the Marseille-style Devil card of the same time period as the Mutus Liber (as above center, Noblet and right, Conver). Even the 15th century Cary Sheet image (above left) has the theme of trapping the sinner and brandishing the trident otherwise associated with Neptune.
O'Neill says that Neptune, as god of the seas, rules over the unconscious. The journey to the devil's lair is thus the night-sea journey of Greek myth, symbolized also by a journey to hell, as in Homer and Virgil. O'Neill gives a psychological interpretation of it:
That psychological perspective is of course not the language of the 15h-17th centuries. But here is the Rsoarium (Fabricius p. 108):This journey to the world of the Devil is actually a journey into the depths of the unconscious, a cathartic digging (or mining in the alchemical allegories) into repressed contents of the mind. (Tarot Symbolism p. 284)
Know that the head of the art is the raven that flies without wings in the blackness of the night and the brightness of the day; in the bitterness that is in its throat the coloring will be found.Fabricius' quote is in reference to the Pandora of c. 1582, which shows a raven's head sticking out of a beaker. The "throat" is evidently the narrow part of the beaker. The "bitterness" however comes from down below, in its belly, so to speak. Focusing on that bitterness and applying gentle heat transmutes it into somethng else, the drops that coat the outside of the retort in the next picture, which I would compare to the drops falling from the tower in the the Marseille-style Tower card. (Below, I have put translations of the Latin in the pictures.
These words, "separation of the soul from the body" and "total separation of the soul from the body", are rather mysterious-sounding. I see them as representing the beginning and end of the first step in a a three-step process that completes the work as described by the alchemist Gerhard Dorn. Jung quotes him in Mysterium Coniunctionis.. The three steps are:
1. Unio mentalis: separation of soul from body, union of soul and spirit.
2. Union of mind (product of first conjunction) with body.
3. Unus mundus: union of body-mind with the “latent unity of the world.”
In this sense, the separation of soul from body is accomplished first by heating the material in the bottom of the flask to boiling and then collecting the precipitate that forms on the sides after it cools.
In the first picture above, the only thing that is missing from the Pandora's imagery is the two little figures at the bottom of the Devil card.For them, we need the imagery of the Mutus Liber, with which I started this section.
When I look at early alchemical works of the 15th century, I see something similar to what is in the late Mutus Liber in the two figures of the Ripley Scrowle that I said were like Adam and Eve standing beneath the Tree of Knowledge, with the serpent above them. Something similar also appears in an early manuscript of the Heilege Dreifaltigkeit.
1. Unio mentalis: separation of soul from body, union of soul and spirit.
2. Union of mind (product of first conjunction) with body.
3. Unus mundus: union of body-mind with the “latent unity of the world.”
In this sense, the separation of soul from body is accomplished first by heating the material in the bottom of the flask to boiling and then collecting the precipitate that forms on the sides after it cools.
In the first picture above, the only thing that is missing from the Pandora's imagery is the two little figures at the bottom of the Devil card.For them, we need the imagery of the Mutus Liber, with which I started this section.
When I look at early alchemical works of the 15th century, I see something similar to what is in the late Mutus Liber in the two figures of the Ripley Scrowle that I said were like Adam and Eve standing beneath the Tree of Knowledge, with the serpent above them. Something similar also appears in an early manuscript of the Heilege Dreifaltigkeit.
It strikes me that throughout the sequence up to this point, the two lower figures have always been there, trapped in matter since the Fall, following the seductive advice of Satan. But now Christ has descended to Hell and can liberate them. In Dante's Paradiso, Canto XXVI, Adam describes how Christ freed Eve and himself from Limbo in the 34th year after the Incarnation. It seems to me that from an alchemical perspective, the Devil card is showing us Adam and Eve in their fallen state, which corresponds also to the Stone trapped in the prima materia. Now they are aware of their chains, and so they will be liberated. It is hotter down in the earth, as people knew from descending into mines and from volcanic eruptions. Neptune was also the god of volcanoes (http://www.greek-gods-and-goddesses.com/greek-god-poseidon.html).
Some have compared the Devil's platform on the Marseille card to a blacksmith's anvil. From that perspective, the Devil could be Vulcan, the metallurgist precursor to the alchemist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_of_the_alchemists), who was also the Roman god of volcanoes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_(mythology)). The myth of Vulcan trapping Venus and Mars in his nets was compared to the trapping of Sol and Luna in the alchemist's retort.
The upper figure is also Mercury in his devilish aspect, as deadly poison. Paradoxically, it is also Mercury that will free the subjects from their chains, like Christ in Tartatus. Thus in numerous alchemical works, Mercury, like St. George, stands triumphant over the defeated dragon.
16. The Alchemical Tower: the explosion, the fall-out, the consequences.
Here are some Tower cards: at left the Chalres VI of c. 1460 Florence, then the Rothschild sheet's card of around 1500 or so, thought to be of Bologna; and finally the Noblet of c. 1650 Paris..You can see that the motif of the falling figures was added quite early.. One change, however, is that in the Noblet, the smoke appears to be reaching up to the sun, and we can't really see if there was a lightning flash from above that started the fire, or it started from within.
Clearly the top is supposed to stay on, if the distilled substance is to be collected by the tube and sent below. On the card, however, the top is off. There has been an onslaught of energy, from above to be sure, but also, in the Noblet, from below, the fire in the tower.
It is possible that the card relates to the process described in the "Raven's Head" image I showed in relation to the Devil card,, with the precipitate running down the side of the vessel. The motto written on the illustration is "Total Separation of the Soul from the Body." As applied to the Maison-Dieu card, if the tower is the body, then the two people could represent the soul now freed from the confines of the body. It is now free to connect with the spirit, which may be the subject of the next two cards, the Star and the Moon.
One illustration that relates to the mottos of "separation of the soul from the body" followed by "union of soul and spirit" is the middle part of an illustration I showed earlier, one that started at the bottom with the alchemist and the soror below a decomposing body. Above this body is a nude figure reaching upward to its counterpart in the clouds, with which it is going to join hands.
There are also other fruitful comparisons between the card and alchemical imagery. O'Neill compares the onslaught of fire and smoke to an alchemical emblem by Fludd (Summum Bonum 1609) of demons and their associated birds and insects attacking the alchemist at God's command, while the archangels defend him. The demons are Azael, Azazel, Samael and Mahazael; the archangels are Raphael, Uriel, Michael, and Gabriel. In the middle the alchemist, "Homo Sanus"--sane man--can only pray. In some ways, to be sure, this image is different from the Maison-Dieu. The figures in the tarot card have no such place of safety, and no archangels to protect them.
O'Neill also compares the card to an account of a thunderstorm that breaks out just as the alchemist is beginning to climb up the sacred mountain out of hell. It may force him back into the depths, from which he will have to try again and again. O'Neill uses again the images of a man falling out of a tree or off the end of a ladder (the first time was with the Hanged Man). Similarly, we have figures falling off the tower in the tarot card. But there is a bright side. O"Neill concludes
The process might be less traumatic than it looks. The figure who appears falling may be suspended in the air, his fingers just dipping into some liquid below. An example is the original Noblet, with its colors faded, on the right below. According to Flornoy's reconstruction, the color of the dark mass at the bottom is blue, hence water (http://letarot.com/jean-noblet/pages/pa ... -diev.html). At the same time, the figure's legs are positioned similarly to that in the alchemical text we saw in connection with the Charles VI Hanged Man ( from Dixon, Bosch p. 256, Folio 40 of Ms. 29, Wellcome Institute, London):The long blackening period has ended, the decomposition is completed in the traumatic thunderstorm. The dark night of the soul is completed and the ascent to heaven begins. (Tarot Symbolism p. 284)
What is being depicted in the manuscript is distillation, the purification of a substance by boiling in an enclosed space. The upside-down man in the flask might be floating upward. Either that or he is falling, condensing, again a gentle process, a distillation that results in an ever-purer Subject.
I have already suggested an an alchemical significance to the small globes that are descending on both sides of the tower. In most 17th century versions of the card, they are different colors, and are the flashes of color that are seen at this stage of the work, the so-called "peacock's tail." That tail may be seen to the left of the flask in the manuscript image above. The alchemists also called the flashes "scintilla," or sparks.And when the Rosarium (quoted previous section) refers to the coloring that comes out of the bitterness in the Raven's throat, it is perhaps referring to these droplets which the Tower card showsin color.
As I exhibited in relation to the Hanged Man, Bosch had many upside down men in his Garden of Earthly Delights, where the pose seems to be that of a trance-state, although none that I see has precisely the same leg positions. William Blake, as I exhibited in relation to the Hanged Man, used this alchemical image in depicting the element of air.
What is important is to use a lot of dung, the alchemists advised. One emblem that O'Neill cites, from Maier's Symbola aureae mensae 1617, shows a man trying to run up the side of a building. The master alchemist advises the other, "Take that which is trodden underfoot in the dunghill, for if thou dost not, thou wilt fall on thine head when thou wouldst climb without steps" (quoted in Fabricius, Alchemy p. 22, where the emblem also appears; Fabricius does not offer an interpretation). This quotation is from an Arabic manuscript translated into Latin in 1182 by Robert of Chester, de Rola tells us.
De Rola points out that the alchemist in the foreground seems to be stuck in the muck; it is similar to the figures' confinement in the water-drop of the Mutus Liber or the ropes on the Devil card. To that extent, the image of the alchemist stuck in dung corresponds to the predicament of the suffering soul.. Yet it is that very dung that provides the means for the alchemist's salvation. De Rola says that the alchemist pointing to the ground is "a reminder that the earth shares with the Philosophick Earth or Subject the same spagyrical [i.e. alchemical] sign" (p. 114). My interpretation is that with the gentle heat and gases provided by decomposing dung, the Subject, philosophical Mercury, will be able to ascend and descend successfully. In the card, however, the top has come off. The result is poisonous fumes escaping, of potential harm to the alchemist. Also, there is heat coming from above, the sun's rays, or a lightning-strike we can't see but was on previous versions of the card. Well, accidents due to overheating no doubt were frequent. It is the same in life. The result is sometimes a fall, as the adept in the foreground predicts. There is a similar scene at this point in the Rosarium series. I showed it earlier; here it is again, in its original place.
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