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The Volatile Feminine
The Volatile Feminine Hitchcock’s The Birds and the Splendor Solis — the same menace, five centuries apart. There is a plate in the Splendor Solis — the luminous alchemical treatise preserved in the British Library as Harley MS 3469 — that has always unsettled me. Not the drowning king, not the dismembered body, not the…
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Sol et Luna: Jung, Alchemy, and the Dreaming Mind
The alchemists thought they were transmuting lead into gold. Jung saw what they were really doing: describing the transformation of the psyche in the only language available to them — the language of matter. The Splendor Solis, that luminous 22-plate manuscript from 1582, is not a chemistry textbook. It is a dream journal written in…
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Why Luna Wears the Red Crown: The Coniunctio Paradox in the Splendor Solis
Why Luna Wears the Red Crown The Coniunctio paradox in the Splendor Solis — and why your confusion is the first stage of the Work. If you have spent any time with the Splendor Solis — the magnificent alchemical treatise attributed to Salomon Trismosin, preserved most beautifully in Harley MS 3469 — you have probably…
