The idea is that one needs to be brought low before they are ready to be built back up to even greater heights. Symbolically this represents the breaking of the human spirit, undergoing great hardship and misery. Once you have that, the first step is called Nigredo, or “Blackening.” Physically, it involves putrefaction, decay, decomposing and breaking the Prima Materia down. But more than that, the Tria Prima also has a spiritual aspect.įirst up, the Magnum Opus requires an alchemist to have something called Prima Materia, or “First Matter,” which they believed to be the original form of matter that everything in the universe is a variation of. In a sense this can be thought of as an evolution of the four elements, transitioning toward the modern idea of elements (in fact, sulphur and mercury are still on the periodic table). It was thought that everything was made of these three: solid, permanent things were made of salt fluid and changeable things were made of mercury and combustible things were made of sulphur. The Tria Prima (latin for “Three Primes”) is a group of three materials which occupy a position of prominence in alchemy: Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury. But the 16th Century Swiss alchemist Paracelsus had a different theory: the Tria Prima One of the more popular and well-known ones was the theory of four elements, and indeed those did play a role in Alchemy. But since the ancients didn’t have the technology to detect such things, they had many different theories. To the Christian mystic, the pelican signifies Christ, who saved humanity through the sacrifice of His own blood.” The pelican represented “one of the vessels in which the experiments of alchemy are performed and its blood that mysterious tincture by which the base metals (the seven baby birds) are transmuted into spiritual gold.What is everything made of? Nowadays science tells us the answer is fundamental particles-quarks, photons, possibly even strings.
Hall explains, “The pelican feeding its young from a self-inflicted wound in its own breast is accepted as an appropriate symbol of both sacrifice and resurrection. The self-sacrificing pelican made her way into Western Esotericism appearing in many traditions, but in particular to the Order of the Rose Cross (Rose Croix). The conjunction creates the Double Headed Eagle, a symbol of unification. Alchemical image from Figuarium Aegyptiorum Secretarum (18th century) showing the Pelican Vulning (one can only assume the artist had never seen a real pelican!) under the moon and the Female archetype on the lefthand side, with the Male, the sun and the Phoenix on the right. The “Pelican in Her Piety” (feeding her young) or the “Pelican Vulning” (wounding herself) is an image found on church facades, mozaics, murals and also used in European heraldry. The pelican became a symbol for self-sacrifice and for the nurturing mother, as well as being associated with the Eucharist in Christian tradition. No one knows quite how this belief came about but it’s possibly due to seeing the birds regurgitating food into the mouths of their young and tucking their bills into the feathers of their breast appearing to stab their heart. In Medieval Europe the pelican was erroneously believed to feed her children with blood from her own pierced heart, an ancient belief that in times of famine the mother bird would sacrifice herself to feed her children or even to resurrect her dead young.
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