Esoteric Texts
Rosarium Philosophorum
Alchemical Texts
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An influential alchemical text famous for its series of twenty woodcuts portraying the conjunction of King and Queen, or Sol and Luna, as a cycle of union, death, putrefaction, and resurrection. The images dramatize the chemical wedding at the heart of the opus. The accompanying text gathers sayings of earlier authorities on the making of the Stone.
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Origins
Era of Composition Era of CompositionFirst appeared in print in 1550, as the second part of the alchemical anthology De Alchimia printed at Frankfurt, illustrated with twenty numbered woodcuts. The text itself compiles earlier alchemical sayings and predates its printed form. 1 Origin of the NameIts Latin title, meaning the rosary of the philosophers, uses rosary in the older sense of a garland or anthology, since the text itself is a compiled anthology of earlier alchemical writers' sayings rather than a single author's original composition. 1 Attributed Author / Compiler Scholarship
Critical EditionModern scholarship treats it as a compiled anthology of earlier alchemical sayings and verses rather than as a single authored work, a florilegium assembled and illustrated for its 1550 printing rather than composed whole. 1 First PublishedPrinted at Frankfurt in 1550 within the anthology De Alchimia Opuscula Complura Veterum Philosophorum, a second and expanded edition of a collection first issued at Nuremberg in 1541. 1 TransmissionFirst printed as part of a larger 1550 alchemical anthology at Frankfurt, and its woodcut series was later used by Carl Jung to illustrate his own psychological reading of alchemical symbolism. 2 Text
Literary Form Transmission
Manuscript TraditionFirst printed in 1550 as the second part of the alchemical anthology De Alchimia at Frankfurt; modern scholarship treats it as a compiled florilegium of earlier alchemical sayings assembled for that printing rather than a single authored original. 1 Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteIts sequence of woodcuts depicting a king and queen's union, death and resurrection became the most reproduced image cycle in Western alchemy, and Carl Jung later used the same series as the structuring frame for his own psychological reading of the alchemical opus. 1 Learn More
The Chemical Wedding in Twenty Woodcuts
The Rosarium Philosophorum ("Rosary of the Philosophers") is an influential sixteenth-century alchemical text, printed in 1550 at Frankfurt as the second part of a compilation, and famous above all for its series of twenty woodcuts portraying the conjunction of a King and Queen, Sol and Luna, as a cycle of union, death, putrefaction and resurrection. The images dramatise the chemical wedding at the heart of alchemical symbolism: the naked pair meet, join, lie together in a single grave as the "dead" conjoined body, the soul departs and returns, and a reborn hermaphroditic figure rises, the whole read as the marriage and rebirth of opposing principles.
The text itself is a compilation of older authorities. Its later fame owes much to C. G. Jung, who used the Rosarium woodcuts as the backbone of his long essay "The Psychology of the Transference," reading the sequence of union and death as a symbolic account of the relationship between analyst and patient and, more generally, of the integration of the psyche, so that a Renaissance chemical allegory became a central document of twentieth-century depth psychology.
Twenty Woodcuts of a Marriage
The Rosarium Philosophorum is a compilation of quotations from earlier alchemical authorities, and by itself the text would be one anthology among many. What made it central is the sequence of twenty woodcuts printed with the 1550 edition.
The woodcuts tell a continuous story. A king and a queen meet, clothed; they undress; they enter a bath; they are joined in a coniunctio; they die and lie as a single hermaphrodite body in a tomb; a soul departs upward; dew falls; the soul returns; and the figure rises transformed. The sequence is explicitly a marriage, a death and a resurrection, and its erotic content is unmistakable and unembarrassed.
That series became, in the twentieth century, the most analysed set of images in alchemy, because C. G. Jung built his Psychology of the Transference on it, taking the woodcuts one by one as a map of what happens between analyst and patient. Whatever one makes of the reading, it moved these images out of the history of chemistry and into psychology, and most readers now meet them through Jung.
The atlas records both the sixteenth century object and its modern reception, and treats the psychological reading as a modern interpretation rather than as the work's meaning.
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