Symbols ana a

Twenty- E ight
cpe pLIqT^c of
cbe oraqof)
♦
rn addition to the difficulty of the "opening,” in retaining consciousness and suppressing the reactions that would return one to the animal body, there is the danger of being overwhelmed by the experience itself, of failing to master the use of the "seed” or "subtle essence” of Gold, which we have to know how to extract and preserve: for it is like the bursting of a dam.¹ Everything that has been in a state of slavery and suspension as Mercury or fixed life, locked in the body, now, after the separation, finds itself in absolute freedom. This ireedom is a necessary intermediary experience, and is a matter of determining up to what point the consciousness can support the unex­pected change ot state and actively transform itself so as to maintain a continuity, and to assimilate it precisely as liberation.
Anyone who has always dwelt in darkness, if suddenly subjected to a very brilliant light, could well be. blinded. In the same way the fully liberated power ot life could prove lethal to one who knows life only as a mixture of death and sleep.
It is because of this danger that the alchemists recommend our constantly taking care that the "subtle” not escape from its "vessel” and dissolve in the Air.^{287 288} Bernard
of Treviso explains it in these words; "This Fountain has a terrible power . . . terrifying because if it should become enflamed and furious it would engulf every­thing and if its waters were to escape we would be lost."³ It is necessary to possess the dignity of that "King of the Land” in whose name alone, says the author, the Fountain is reserved and who, is so strongly fortified thereby that "none can conquer him.” And so the already difficult trick of closing one's eyes and fearlessly letting whatever happens, happen, is complicated by another subtle and equal necessity: one must kill as well as be killed, and "fix” what is fleeting.
Flamel, in commenting on the eighth of his hieroglyphic images, in which we see a Red Man planting his foot on a winged lion who wants to carry him off and ravish him, says that this is the "Lion that devours all metallic nature [all individu­alized nature] and changes it into its own and true substance [nonindividualized, liberated],” and that can gloriously transport the Red Man beyond the waters of Egypt—that is, from the waters of corruption and forgetting.⁴ We must awaken the force but not let it unseat us. The characteristic depiction of this ability is dramatized by the myth of Mithras who seizes the bull by the horns and does not let go despite the animal's mad stampede until the bull, exhuasted, gives up and allows himself to be led back to the "cavern" (the alchemical texts speak specifi­cally and frequently of Mercury's cavern), where Mithras gives it death. After its death there follows the symbolic emerging of vegetation from the earth, sprouting from the blood of the sacrificed animal.
Basil Valentine agrees, using more complicated symbolism; "One who is curious to know what this 'All-in-Everything' is [said to be the goal of the Art] must give the Earth great Wings [equivalent to the flight of the Dragon, the. stampede of the bull, the arousal of the Serpent, etc.], and must rise up and fly over the mountains, up to the firmament; then he must clip his wings by dint of fire, so that he falls into the Red Sea [here, fire and Red Sea are symbols of the intervention of the principle of affirmation], and drowns.”⁵
But in the reciprocal killing and being killed, both natures are changed into one another, utterly interpenetrating. So that sometimes we speak of union and sepa-