ALCHEMICAL SYMBOLOGY
In our comment on the First Key of Basil Valentine in our URL at the text of the explanation of the First Key says the following:
«If you would operate by means of our bodies, take a fierce grey wolf, which, though on account of its name it be subject to the sway of warlike Mars, is by birth the offspring of ancient Saturn, and is found in the valleys and mountains of the world, where he roams savage with hunger. Cast to him the body of the King, and when he has devoured it, burn him entirely in a great fire. By this process the King will be liberated; and when it has been performed thrice the Lion has overcome the wolf, and will find nothing to devour in him. Thus our Body has been rendered fit for first stage of our work. »
If you observe the image that is illustrated in the First Key, you will see that it shows a King and a Queen. Adjacent to the King we see a Wolf jumping over a crucible, and adjacent to the Queen, we see Saturn handling a scythe with a cupel between his legs.
Accept it or not, the symbolism is clear. The image symbolically shows us the purification of gold and silver. The Gold purification is achieved by antimony, represented by the grey Wolf, and silver by Saturn in a cupel. This procedure is known since the antiquity. This image, as we said, does not agree with the text of the book.We made that comment in our book Le Grand Oeuvre Alchimique, Editions Arcadis, and we don't know what were the criteria of the artist, who ordered the engravings; therefore we know they were added later on.
Meanwhile, accidentally, seeing an alchemical symbology book, we found this image that exactly represents what Basil Valentine wanted to explain symbolically in the First Key, that is, the purification of gold.
This image was copied from M. Maier’s book, Atalanta Fugiens, Oppenheim, 1618.Notice
well, that in the image, we see a hungry Wolf eating a crowned King (which here represents the noble metal) fallen on land. The text of the First Key of Basil Valentine says: «Cast to him the body of the King, and when he has devoured it, burn him entirely in a great fire. By this process the King will be liberated. »It is exactly this that we see in the figure, a wolf in a fire is being burnt, and a freed King is leaving running away, which corresponds to the spagyrical reality of this operation of the gold purification by antimony, such as is related by Glaser, Lemery and others.
In the background, we see a palace surrounded by a river. Symbolically this would represent the wet path, but as we are unsure of which path M. Maier describes in his book Atalanta Fugiens, we will not be able to advance further.
The Lapidus’ book that we have, In Pursuit of Gold, does not have all the images of the Atlanta Fugiens, nor the text because we were unaware of the existence of this image. If we had read the book, probably we would know the path that he describes. Of one thing about which we could be right is that this image symbolizes very well the purification of gold by the grey Wolf!Rubellus Petrinus