The Fourth Key

A skeleton stands on a draped box or bier in an open landscape, a lit candle burning to its left, a bare tree stump to its right, a church visible in the distance. Practitioners read this as the blackening stage of the Work, putrefaction, in which the starting matter was understood to "die," reduced to an inert residue as a necessary prelude to purification and eventual rebirth inside the vessel. The candle mattered: it signaled that this decay was believed to proceed under a gentle, sustained heat rather than violent fire. Set against the standard memento-mori skeleton, that single flame is the detail worth lingering on, a visual restatement of the alchemical maxim that nothing new is made without the death of what came before. Among the twelve, this plate is often singled out as the sequence’s starkest image of that stage.

Maker

Matthaeus Merian the Elder, engraver (text attributed to Basilius Valentinus)

Date

Late 17th century; text tradition traced to ca. 1599

Medium of the original

Engraving

Original held by

Science History Institute, Philadelphia

Credit

Science History Institute, Philadelphia · via Wikimedia Commons

Rights

Public domain, verified

Catalogue number

PA-00526