Carl G Liungman wrote on his book Encyclopedia of Western Signs and Ideograms (2004, Page 256) that The Star of David serves as a general symbol of the art of alchemy and that it stands for a combination of water and fire. Sometimes it replaces the words "drink!" Or "swallow!" It is also a symbol for quintessence, the fifth element after air and earth and fire and water; which was believed to be the purest and essence of something.
On the New Alchemy Website I found a drawing from 1625 of Nature (Half naked Woman with four breasts, indicating wholeness) bearing the shinning Star of David - symbol of the lumen naturae (Light Of the Darkness, which illuminates it's own darkness, like exploring a dark cave with a candle, not with a torch).
Remo F. Roth wrote an online book titled The Archetype of the Holy Wedding in Alchemy and in the Unconscious of Modern Man where he says that the Star of David is used
In the mysticism of all five-world religions: in the Kabbalah, in Christian mysticism… in the heart chakra of Buddhist and Hindu Tantrism and in Muslim Sufism. It is always connected to the heart, the symbol of the Eros principle in the original and broadest sense of the word
Remo Roth's online book is an excellent introduction to Alchemy. I was taught there a lot of new and surprising things e.g. that the unity of the opposites, about which I heard a lot in Jewish sources, is in fact the main issue Alchemy deals with…
On the lamp - hexagram
Source: Musaeum Hermeticum
alchemy book, Frankfurt, 1625
Source: Wikipedia Entry: Musaeum Hermeticum.
3 comments:
see photo on
http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2016/1350/320/Alchemy.jpg
another excerpt from Remo F. Roth
http://www.psychovision.ch/rfr/radbilde.htm#3
"The Seal of Solomon (the "Star of David") symbolizes the goal of the alchemical opus16. The latter consisted in transforming the purely masculine, Trinitarian God image of Christianity, represented by the upward-pointing equilateral triangle. The alchemists sensed that the Church Fathers' definition of an eternally unchanging God could not be ultimate wisdom. They sensed that a transformation of the image of God had commenced in the unconscious in the course of the Christian Aeon. Consequently they came to the extremely heretical conclusion that the Christian God ages, falls ill, and dies, and descends into matter, into the human body, or into the realm of human drives. This death of God created a situation in which every single human being had to take part in the renewal of the God that had become immersed in matter …Since Paracelsus this prima materia that was to be redeemed, transformed, or refined had likewise been imagined as trinitarian, as was the Christian God. Moreover, it turned out to be a feminine divine principle that waited in matter or in the drives on the human body for its liberation. This World Soul ardently awaited human beings to redeem her, and was represented by the downward-pointing equilateral triangle, an abstraction of the female pubic area. Interpreted in terms of depth psychology and the drives, we discover that the Paracelsian antitrinity was concerned with the principles of aggression, exploration, and sexuality".
David, thank you very much for your recommendation of my Holy Wedding book. I am just writing its end and hope that I will find a publisher. I am especially grateful for you remark that it is a good introduction into alchemy. Remo
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