The green lion devours the sun
Why one of alchemy’s strangest images turns up again and again in the library’s manuscripts, and what the scribes who drew it meant by it.
The green lion holding the sun. Alchemical anthology, German manuscript, seventeenth century.
View the page in the libraryIn alchemical manuscripts the green lion is rarely at rest. It prowls across the page with the sun in its jaws, or hangs upside down inside a glass vessel, and the scribes who drew it expected their readers to know exactly what it meant.
For most writers the lion stood for a fierce solvent: green because it was raw and unripe,1 and strong enough to dissolve even gold, the metal of the sun. To devour the sun was to break matter down so that it could be made again.
A green lion upside down inside a glass vessel, above a crescent moon. The seventh of a sequence of emblems on the stages of the work.
- Book
- Alchemical anthology
- Made
- France, 18th century
- Plate
- VII of the sequence
Both manuscripts are in the library, transcribed and translated, and every plate in this article links to the page it comes from.
Gott ist die reinste Liebe
God is the Purest Love
Magic
Cosmology
Kabbalah
Hexastichon
Ars Magna
Holy Almodel of Solomon
Key to the Mysteries of Magic
The Kabbala
