Hermes, the master of eloquence.
The necessary harmony of the cicada.
This insect is one of the animals linked to Hermes and his favorite instrument, whose song, according to Plato, shares the power to put men to sleep with the god’s wand. And we know that the world of sleep is the world of beginnings. Andrea Alciati says: “Fingers touch and strings emit tones. But when a string is broken or badly made, the harmony is spoiled. Then we need the song of a cicada that fills the forest with its uniform voice.“ Should we understand this as the task of Hermes or of the Alchemist?
Blow against blow.
There, where opposing actions blast.
Heraclitus uses the allegory of the bow and the lyre to explain how harmony consists in opposing tension: “They do not understand how that which is opposed to itself adapts to itself. This is arranged by the action of its opposites, such as the bow and the lyre.” – fr. 125 =51 DK. Greek translators had some difficulty interpreting his neologism παλίντροπος: the strings of the bow and the lyre exert a pull on the wood of the instrument, and reciprocally the wood also tensions the strings. The phenomenology of “blow against blow” or of the dual task, expressed by Heraclitus in the metaphor of the opposition between wood and string, was comprehensible only to ancient philosophers.
Hera-the-air screamed in Zeus’ ears.
Yet, she, “the other of the kings”, too weakly arrives on earth.
Only the ancient Vesta/Hestia, daughter of Saturn, could amplify and replicate on earth Hera’s movement/fire. Hestia/Vesta could not be moved from her place of origin. Any attempt to allure her was futile. Similarly, Greek mythology charges Hephaestus with the task of amplifying the intensity of Zeus’s feeble cosmic fire. Hephaestus-the-lame, by himself, never goes too far.
Prometheus, the archetype of the magical man.
Imitating Prometheus, the alchemist’s task is to amplify the cosmic fire from the heavens to sky and the earth.
Only the bridge-building pontifex was permitted to extract and renew the power of the stable seed of cosmic fire with the ritual of extinguishing and rekindling. Legend has it that Prometheus the Merciful brought the sacred fire to humans by hiding it in a cane, which he agitated incessantly throughout his daring journey. The delivery to dancing satyrs can only strengthen the idea of movement to the point of oscillation. Thus, the amplification of cosmic fire is not static, but rather requires the undulation of the “cosmic waters.” Definitely, both from a “ritual” point of view – but I define it as compliant with the laws of thermodynamics – and from a symbolic point of view, the fire that Prometheus gives to the alchemists does not limit itself to burning.
Stars vs Sun.
Only at night the stars can dive into the most inaccessible recesses of the Earth’s crust.
During the day, the sun prevents the stellar Spiritus Mundi, Spirit of the World, from approaching the Earth and leaves it hovering in the upper atmosphere. At night, thanks to the moon, stellar influences can descend to penetrate the most inaccessible recesses of the Earth’s crust. It This was primarily during the winter solstice when the sun leaves the scene to the other actors, which modifies the composition of air. But also when important stars, like Orion or Sirius, become more dominant than the sun, and manage to exert their force by shaking the atmosphere. It is well known that ancient agricultural calendars indicated stellar cycles rather than the Earth’s orbit around the sun.