The Fifth Parable: The Two-Headed Figure

A single winged body carries two heads: one male and rendered in gold, one female and rendered in silver, each haloed in its own metal’s light. The figure holds an egg in one hand and a mirror-bright shield in the other. This is alchemy’s rebis, the "double thing," a standard way of picturing the union of the two principles the whole manuscript has been building toward, sulfur (hot, active, solar, gold) and mercury (cool, receptive, lunar, silver), joined in one body rather than merely mixed in a jar. The egg names the vessel the union still has to pass through, the philosophical egg in which the material gestates toward the Stone. The reflective shield is worth pausing on: it puts self-recognition, not just chemistry, into the image, since medieval alchemical writing often folded spiritual transformation into the material one.

Maker

Unknown illuminator (text attributed to Salomon Trismosin)

Date

1582 copy

Medium of the original

Plate

Original held by

British Library

Credit

British Library · via Wikimedia Commons

Rights

Public domain, verified

Catalogue number

PA-00503