Twenty-One

SATURN: INVERTED GOLD

To bestow on these symbols a more concrete meaning, we have to fall back on the quadripartite division (discussed here). Magical Lead more exactly corresponds to the terrestrial element, to the minerality of the body, to that which in the body is obedient to the forces of the mineral kingdom (the skeleton). And that is just where the primordial state of the individual, Osiris, lies sleeping—and Saturn also, who was the king of the Golden Age: the metaphysical kingdom corresponding to the state of being in the absolute sense.¹ And if we remember that the calcareous element is expressed by the skeleton, the correspondences established by certain ancient texts, via pseudohomonyms, the titanic element, the earth element, and the calcareous element are all very interesting. In one anonymous Greek text, Earth appears at the end, and the operation pertaining to it is called the almighty limestone.² And Agathodaimon adds: "Such is the Word on lime, the omnipotent [or 'titanic—τίτανος] lime, the invincible body, the only useful thing. . . . Whoever finds it, will triumph over the incurable sickness of poverty—τὴν ἀνίατον πενίαν νόσος.³ But Plutarch informs us penia, "privation" or "misery," is the materia that "in and by itself is full of need; it is satisfied in full by the Good, ever inclining to it, tending to participate in its nature."⁴ Poverty, the "incurable sickness" is then the same state of privation that in "the matter" is the need, "thirst," the "aqueous form"; and the Good is the actuality of the Absolute Individual bound to the "ominipotent lime," to the resurrecton and transfiguration of the Titans. Once again we return to the same meaning.

Now that said correspondence has been clarified, let us turn briefly to the myth of Saturn. Saturn also suffered emasculation, after which he hid in Latium but Latium (from latere) is nothing more than a duplication of the idea of hiding oneself,⁵ of passing to a state of latency or silence (nonmanifestation); we have explained the emasculation as the deprivation of the power, which is equivalent to the premature reaping of the corn and the biblical prohibition concerning the Tree of Life. Other possible meanings of the myth might be seen here in an allusion to the transformation of connections that refer to Lead in the sense of a corruptible body, which Saturn himself devoured and destroyed.

Thus in alchemy we encounter a duplication: Saturn is the "ancient" and the "divine" (or sulfurous) and at the same time it is inverted Gold—Lead—as the vulgar body;⁶ it is the father of our Stone and that of the Philosophers⁷—in which, according to De pharmaco catholico, it is manifested as "cosmic spirit" with a "body and spirit-nature comparable to Arsenic," that is, to the virile power par excellence. Boehme explains that Lead and Gold are produced in Saturn by the same power, and adds: "It is not death, but an enclosure that represents the divine celestial essence."⁸

A hieroglyphic appearing on the cover of the Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine expresses the same idea: in this we see a Saturn crowned with sickle and compass (symbols of the two powers: the sickle is dissolution and the compass is the power "to measure," to set limits, the coagula) at the top of a symbol that comprises the different elements (or phases) of the Work. Immediately below Saturn, that is, latent (Latium), is , the symbol of Sulfur, which contains the Phoenix bird within itself; it concerns the "Primordial Fires," of the first inextinguishable, ubiquitous, superpersonal powers of animation and individuation.

However, whenever the texts speak of the Sulfurs of Saturn or the like, it is an alluson to these forces (or "Gods")⁹ hidden within the organs that they themselves have formed in the "Earth"; uniting with which (as with their original members) the power conferred by will—Telesma—what "is here," will be made perfect. Wherefore it has been said: "Let descend and everything will be fulfilled"—εἄ κάτω καὶ γενήσεται,¹⁰ and in the Book of Mercy: "Return the Soul to the Bodies: make your Souls perish in the Bodies and purify the Souls and Bodies cleansing and washing them together. Submit the volatized Souls to the Bodies from which they have escaped."¹¹

The reason is thus clear for the importance attributed to the alchemical "ashes," the "sediment," the caput mortuum or "precipitate," to the terrestrially remaining in the bottom of the vessel when separation is worked; which is why it is called "the diadem of the king," and why it is said that in the residue of "combustion" is revealed the "energy of everything"—παντὀς ἐνέργεια. What in appearance is the most worthless of the four entities (see here)—Saturn—is actually the most precious, because it bears within itself the "traces" or "memories" or "signatures" of "the state of being" (the Golden Age), while the other more subtle modes of the human entity correspond to states already derived from a disempowered condition. They are allegorized in the hermetic interpretation by the myth of the Ages of Silver, Bronze, and Iron that succeeded the Saturnia Regna ("Saturnian realm").¹² "Paradise is still on this earth, but man is so far from it that he cannot regenerate it unless he can reenter it through his own reintegration. And it is there that the Gold is hidden in Saturn in despised shapes and colors and very different from its normal state."¹³

On the basis of such ideas we can now offer a synthesis of the condition of the human being by means of the ideogram , found in Della Riviera,¹⁴ if we may so interpret it. The vulgar Moon and Sun ( and )—that is, the exteriorizations of ordinary waking consciousness—are in ascendance (above) with regard to the elemental forces of the Body (symbolized by the cross ), which, however, in their depths ( in turn is found under ), are recapitulated by the primordial virile form, , the sign already explained as θεîον—Sulfur or Divine Energy—in a "pure state." With these three parts of the hieroglyph ( , , ) we can convey three systems of the human entity, hermetically speaking. To the vulgar and (Sun and Moon) correspond the head, with its cerebral organ that plays the role of a center of transformation of all perceptions into sensations and material images, with corresponding subjective, emotional states.¹⁵ The waking consciousness does not usually illuminate anything but what appears in this site.¹⁶

As for the elementary Cross, , it corresponds to the middle zone of the human organism with the center in the heart, which is equivalent to the center of said cross and thence to the Quintessence, to the secret Heaven, the Water of Life, and all the other symbols referring to the "Spirit" principle. In a special sense, elemental "life" is bound to this zone as vibrating or rhythmic life in communication with the rhythms of the cosmic forces expressed in different ways within the physical body, above all in the respiratory and circulatory systems. From this region is now excluded the ordinary consciousness; the processes that take place within it, it does not know except through the "signals" given in the function of the higher zone (images-emotions).¹⁷ The contents of this region are essentially made up of translations of processes that at first are produced nonmaterially in the mid-region, manifesting forces still deeper.¹⁸

So attest the ancient teachings, both Oriental and Occidental, concerning the relation between the heart and the intellect: the dependence of the brain on the heart is not one of "sentiment" (the heart associated with "sentiment" is a profane notion), but of "nobler" forms of the intellective faculties that precede hierarchically their sense-perception through the brain. Hence Geber says: "The intelligence has its seat in the heart, because that is what precedes all the other organs;¹⁹ it supervises everything brought to man’s brain. Without it the brain could never be awakened."²⁰

From the center of the Cross, which is the equivalent of the central and immobile hub out of which the "wheel of the elements" rolls, we rejoin the third region, the inferior region corresponding to . This is the site of the nonhuman creative forces that in the corporeal structure crop up from the power of sexual generation, whose organs are situated precisely in the center of that which physically corresponds to this region. It is the foundation, the first root out of which everything springs into action through elemental processes to be manifested in the energies and internal and external forms of the particularized consciousness of the individual. This is the dark world in an illustration of Gichtel’s, called the "root of Souls in the center of Nature"²¹—dark insofar as it hierarchically precedes every manifestaton (light). Here is the end point of the visita interiora terrae rectificando.²²

We feel it has been apposite to add to the quaternaries these ternary correspondences, because they help us understand certain special and technically important aspects of the hermetico-alchemical teaching.