Abraham Eleazar (circa 1735): Uraltes Chymisches Werke (Leipzig, 1760):
In 1357 a mysterious parchment fell into the hands of the Parisian notary Nicolas Flamel. It contained hieroglyph figures, whose interpretation by a Jewish scholar finally enabled Flamel to perform several successful transmutations. In Eleazar’s interpretation, the dragon is prepared from the philosopher’s vitriol and represents the dry path, while Saturn-Antimon represents the wet path. Finally, by achieving links to Mercurius, both lead to its fixing.
Caption of Plate IV— With this cut off the feet of Phyton or burn them off by Fire prepared from the Green Dragon.
Saturn (Cronus) represents Father Time with winged hourglass on his head (“time flies”). The youthful Mercury wears a winged helmet but without his winged sandals. He seems immobile, fixated on the ground. He holds a winged caduceus weakly in his right hand, oblivious to the dragon and that Saturn is about to chop off his legs. Compare with image below— “Mercurius volatile” in action.
Dante has written about the four levels of interpretation: literal, moral, allegorical, anagogical. I’ve given a literal level interpretation of the engraving. Here’s a more insightful passage from Fulcanelli’s The Dwellings of the Philosophers (1964): “Saturn easily enters into solution and coagulates similarly. It lends itself readily to the extraction of its Mercury. It can easily sublimated, to such an extent that it becomes the mercury of the sun. For Saturn contains within itself the gold which the Mercury needs, and its mercury is as pure as that of gold. For these reasons, I say that Saturn is, for our Work, by far perferable to gold; for if you want to extract mercury from gold, you will need more than a year to extract this body out of the sun, while you can extract mercury from Saturn in 27 days. Both metals are good, but you can assert with more certainty yet, that Saturn is the stone that the philosophers do not want to name and whose name until today has been hidden.” (translated 1999, page 484) An examination of the Periodic Table of Elements shows that gold (Au-79) is contained within mercury (Hg-80) as well as lead (Pb-82). Since the Planetary god Saturn is associated with lead, we can visualize its transformation to mercury and gold by stripping off a few extra electrons and protons. While such transformations are accomplished in high-energy cyclotrons and particle accelerators, we still don’t know how the alchemists manage such feats during medieval times.