The King and the Queen: the wedding of Sun and Moon in alchemy
The coniunctio of Sun and Moon in European alchemy: the woodcuts of the Rosarium philosophorum, Splendor solis, Atalanta fugiens and the Chymical Wedding.
Among the most famous images of European alchemy is that of a king and a queen who meet, unite and are reborn as a single creature with two heads. The king is the Sun, the queen is the Moon. This couple, representing the union of opposite principles, runs for centuries through illustrated treatises, from late medieval manuscripts to the emblem books of the seventeenth century, and forms the symbolic heart of the so-called coniunctio.
The Rosarium philosophorum
The work that more than any other made the couple famous is the Rosarium philosophorum, published in Frankfurt in 1550 within a collection of alchemical texts. Its woodcuts show the king and queen offering each other flowers, undressing, bathing, uniting and finally dying to be reborn as a hermaphrodite being, the rebis, the «double thing». Each image is accompanied by verses and quotations from earlier authors.
The figures of the Rosarium should not be read as realistic scenes but as allegories of laboratory operations: solution, conjunction, putrefaction, purification. The Sun and Moon correspond to complementary substances or principles, often identified with sulphur and mercury, the fixed and the volatile, the hot and the moist. The union of the two luminaries expressed the goal of a work meant to reconcile what in nature appears divided.
From Splendor solis to Atalanta fugiens
Other works develop the same theme with great visual richness. Splendor solis, an illuminated manuscript of the sixteenth century traditionally attributed to the legendary Salomon Trismosin, presents the Sun and Moon as sovereigns in finely crafted plates. In 1617 Michael Maier, a German physician and alchemist, published Atalanta fugiens, fifty emblems accompanied by epigrams and pieces of music. One of them states that the Sun needs the Moon as the cock needs the hen.
In 1616 a text of a different kind had appeared in Strasbourg, the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, attributed to the Lutheran theologian Johann Valentin Andreae. The tale, spread over seven days, recounts the journey of an old hermit invited to the wedding of a king and a queen in a mysterious castle. Without presenting them explicitly as Sun and Moon, the work recasts the imagery of the alchemical wedding in the form of a romance.
The meaning of the couple
Behind the royal couple older traditions can be glimpsed. Greek myth pairs Apollo and Artemis, brother and sister linked to the Sun and the Moon; medieval theology compared Christ to the Sun and the Church to the Moon, which reflects his light. Alchemists drew on this repertoire to give shape to their ideas, mixing religious, astrological and mythological symbols in a deliberately obscure language, intended for a narrow circle of readers.
In the twentieth century the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung devoted an essay to the Rosarium, The Psychology of the Transference, interpreting its images as representations of the meeting of opposites in the psyche. This is a modern reading, debated by historians of science, but it has made those woodcuts known far beyond specialist circles. Today the wedding of the Sun and the Moon is studied above all as a document of cultural and artistic history.
The wedding of the Sun and the Moon is perhaps the most eloquent image of European alchemy. It speaks of the desire to reunite what is separate, the light of day and the light of night, the fixed and the changeable. Anyone looking at the plates of the Rosarium or of Splendor solis finds there a refined art and a way of thinking about nature through images, far from modern chemistry but full of fascination.