Masculine Principle

Sulphur, as the soul, is consciousness, the individual spirit. The hot, dry, fiery, masculine principle, it is the active, engendering seed, called Sol and the Father of the Stone. It is form—eidos —the idea of a thing, as opposed to matter, the expression of the idea. Its symbols include the Sun, the stag and the Red Lion. In its unpurified state it is the red man, who quarrels with the white woman. When exalted, or perfected, he becomes the Red King. 

When beginning the journey at the root of consciousness, Bhogar tells us that one meets the masculine principle standing upon the syllable A in the form of Ganesha, the Lord of Gateways. His consort Vallabhai Shakti stands upon U and a line unites them. Their union bares an issue. Bhogar tells us that this issue is each one of us, we who stand upon the syllable Bhu, we who stand upon the Earth. 

In the alchemical worldview, Mercury refers to the mercurial quality of matter rather than to the element we now call mercury. The alchemists believed that metals differed from one another because they contained greater or lesser amounts of particular qualities. According to Paracelsus theory of tria prima, the three fundamental properties of matter were represented by mercury sulfur, and salt.22 Sulfur was associated with Sol, the sun, and thus with the Masculine Principle, while mercury was closely associated with silver, the Moon, and the Feminine Principle.23 Salt—the fixed, immutable, quality of matter—was associated with body and earth. 

The next tier is silver, associated with the Moon and the Feminine, whereas the gold of the upper tier is associated with the Sun and the Masculine Principle. This symbolism contrasts to the more specific color symbolism of the knight s crest in Plate 1-3, which refers back to changes in color observed during actual chemical processes in the experiments of the alchemists. The metals refer to the instinctual prima materia and to the Feminine and Masculine Principles, Luna and Sol, which emerge as the prima materia is refined to reveal its spirit and its soul. Here we see that what begins as an attempt to transform matter begins to be taken inside, as a process of interior transformation. 

We might be tempted to say that at last the Masculine Principle is triumphant, as expressed by the wonderful sun-like radiance. But the picture tells us something different. There is no sun in evidence the planetary ruler is the moon. This young king is under the sign of the moon, and he is standing on the convex surface of a golden crescent moon. So he is not a symbol of the Masculine only but rather a symbol of the Masculine tempered by the Feminine. 

Marburg, 105 Marriage, 33 Mars, 36, 42 Masculine principle, ig Matejko, 88 Mathematics, 66, 164 Mauveine, 190 Maxwell, xiil de Maycme, 103 Mayow, 114... 

Again we turn to Pernety to find the identity of a certain masculine noun to which female must inevitably refer in the already established alchemical context of Duchamp s Large Glass. The correct answer is Principe, Principle. And we learn this by first turning to two articles in the Dictionnaire Mytho-Herm tique consecutively dealing with female ... 

There existed then, in the beginning, two principles the one luminous, approaching spiritual nature the other material and dark. The first, the principle of light, of movement and of heat the second, the principle of shadows, of torpor and of cold, (Cosmopol. Tract /.) the former, active and masculine the latter, passive and feminine. From the first comes the movement for generation in our elementary world, and from the second proceeds the alteration, whence death has taken its origin. 

ARSENIC OF THE PHILOSOPHERS — The Mercury of the Wise — otherwise, the matter from which this Mercury is extracted. It is also the Hermetic Matter when it has reached the black stage, and the Sulphur or active and masculine seed. Some also understand by this term that Salt, which is the bond between Sulphur and Mercury, and is one of the three principles of Nature, and of all composites. 

The red planet represents the intensely masculine, active, dynamic principle. Its effects are intensifying, accelerating and violent. As the god of War, Mars is traditionally seen, along with Saturn, as a malign body at conflia with the other planets. 

In the operations of the Great Work, the union of masculine and feminine principles was associated with the process known as conjunction [coniunctio] .Sulphur was said to bestow, and mercury to receive, the form assumed by the material resulting from their conjunction— just as wax takes and retains the impression of a seal. There were innumerable synonyms for each of these principles, many of which were used also to denote the Philosopher s Stone. Sophie sulphur was called Sol, king, male, brother, Osiris, lion, toad, wingless dragon,..., etc. 

In the cryptic expression and symbolic representation which characterised alchemy and found a later expression in the symbols and formulae of modern chemistry, sophic sulphur and sophic mercury assumed a bewildering variety of forms. For example, they were known as Osiris and Isis, sun and moon, Sol and Luna, brother and sister, masculine and feminine, active and passive, giver and receiver, seal and wax, fixed and volatile, wingless lion and winged lioness, lion and eagle, and so forth. The Stone, when conceived as the result of the union of masculine and feminine principles, was sometimes represented as an infant. 

The view of the sulphur-mercury theory as a union of masculine and feminine principles found an expression in various pictorial representations of the so-called Hermetic Androgyne, Rebis, or Two-Thing. These designs, like so many others in alchemy, were often delicately coloured for example, the masculine and feminine half-figures of the hermaphrodite standing beside the sun-trcc (yellow) and moon-trec (blue), signified multiplication and a dragon at the foot represented the liquid menstruum. 

V Ticn considered as masculine and feminine principles, sulphur and mercury were regarded as fixed and volatile, respectively, a connotation that seems at variance with this scheme. Here is another inconsistency but if alchemy had an extra principle it was certainly not consistency. >... 

A number of mid-century critics, in particular those influenced by myth and archetype criticism, focused less on the ideologies of gender identity than on masculinity and femininity as principles. Mrs Ramsay becomes perceived as a representation of the mind and sensibility of the female... 

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