On Saturn and the Age of Gold
In the midst of winter, I finally realised that within me lies an invincible summer.
—Albert Camus
AMONG the wealth of Hermetic philosophical texts that flourished in Europe between the fall of Constantinople and the French Revolution, certain works distinguish themselves as jewels. This is usually due to their unique lucidity in explicating the Hermetic doctrine itself, or their generosity in revealing what so many other texts willingly or unwillingly obscure regarding the praxis. The Reign of Saturn Transformed into an Age of Gold—the text which we present here—is one such work. It both shines with a vivid clarity, and reveals more than it conceals.
The ambience of the Roman Saturnalia pervades the title of our work—the great festival of inversion in which kings become slaves and slaves kings—alluding to the radical transformation of the lowest into the highest and the highest into the lowest. Saturated with the metallic associations of Saturn with lead and royalty with gold, the Saturnalia not only provides a classical framework for transmutation, it also furnishes the basic fluidity between ‘above’ and ‘below’. [1] This fluidity was the principle domain of Hermes-Mercurius, the alchemical divinity par excellence who straddles duality and enables the homology between ‘that which is above’ and ‘that which is below’. It is Saturn, however, who provides the limits and pivots.
The classical motif of the aurea sæcula—the golden age—has its roots in the Greek conception of world-ages. Hesiod spoke of a decline from a ‘golden race’ into races of silver, bronze, and iron, applying a metallic symbolique to the decline of humanity and civilisation. Whereas the golden age was characterised by peace, ease, and abundance, the iron age was riven by strife, toil, and dishonour. [2] Among the Romans, Ovid informs us that the golden age was ruled by Saturn, a role which highlights his peculiar paradoxes.
Robert Willemsz de Baudous, The Golden Age, c. 1598.
Originally an indigenous agricultural god whose scythe reaped abundant crops, Saturn later assimilated the qualities of his Greek counterpart Cronus. Youngest of the titans and eldest of the gods, Cronus usurped the cosmic order by castrating his father with the very sickle that later symbolised his harvest. Under Saturn’s rule, the golden age enjoyed a perennial spring and had no need for law due to the inherent justness of human nature. But when Saturn was himself deposed, nature fell divided into four seasons and humankind descended into a spiral of injustice. [3] The ‘Greek’ view of Cronus—a patricidal tyrant who ate his children to preserve his reign—became embodied in the cruel and all-devouring force of time itself (chronos). This more pessimistic attitude persisted in the astrological texts of the Hellenistic period, where Cronus presided over poverty, slavery, death, and suffering. [4] A more favourable ‘Roman’ view of Saturn—god of cycles and liberator from the bonds of suffering—was enshrined in Virgil’s Eclogues and its vision of a restored golden age:
Now the Virgin returns, the reign of Saturn is restored; and a new generation descends from heaven on high. Only do you, pure Lucina, smile on the birth of the child, under whom the iron brood shall at last cease and a golden race spring up throughout the world! Your own Apollo now is king! [5]
As one scholar has remarked, Virgil’s influence ‘transformed the fear of apocalyptic ekpyrosis into the notion of Rome as an urbs æterna, regenerating itself after every cycle’. [6] It was precisely this vision that was sustained by the Saturnalia, which from December 17–23 on the Julian calendar, ritually reversed the injunctions of time, paucity, and oppression. In restoring Saturn’s beneficient rule in the advent to the winter solstice—the sun’s turning point—a hidden connection between the solar and the Saturnian was implied.
The desire for a terrestrial golden age through the restoration of Saturn’s rule was mirrored in the desire for a spiritual golden age. Among Neoplatonists, Porphyry spoke of the ability of Saturn to liberate the psyche from the bonds of astral fatality (heimarmenē), freeing souls into immortality. [7] This was connected specifically with the zodiacal polarity of Cancer and Capricorn, which define the tropics or turning points of the year: the points at which the sun ‘stands still’ (sol-sistere) before starting its enantiodromia—the return to its opposite pole. For Porphyry, Cancer and Capricorn, respectively ruled by the Moon and Saturn, were each gates by which the soul entered into embodiment and through which it was freed from embodiment. [8] The Moon, closest of the visible planets and ruler of birth and nurturing, was ultimately the mistress of all that waxes and wanes in the realm of generation and corruption—i.e., the sublunary world of classical cosmology. Saturn by contrast, dry and distant, was the farthest of the visible planets. As such he was the guardian of the boundary that separates the planetary spheres from the Ogdoad—the boundless ocean of fixed stars beyond the planetary order. Within a cosmology in which the soul was seen to descend into material embodiment through the planetary spheres, gaining the vices and virtues of the seven planets as it did so, the path of liberation was accordingly conceived as an ascent through, out, and beyond these same heavenly bonds. Saturn was therefore the final frontier on the soul’s liberating return to its origin, its spiritual golden age.
In the ancient system of planetary dignities, Saturn ruled not only Capricorn, but also Aquarius—the two signs diametrically opposed to the domiciles of the sun and the moon. The leaden planet thus opposed both of the royal luminaries, whose lustre shone as silver through the waters of Cancer, and as gold through the fires of the lion. This polarity between Saturn on one hand, and the sun and moon on the other—together with their terrestrial associations with the lowest and highest of the metals—further substantiates the alchemical symbolism underpinning our text. Lead is not simply the opposite of gold; it is in many respects inverted gold.
The Reign of Saturn Transformed into an Age of Gold. Forthcoming, Rubedo Press.
‘Do not doubt that Saturn has quite a bit to do with gold’, remarks Marsilio Ficino, the fifteenth-century Florentine philosopher. ‘His weight leads people to believe so: furthermore, gold, being similar to the Sun, is by the same token in all metals in the same way that the Sun is in all planets and stars’. [9] This intimation of a common ‘metallic light’ inherent to all metals was also expressed in the Hermetic perception of metals as living entities that could mature, mate, and multiply. At the turn of the seventeenth century, an alchemist known simply as ‘the Cosmopolitan’, explicitly developed the idea that the seven planetary metals grow from one common root. ‘The seed which appears in Saturn is the same as that which is found in gold’, he remarks. [10] From the alchemical point of view, the apparent differences between the seven planetary metals were not of an essential nature, but of an accidental one; by purifying a metal of its inessential qualities, lesser metals could resume their royal status as silver or gold. For these and other reasons, the dream of a terrestrial golden age was never abandoned by the alchemists.
In the wake of the Rosicrucian Manifestos of the early seventeenth century, whose prophecies foretold a universal reformation of civilisation through alchemical humanitarianism, the title of our tome becomes more comprehensible. [11] For the deeper aims of alchemy were never simply to transmute lesser metals into gold; the philosopher’s stone was designed to bring back a golden aeon. ‘Paradise is still in this world yet humankind does not occupy it’, remarks Jacob Böhme (1575–1624), the great Christian Hermeticist; ‘For you see, this gold is locked inside Saturn’. [12]
In a similar vein, a 1621 text entitled Aurea Seculum Redivivum (The Golden Age Restored) describes a dream in which an alchemist learns to release the virgin goddess Nature from the necrotising grip of Saturn. [13]. Stripped and wounded under the abuse of a corrupted aeon, her blood and tears purify the mind and memory of the dreaming alchemist, cleansing him of confusion and granting him the wisdom to choose her as his bride. Her dowry, he learns, is wrapped in her clothes, which have become putrid, poisonous rags. Within these infested garments lie nature’s most precious jewels—her uncorrupted essence. In subsequent dreams, he is taught the procedures for separating the pure from the impure. Upon waking, he finds the rags beside his bed. The dream has now become a reality, yet the admonition remains the same: purify what has putrefied in order to reveal the hidden treasure.
Symbolised almost universally by a being of gold or light, the immortal ontology alluded to by this motif cuts across time and culture to reveal a fundamentally metaphysical message. In this connection, the remarkable similarity of this motif to a simile from the fifth-century Tathāgatagarbha Sūtra cannot go without mention. Surviving in Chinese and Tibetan translations, this early Mahāyāna text speaks of a statuette of the Buddha fashioned from precious jewels and left forgotten inside rotting rags. The text observes that just as the rags conceal the eternal and unchanging image of the Buddha, so too do sentient beings themselves hide the nature of a Buddha within themselves, concealed by the wrappings of their mental and emotional impurities. [14] The cycles of Saturnian suffering, like those of Samsara, thus hold the keys to the essence of the spiritual aeon.
We allude to this eastern reflex merely to distill the core themes, but it is important to note that the western roots of this idea already existed a century earlier. In a text called On the Letter Ōmega, Zosimos of Panopolis, a late-fourth-century Egyptian alchemist, speaks of a phōs anthrōpos (being of light) that resides ever-presently within the veil of the human microcosm. This ‘man of light’, Zosimos specifies, is superior to fate but is hidden within a ‘man of earth’ who is subject to fate because he is formed from the four elements of the sublunary world. [15] This earthly being is further identified with Adam, the primordial human of the Judaic Genesis who is formed from ‘virgin earth’. [16] The polarity between the ‘man of light’ and the ‘man of clay’ makes a clear allusion to the resurrection theology of I Corinthians, which distingushes between a first anthrōpos ‘from earth’ (ek gēs) and a second ‘from heaven’ (ex ouranou). [17]
The double nature of the primodial anthrōpos as both heavenly and earthly would continue to surface in later alchemical contexts, which frequently emphasise the androgynous nature of Adam. It is pivotal to the Huginus text, which remarks: ‘Adam had his own woman hidden within himself—Eve—who emerged from his flank and was made manifest by virtue of the first Archæus’. Alchemically speaking, this Adam embodies the masculine and feminine principles of the prima materia through which the immortal essence emerges, or more precisely, through which it becomes father and mother of itself. True to the nondual nature of the alchemical process, this emergence not only restores the primordial ontology inherent in all beings (from metals to mortals), its ultimate promise is to render paradise integrally present.
Aaron Cheak, PhD
Saturnalia 2020
Notes
Tabula Smaragdina, ‘Quod est inferius, est sicut quod est superius’.
Hesiod, Works and Days, 109–205.
Ovid, Metamorphosis, 1.89 ff.
Vettius Valens, Anthology, book 1.
Virgil, Eclogues, 4.5–10 (trans. modified after H. R. Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library vols 63–64, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916).
Frederick A. de Armas, The Return of Astræa: An Astral-Imperial Myth in Calderón (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 249.
Porphyry, Peri tou en Odysseia tōn nymphōn antrou, 10–13; trans. Thomas Taylor, On the Cave of the Nymphs in the Thirteenth Book of the Odyssey (London: Watkins, 1917), 26–35.
Porphyry, 10–11; On the Cave of the Nymphs, 27: ‘Cancer is the gate through which souls descend; but Capricorn that through which they ascend’.
Ficino, Three Books on Life, III.2, 253.
Novum lumen chymicum, IV: ‘Unicum tantum est semen, idem in Saturno, quod in auro inuenitur’.
Fama Fraternitatis (Kassel: Wilhelm Wessel, 1614); Confessio Fraternitatis (Kassel: Wilhelm Wessel, 1615); Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz anno 1459 (Strasbourg: Zetzner, 1616).
Boehme, De Signatura rerum, ch. 8, 154: ‘Das Paradyß ist noch in der Welt, aber der Mensch ist nicht darinnen [...] Sehet im Saturno liget ein Gold verschloßen’.
Henricus Madathanus (Adrian von Mynsicht, 1603–1638), Aureum Seculum Redivivum, das ist: die uhralte etwichene Güldene Zeit (sl: sp, 1621).
Tathāgatagarbha Sūtra; Michael Zimmerman, A Buddha Within: The Tathāgatagarbhasūtra: The Earliest Exposition of the Buddha-Nature Teaching in India (Tokyo: Soka University, 2002), 131–135.
On the ‘man of light’, see Zosimos of Panopolis, On the Letter Omega, 8–16; Hershbell Jackson, Zosimos of Panopolis on the Letter Omega (Society of Biblical Literature, 1978), 27–37; Michèle Mertens, Les Alchimistes Grecs: Zosime de Panopolis, Mémoires Authentiques (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2002), 4–10.
Phōs (light) is clothed in ‘Adam, who comes from fate, who comes from the four elements’ (Omega, 11).
1 Corinthians 15:47.