Leah DeVun, "The Jesus Hermaphrodite: Science and Sex Difference in Premodern Europe," Journal of...

The Jesus Hermaphrodite: Science and Sex Difference in PremodernEurope

Leah DeVun

Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 69, Number 2, April 2008,pp. 193-218 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania PressDOI: 10.1353/jhi.2008.0013

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The Jesus Hermaphrodite: Science and SexDifference in Premodern Europe

Leah DeVun

In Book IV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a lovestruck water nymph namedSalmacis attempts to seduce Hermaphroditus, the son of Hermes and Aph-rodite, at the edge of her fountain.1 Despite the youth’s apparent lack ofinterest, Salmacis follows him into the water, forcibly kissing and fondlinghim. When he rejects her advances, she asks the gods to join them forever.The result is a single creature of fused male and female body parts:

As when one grafts a twig on some tree,he sees the branches grow one,and with common life come to maturity,so were these two bodies knit in close embrace:they were no longer two, nor such as to be called, one, woman,and one, man. They seemed neither, and yet both.2

1 I acknowledge gratefully the Texas A&M University Melbern G. Glasscock Center forHumanities Research, the Huntington Library, and the USC-Huntington Early ModernStudies Institute for their generous support for this project. I would also like to thankCaroline Walker Bynum, Mary Doyno, Anna Harrison, Kathleen P. Long, Cary J. Neder-man, Elissa Popoff, and Anna Trumbore Jones for their assistance during the preparationof this article. Thanks especially to the staff of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, theBibliotheque Nationale de France and, in particular, Christoph Eggenberger of the Zen-tralbibliothek in Zurich.2 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb ClassicalLibrary, Harvard University Press, 1971), 4.375–79: ‘‘velut, si quis conducat corticeramos, / crescendo iungi pariterque adolescere cernit, / sic ubi conplexu coierunt membra

Copyright � by Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 69, Number 2 (April 2008)

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Ovid’s tale was well known in the Middle Ages, as revealed by the largenumber of manuscript copies of the Metamorphoses and by the manyglosses and notes on the work that circulated after the late eleventh century.Late medieval vernacular poets, including Dante, Chaucer, Chretien deTroyes, Guillaume de Lorris, Jean de Meun, Christine de Pizan, and Boccac-cio, among others, all made extensive use of Ovidian material in their writ-ings. The myth of the hermaphrodite, in particular, found a number ofadmirers and interpreters.3

Among the readers most fascinated with tales of transformation werealchemists, naturalists who explored the properties and composition ofmatter, as well as the possibility of manufacturing precious metals throughhuman technology. Alchemists struggled to explain the material changesthey believed metals underwent during the process of transmutation. Al-though alchemical writers offered a number of analogies, including plant-grafting and spontaneous generation, to characterize transmutation, suchexplanations were limited in their power to discuss alchemical change interms of the sexed elemental qualities with which alchemists believed theyworked.4 But such change was at the heart of Ovid’s metamorphoses, andthe hermaphrodite story provided a particularly apt model for alchemists:it described a fusion of male and female sexed parts into a biform body thatwas, as Ovid claimed, both and neither. It should come as no surprise thatalchemists seized upon the image of the hermaphrodite to describe the ‘‘phi-losophers’ stone,’’ the chemical agent they thought transmuted base metalsinto silver and gold. According to alchemists, their work combined maleand female elemental qualities into a compound substance of both sexes—ahermaphrodite—that was capable of transmutation. This body (since chem-icals and metals were often called ‘‘bodies’’ in alchemy) was both, but alsoneither, because the alchemical process held contrarieties in stasis, creatinga new substance that was outside the norms of binary division.

Of course, alchemy was not concerned with any actual case of intersex

tenaci, / nec duo sunt et forma duplex, nec femina dici / nec puer ut possit, neutrumqueet utrumque videntur.’’3 Lauren Silberman, ‘‘Mythographic Transformations of Ovid’s Hermaphrodite,’’ Six-teenth Century Journal 19 (1988): 643–52; Marilynn R. Desmond, ‘‘Introduction,’’ andFrank T. Coulson, ‘‘The Vulgate Commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses,’’ both in Medi-aevalia: A Journal of Medieval Studies 13 (1987): Ovid in Medieval Culture: A SpecialIssue, 1–8, 29–61; Marilynn Desmond and Pamela Sheingorn, Myth, Montage, and Visu-ality in Late Medieval Manuscript Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,2003), 148–51.4 William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 64–65.

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DeVun ✦ Science and Sex Difference in Premodern Europe

birth; the alchemical hermaphrodite was merely a metaphor used to repre-sent a chemical substance. Alchemy borrowed ideas and vocabulary freelyfrom medical and religious conversations, using familiar stories and imagesto explain sophisticated states of chemical change by analogy. As a result,alchemical texts are rife with medical images of human reproduction, reli-gious images of death and resurrection, and even hermaphrodites. Becausethe alchemical hermaphrodite was a symbol and not a person capable ofillicit behaviors, it carried with it few of the negative connotations associ-ated with intersex humans, who were classified as ‘‘monsters’’ in moraland medical texts, and who were treated with equal parts curiosity anddisapprobation. But the alchemical hermaphrodite depended upon under-standings of intersex people in medieval society, and it therefore shared insome of the transgressive elements of intersex, as I shall argue below. Evenso, the composite nature of the hermaphrodite was elevated to an ideal inalchemical literature, leading authors to a startling conclusion. Alchemicaltexts played upon the metaphorical parallelism of the philosophers’ stoneand Jesus Christ to claim Christ him/herself as a hermaphrodite, the perfectcombination of contraries—masculine and feminine, human and divine—inone body.

Many historical studies of hermaphrodites have been published in re-cent years, chiefly because historians view societal attitudes towards inter-sex as especially revealing of contemporary ideas about sex and gender.Classic studies in the history of sexuality by John Boswell, Michel Foucault,and Thomas Laqueur have highlighted intersex as a part of their argumentsthat current understandings of sex and sexuality are neither natural norinevitable.5 Building upon these studies, a number of new scholarly workshave delved into medical, legal, and literary sources to explore the meaningsof intersex in premodern and modern society.6 But hermaphrodites in al-

5 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 3 vols. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978–1986); John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People inWestern Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gen-der from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).6 For instance, Cary J. Nederman and Jacqui True, ‘‘The Third Sex: The Idea of theHermaphrodite in Twelfth-Century Europe,’’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 6(1996): 497–517; Miri Rubin, ‘‘The Person in the Form: Medieval Challenges to Bodily‘Order,’ ’’ in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Man-chester University Press, 1994), 100–122; Ruth Gilbert, Early Modern Hermaphrodites:Sex and Other Stories (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Alice Domurat Dreger, Hermaphro-dites and the Medical Invention of Sex (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998);Julia Epstein, ‘‘Either/Or—Neither/Both: Sexual Ambiguity and the Ideology of Gender,’’Genders 7 (1990): 99–142; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion

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chemical literature have so far attracted little analytic attention.7 In the mid-twentieth century, scholars such as C.G. Jung and Mircea Eliade made im-portant contributions to the study of this subject, but they tended to viewsuch images either as evidence of an unchanging psychological ‘‘collectiveunconscious’’ or as part of a cross-cultural mythological system.8 Yet histo-rians have more to learn from the specific cultural context of the alchemicalhermaphrodite in premodern Europe; moreover, the alchemical hermaph-rodite can tell us something we may not be able to learn from other textsabout the meanings of sex, difference, and change in alchemy and beyond.

HERMAPHRODITES IN MEDIEVALMEDICINE AND SOCIETY

Hermaphrodites appear with regularity within discussions of sexual gener-ation and sex difference in medieval medical texts. As Joan Cadden hasshown, the premodern medical world inherited two distinct and often con-tradictory theories of generation, the Hippocratic/Galenic model and theAristotelian model, which led to divergent understandings of hermaphro-ditism.9 According to the older tradition, originated by the writers of theGreek Hippocratic corpus and popularized in the Middle Ages by thePseudo-Galenic tract De spermate, hermaphrodites were neither male norfemale, but an intermediary sex that combined male and female characteris-tics in equilibrium. During the normal process of conception and gestation,a number of factors—such as the child’s position in the womb, or the rela-tive strength of the mother and father’s sperm—determined the sex of anoffspring, which might be male, female, or hermaphroditic.10 The compet-ing Aristotelian model, which derived chiefly from Aristotle’s De generati-

of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Katharine Park and Lorraine J. Daston, ‘‘TheHermaphrodite and the Orders of Nature: Sexual Ambiguity in Early Modern France,’’GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 1 (1995): 419–38.7 The exception is Kathleen P. Long’s Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe (Aldershot:Ashgate, 2006), 109–62.8 C.G. Jung, Jung on Alchemy, ed. by Nathan Schwartz-Salant (Princeton: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 1995), 126, 211–13; Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible, trans.Stephen Corrin (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962), 58–62, 138, 161; The Two andthe One, trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Harvill Press, 1965), 102–3.9 Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1993); Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicinein the Middle Ages, trans. Matthew Adamsom (Oxford: Polity Press, 1988).10 Cadden, Meanings, 198–202.

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one animalium and became widespread in the thirteenth century, arguedthat hermaphrodites were not so much an intermediate sex as the productof doubled or superfluous genitalia. A hermaphrodite occurred when mat-ter contributed by the mother (in the form of menstrual blood) exceededthe amount needed to produce one fetus, but was not enough for two. Theextra matter could form either conjoined twins or a single fetus with extraappendages, including a second set of genitals. Aristotle held, however, thatthe sex of a hermaphrodite was only superficially ambiguous: the true sexwas determined by the complexion of the body (that is, the combination ofheat, cold, dryness, and moisture within it), which always indicated eithermale (hot and dry) or female (cold and wet) sex.

Medical discussions of hermaphrodites often figure in chapters devotedto ‘‘monsters’’ (usually meaning humans with birth defects), which authorsattempted to explain according to the various theories of generation.11 Athirteenth-century medical tract, De secretis mulierum (attributed to Albertthe Great, but likely written by one of his followers) places its analysis ofhermaphrodites within a customary discussion of monstrous births. Theauthor notes that while a hermaphrodite participates in both male and fe-male natures, he should always be called ‘‘male’’ simply because the maleis the worthier sex.12 While the author views hermaphrodites as a combina-tion of masculine and feminine qualities, he nevertheless determines thehermaphrodite’s sex according to the value of men and women within abinary gender system. Other authors discuss hermaphroditism in the con-text of not only monsters, but also sodomy or other forms of sexual devi-ance, or they attempt to fix the ‘‘true’’ sex of a hermaphrodite in terms ofsexual activity and passivity. In his Summa de confessione, written about1216, Peter of Poitiers cites hermaphrodites as a part of his polemic againstmasturbation, which Peter claims is more monstrous than sodomy, ‘‘sincethe person practicing it is both active and passive, and thus as if man andwoman, and as if a hermaphrodite.’’13 A similar association between her-

11 On monsters, see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order ofNature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998); David Williams, Deformed Dis-course: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature (Montreal:McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996).12 Pseudo-Albertus Magnus, Women’s Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Mag-nus’s De Secretis Mulierum With Commentaries, ed. Helen Rodnite Lemay (Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press, 1992), 116.13 ‘‘In hoc quidem distans ab illo quod in hoc corrumpitur una sola persona, et in illoduae, sed in eo monstruosius est quam illud, quia hic eadem persona fit agens et patiens,et ita quasi uir et mulier, et quasi hermaphroditus.’’ Peter of Poitiers, Summa de Confessi-one: Compilatio praesens, ed. Jean Longere, in Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medi-aevalis, vol. 51 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1980), 18–19.

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maphroditism and sodomy appears in Peter the Chanter’s twelfth-centuryDe vitio sodomitico, which warns that the hermaphrodite should be permit-ted to use only the sexual organ ‘‘by which s/he is more aroused, or the oneto which s/he is more susceptible.’’14 In order to avoid engaging in sodomy,the hermaphrodite must perform sexually as either a man or a woman, butnever as both.

These medieval texts emphasize the problematic nature of individualswho do not fit easily into binary sex categories. Despite the continuum ofsex difference proposed by the Hippocratic/Galenic model, Pseudo-Albert,Peter of Poitiers, and Peter the Chanter limited the transgressive potentialof a hermaphrodite by establishing him/her firmly within either one of twogenders—he/she cannot be neither or both in social contexts.15 As noted,hermaphroditism was also readily associated with sexual practices consid-ered deviant or undesirable, such as masturbation or sodomy. And becausemonstrous births were often thought to result from some secret sexual sinof the parents, hermaphrodites may have been doubly connected to sexualvice.16 These examples suggest that hermaphrodites were a source of confu-sion and even suspicion to their contemporaries, necessitating their divisioninto binary gender categories of male and female, and conveying the extentto which neitherness and bothness had the potential to threaten social andnatural norms.

SEXUAL LANGUAGE IN ALCHEMY

Hermaphrodites had much more positive connotations in alchemy, whichplaced them within a larger discussion of the parallels between metal trans-mutation and sexual reproduction. Since metals had no obvious means toreproduce themselves, alchemists relied upon the metaphor of sexual repro-duction to explain their generation, as well as to theorize the philosophers’stone, the substance thought to transmute metals by hastening the naturalprocesses of metal formation that normally occurred in the earth.17 The

14 ‘‘Non erit consortium viri ad virum, vel mulieris ad mulierem, sed tantum viri ad mulie-rem, et econtrario. Unde Ecclesia homini androgyno, id est habenti instrumentum utrius-que sexus, aptum scilicet ad agendum et patiendum, instrumento, quo magis calescit,quove magis est infirmus, permittit uti.’’ Peter the Chanter, De vitio sodomitico, ch. 138of Verbum abbreviatum, Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne (1844–92), 205: 334.15 Nederman and True, 515–17.16 De secretis mulierum, 114–16; Williams, 175.17 For theories of transmutation, see Newman, Promethean Ambitions, esp. 34–114.

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Tabula smaragdina, one of the foundational works of alchemy, stated thatthe father of the philosophers’ stone ‘‘is the Sun; its mother the Moon.’’18

Many commentators on the Tabula smaragdina equated this ‘‘father’’ and‘‘mother’’ with sulphur and mercury (the two materials generally thoughtto be the building blocks of metals in the Arab alchemical tradition), whichthey identified as components of an alchemical reproductive process. Forinstance, in his Epistola boni viri, John Dastin quotes from the Tabula sma-ragdina, as well as from the Arab alchemists Jabir and al-Razi, before con-cluding that ‘‘the stone is nothing other than the male and female, sun andmoon, heat and cold, sulphur and mercury.’’19 That is, the philosophers’stone is produced in a manner parallel to sexual reproduction among hu-mans, with hot sulphur taking on the sexual role of the male, and coldmercury, the female.

The Tabula smaragdina was not the only alchemical text that requireddecoding. During the thirteenth century, European alchemists encounteredLatin translations of Arabic writings, some of which included discussion ofan unidentified alchemical base material, the ‘‘rebis.’’20 Latin alchemistssuch as Constantine of Pisa and Richardus Anglicus attempted to decipherthe word, apparently a transliteration of a still-unknown Arabic term.Richardus interpreted ‘‘rebis’’ as an abbreviation for ‘‘res bina,’’ or ‘‘twothing,’’ which he identified with the philosophers’ stone, and which manysubsequent alchemists understood as a hermaphrodite.21 This attempt tosolve the linguistic puzzle of the rebis was no isolated incident. Alchemistsspent much of their time struggling to identify the meaning of cryptic al-chemical language and imagery in order to prove their worthiness amongthe company of adepts.22 But while alchemists could have interpreted a‘‘two thing’’ in any number of ways, they generally solved the riddle of the

18 ‘‘Pater ejus est Sol, mater ejus Luna.’’ Julius Ruska, Tabula Smaragdina: ein Beitrag zurGeschichte der hermetischen Literatur (Heidelberg: Winter, 1926), 2.19 ‘‘Non ergo perturbent te haec verba vel alia consilia, quia lapis nihil aliud est quammasculus et femina, sol et luna, calor et frigus, sulphur et mercurium [sic].’’ From JohnDastin, Epistola boni viri, ed. and trans. Wilfred R. Theissen in ‘‘John Dastin’s Letter onthe Philosophers’ Stone,’’ Ambix 33 (1986): 81.20 Andree Colinet, ‘‘Le livre d’Hermes intitule ‘Liber dabessi’ ou ‘Liber rebis,’ ’’ Studimedievali 36 (1995): 1011–52.21 See, for example, Constantine of Pisa, The Book of the Secrets of Alchemy, ed. BarbaraObrist (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 111, 212, n. 372; Richardus Anglicus, Correctorium alchem-iae, in Alchemiae quam vocant artisque metallicae . . . (Basel: Petrum Pernam, 1572),553–55.22 Robert Halleux, Les textes alchimiques, Typologie des sources du moyen age occidental32 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1979), 113–19.

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rebis by imagining a hermaphrodite. Even authors who did not explicitlyuse the word rebis began to describe the alchemical agent as a hermaphro-ditic substance.

Scholastic thinkers Albert the Great (ca. 1193–1280) and Petrus Bonusof Ferrara (fl. ca. 1330) used sexual and reproductive analogies in theirwork, and they exemplify the early development of the idea of hermaphro-ditism in mineralogy and alchemy. Although Albert the Great’s De mineral-ibus was not strictly an alchemical work, Albert drew from alchemicalsources in order to supplement the Aristotelian natural philosophical cor-pus, which lacked an extensive analysis of minerals. Albert explained theformation of stones and metals by means of prolonged comparisons to sex-ual reproduction, which he rendered in language drawn from Aristotle’s Degeneratione animalium. Moreover, he described sulphur (which he believedwas simultaneously hot, cold, wet, and dry) as a hermaphroditic, plantlikesubstance.23 For Albert, a substance that contained all four qualities was insome sense both male and female, and thus capable of self-reproduction.Although Albert did not develop further the theme of the hermaphrodite,his understanding of hermaphroditism as a combination of unlike qualitieswithin a substance was formative.

Petrus Bonus of Ferrara seems to have been among the first to connecthermaphroditism explicitly to the alchemical agent of transmutation, a sub-stance that transformed metals into gold and silver upon contact. UnlikeAlbert’s De mineralibus, Petrus’ Pretiosa margarita novella was whollyconcerned with alchemy and particularly with the philosophers’ stone.24

Petrus described the philosophers’ stone as a combination of sulphur andmercury, which he explained in terms of sexual reproduction:

[They] call the milk that is coagulated the female, and the malethat which coagulates, since activity is attributed to the male, andpassivity to the female. For when this stone arises, since it is itselfliquid and flowing and passive, it is called female. Its coagulum,that which coagulates it, when it is solid, firm, permanent, andactive in it, is called male. The combination of these is called thecompound stone, perfect and composite, and in the mixing they

23 Albertus Magnus, De mineralibus, ed. and trans. Dorothy Wyckoff (Oxford: Claren-don Press, 1967), 205 (IV, 1).24 On Petrus Bonus, see Chiara Crisciani, ‘‘The Conception of Alchemy as Expressed inthe Pretiosa Margarita Novella of Petrus Bonus of Ferrara,’’ Ambix 20 (1973): 165–81.

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become altogether one . . . Therefore the male and female arejoined, and become one.25

The aftermath of this conjunction did not follow the same trajectory ashuman reproduction. According to both Galenic and Aristotelian modelsof conception, nearly all human pregnancies would result in an unambigu-ously male or female child; a hermaphroditic child would be born only in arare case. At the end of a successful alchemical gestation, in contrast, ahermaphrodite is always the result. Petrus notes that when the process iscomplete, the philosophers’ stone embodies both male and female complex-ionary qualities:

And it must be known that the male and the female are the sameand in the same substance, and they have diverse powers in suchunity of subject . . . [s]uch a union is able to be called Herma-phrodita: since plants and seeds impregnate wherever, and are alsoimpregnated, and this denotes that activity and passivity in thesame subject are mixed together into a certain unity. When, there-fore, the stone arises, it has in it a mixture of male and female.26

Since the stone is capable of both active and passive sexual functions,it is able to reproduce, much like a vegetable seed or an egg, and conse-quently to transmute metals. For Petrus, the alchemical hermaphrodite is aunity of contrary qualities. Although he may not have had Ovid’s story inmind, Petrus’ alchemical stone bears a strong resemblance to the mythologi-cal Hermaphroditus, who underwent a similar process to become a fusionof the sexes. Petrus’ alchemical stone is a new chemical compound (neitherthe female nor male that existed before), yet he prefers to discuss it in terms

25 ‘‘[N]ominantes foeminam ipsum lac quod coagulatur, masculum autem quod coagulat:quia actio attribuitur masculo, passio vero foeminae. Nam in hoc lapide, quando oritur,cum ipse sit liquidus, et fluens et patiens dicitur foemina: suum autem coagulum, a quocogulatur cum sit solidum, firmum, permanens et agens in illud, dicitur masculus: com-positum autem ex iis, dicitur lapis commixtus, perfectus et compositus, et fiunt in com-mixtione unum omnino. . . . Masculus ergo et foemina conjunguntur, et unum fiunt, etcetera.’’ Petrus Bonus of Ferrara, Pretiosa margarita novella, in Bibliotheca chemica curi-osa, ed. J.-J. Manget, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1702 [repr. Bologna: A. Forni, 1976]), II: 51.26 ‘‘Et est sciendum, quod masculus et foemina sunt idem, et in eodem substantivo, et sunthabentes virtutes diversas in tali subjecti unitate. . . . talis copulatio potest dici Hermo-phrodita: quia plantae et semina ubicunque impraegnant, impraegnantur etiam, et hocdenotat agens et patiens in eodem subjecto simul esse commixta in unitate quadam.Quando ergo oritur lapis iste, habet in se mixtionem masculi et foeminae.’’ Ibid., II: 51.

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that preserve the distinct identities of its components (the both). As in theOvidian story, the alchemical hermaphrodite is not merely a midpoint be-tween opposites, but a body that holds contraries in stasis and conversa-tion. While Petrus’ comments suggest that he imagined the stone in termsof a hermaphroditic plant or egg, he also referred to the constituent parts ofthe substance as ‘‘woman,’’ ‘‘king,’’ or ‘‘wife,’’ adding an anthropomorphicdimension to his analogy.27

The metaphor of biological reproduction was not the only image thatPetrus used to characterize the philosophers’ stone. He noted that the stonehad a comprehensive nature that allowed it to be likened to multiple pairsof opposites, including ‘‘the corporeal and incorporeal . . . corruptible andincorruptible, visible and invisible, to spirit, soul, and body, and their unionand separation,’’ among other concepts.28 For Petrus, the stone was bothnature and divinity, corruptibility and incorruptibility, and by extension, itwas parallel to Christ. According to the scholar Chiara Crisciani, Petrusclaimed that the stone bore all the chief aspects of Christ and his life: it wasa union of divine and natural elements, the product of a miraculous birth,and subject to death and resurrection.29 Other alchemical treatises of thethirteenth and fourteenth centuries drew similar parallels between Christand the alchemical stone. In De lapide philosophorum, the author orga-nized his description of the alchemical operation with respect to the lifeof Christ, ending the work with a symbolic death and resurrection.30 Thefourteenth-century alchemist John of Rupescissa explained the crucifixionof the philosophers’ stone in his Liber lucis; after the ‘‘death’’ of the stone,it was to be entombed in the alchemist’s equipment ‘‘just like Christ insidethe sepulcher.’’31 Analogies between the philosophers’ stone and Christ

27 Ibid., II: 51. For instance: ‘‘Veneramini regem et uxorem suam, et nolite eos comburere,et cetera. Et Theophilus:Philosophi tamen mulieres suos conjuges interficientes, neci dede-runt, illius enim mulieris venter armis plenus est et veneno, et cetera.’’28 ‘‘Tam corporeis quam incorporeis . . . et de corruptibilibus et incorruptibilibus, et visi-bilibus et invisibilibus, et de spiritu, et anima, et corpore, et ipsorum unione.’’ Ibid., II:34. For the Aristotelian analysis of opposites, see G. E. R. Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy:Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1966).29 Crisciani, ‘‘The Conception of Alchemy,’’ 171–73.30 Antoine Calvet, ‘‘Alchimie et joachimisme dans les alchimica pseudo-arnaldiens,’’ inAlchimie et philosophie a la Renaissance, ed. Jean-Claude Margolin and Sylvain Matton(Paris: J.Vrin, 1993), 99–100.31 John of Rupescissa, Liber lucis, 24v: ‘‘Sic extrahe ipsum de vase predicto quod vocaturovum Philosophorum, et Magister Arnaldus dicit quod Lapis est clausus in eo sicutChristus in sepulcro.’’ A fascimile of the manuscript has been reproduced in Il libro dellaluce, ed. Andrea Aromatico (Marsilio: Editori, 1997).

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played upon the supposedly parallel structures of alchemy and Christianity.Like Christ, the philosophers’ stone was a combination of nature and divin-ity, of corporeality and incorporeality, of opposites united in one subject.

The works of Albert the Great and Petrus Bonus reveal early stages inthe development of the alchemical hermaphrodite. Both Albert and Petrusappear to have drawn from notions of the hermaphrodite as a fusion ofmale and female attributes, rather than from the understanding of the her-maphrodite as a result of doubling or superfluity. In addition, the alchemi-cal hermaphrodite was not a midpoint between opposites; instead, it was aunity of pre-existing and contrary parts that remained distinct. Petrus’ textalso reveals the multiplicity of analogies used to characterize the philoso-phers’ stone: the stone was Christ, the stone was a king, and the stone wasa hermaphrodite. These analogies were carried further in the works of otheralchemical authors, who combined metaphors in new ways, exploring theinterplay of balance and doubling in the image of the hermaphrodite andborrowing from a longstanding tradition of viewing Jesus as both male andfemale.

THE JESUS HERMAPHRODITE

By the turn of the fourteenth century, Latin alchemy was in the process ofchanging from a self-consciously scholastic discipline, wedded to the lan-guage of Aristotelian natural philosophy, to a field of study that was in-creasingly religious in its sentiments and vocabulary. The image of thehermaphrodite became crucial to these new writings, as can be seen fromthe text and manuscript illuminations of the undated Aurora consurgensand the early fifteenth-century Book of the Holy Trinity. While Albert theGreat and Petrus Bonus tended to view the philosophers’ stone as a her-maphroditic plant or egg, these texts clearly represented the philosophers’stone as a hermaphroditic human.

While the precise date of the Aurora consurgens’ composition remainsuncertain, the earliest exemplar of the Aurora consurgens is a lushly illus-trated manuscript produced in the 1420s and now housed at the Zentral-bibliothek of Zurich (Codex Rhenoviensis 172).32 The text of this

32 On this text, see Barbara Obrist, Les debuts de l’imagerie alchimique, XIVe-XVe siecles(Paris: Sycomore, 1982), 183–245; Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision,Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,2003), 235–40.

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anonymous treatise exemplifies the trend of religious language in alchemy,as well as the symbolic use of the alchemical hermaphrodite. The workdraws from an array of Arab and Latin alchemical authors, as well as fromsapiential theology of the biblical books of wisdom, to create a tapestry ofbiblical quotations and poetic imagery more akin to a mystical tract than apractical manual of alchemy. It opens with a paean to the female figure ofSapientia, or Wisdom, who is a ‘‘gift and sacrament of God and a divinething, which most of all and in many ways has been hidden in figurativespeech by the wise.’’33 In the second section, Sapientia herself speaks inseven ‘‘parables’’ that ostensibly reveal the secrets of alchemy but are deliv-ered in highly metaphorical prose. The personified wisdom of biblical scrip-ture, which patristic and medieval authors identified variously with thefemale Virgin Mary or the male Christ, is equated here with personifiedalchemy—the lapis, or stone.34 The voice of alchemy in the Aurora con-surgens is thus chiefly female, but also sometimes male. In one passage, thefeminine Sapientia describes herself in distinctly masculine terms:

[To the one for] whose love I languish, in whose ardor I melt, inwhose fragrance I live, by whose taste I regain my health, by whosemilk I am nourished, in whose embrace I grow young, in whosekiss I receive the breath of life, in sleeping with whom my wholebody is emptied of life, I will yet be as a father to him and he willbe to me as a son.35

Sapientia here shows her/himself to be youthful and aged, revivified anddrained, and united with a male who is both sexual partner and son (andwho may be either the aspiring alchemist or the chemical sulphur, the‘‘male’’ component of the alchemical stone). Alchemy is described by a se-

33 ‘‘Est namque donum et sacramentum Dei atque res divina, quae maxime et diversimodea sapientum sermonibus typicis est occultata.’’ Aurora consurgens, ed. Marie-Louise VonFranz, trans. R. F. C. Hull and A. S. B. Glover (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1966),42.34 On personified Wisdom, see Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s The-ology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 42–88. For patris-tic and medieval understandings of Wisdom as feminine, see Jennifer Heimmel, ‘‘God isOur Mother’’: Julian of Norwich and the Medieval Image of Christian Feminine Divinity(Salzburg: Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universitat Salzburg, 1982), 21–24.35 ‘‘Cuius amore langueo, ardore liquesco, odore vivo, sapore convalesco, cuius lacte nu-trimentum suscipio, amplexu iuvenesco, osculo spiraculum vitae recipio, cuius con-dormitione totum corpus meum exinanitur, illi vero ero in patrem et ipse mihi infilium’’(emphasis is mine). Aurora consurgens, 58.

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ries of opposing images, much like the multiple pairs of opposites cited byPetrus Bonus in the Pretiosa margarita novella. More important, the usuallyfeminine protagonist in the Aurora consurgens is transformed into a father,suggesting that Sapientia—and the alchemical stone—have both masculineand feminine aspects.

A series of unusual illustrations accompany the text of the Aurora con-surgens and explore the theme of the alchemical hermaphrodite in newways. While similar illuminations appear in at least seven manuscripts ofthe Aurora consurgens, the earliest extant copy—the Zentralbibliothekmanuscript—is perhaps the most interesting.36 One particularly evocativepainting from this manuscript envisions the alchemical stone as a hermaph-roditic youth in the clutches of a blue eagle (Fig. 1, p. 206). In this painting,the hermaphrodite is a physical fusion of male and female bodies, a biformperson with two heads, two pairs of arms, two chests, and two sets ofgenitalia. The image draws upon the understanding of the stone as a combi-nation of sulphur (represented by its male half) and mercury (representedby its female half). As in the works of Albert the Great and Petrus Bonus,the hermaphrodite is a balance of male (hot and dry) and female (cold andmoist) qualities, but its doubled heads and genitalia also invoke the Aristo-telian notion of the hermaphrodite as a superfluity of bodily matter. Theshape of the body recalls similar images of conjoined twins, another ‘‘mon-ster’’ thought to be caused by excessive matter at the time of conception.The alchemical hermaphrodite, as the illustrator imagined it, was both anequilibrium of unlike qualities and a redundant melding of extra limbs andorgans. This image bears a striking resemblance to a fifteenth-centurymanuscript illumination of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Fig. 2, p. 207), whichdepicts the Ovidian hermaphrodite as conjoined bodies split at the waist.The similarities between the two images point to the debt of the alchemicalimagination to Ovid’s tale. In both illustrations, the male and female bodiesare fused into a new shape that still retains the distinct characteristics of itsparts—the neither and the both. In the Aurora consurgens, the animalsclasped in the hands of the hermaphrodite add yet another level of meaning.The rabbit, which symbolizes alchemical ‘‘fixity,’’ hints at the hypersexual-ity of rabbits: both male and female rabbits were thought to give birth, andthey were sometimes considered to be hermaphroditic.37 The bat, symboliz-ing alchemical ‘‘volatility,’’ likewise invokes the hermaphroditism or split

36 Obrist, 188–89.37 See, for instance, Boswell, 141–43, 303–7.

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FIGURE 1. Alchemical hermaphrodite, Aurora consurgens, Zurich, Zen-tralbibliothek, MS Rhenoviensis 172 (early fifteenth century), insidefrontispiece.

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FIGURE 2. Hermaphrodite, Ovid, Metamorphoses, in Paris, Biblio-theque Nationale, MS Fr. 137 (fifteenth century), fol. 49.

nature of bats in the medieval bestiary tradition.38 These iconographicalreferences invoke the two contradictory aspects of the alchemical hermaph-rodite: its doubled sex, encompassing both male and female, and its lack ofdefined sex, neither male nor female.

The images of the hermaphrodite in the Zurich manuscript link the

38 Alain of Lille, Plaint of Nature, trans. James J. Sheridan (Toronto: Pontifical Instituteof Mediaeval Studies, 1980), 94.

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Aurora consurgens to a similar program of miniatures attached to theanonymous Book of the Holy Trinity, also from the early fifteenth centuryand from the same southern German area of production.39 Although wecannot identify the author, we know that he visited the Council of Con-stance in order to promote his work before the Emperor Sigismund, andthat he attracted the interest of other nobles, including the emperor’sbrother, Wenceslas of Prague, and the margrave Friedrich of Brandenberg,who subsequently became his patron. Perhaps due to the enthusiasm ofaristocrats for the alchemical manufacture of gold, the Book enjoyedenough success to survive in at least twenty manuscripts, many of which arevividly illustrated. The Book’s illuminations resemble those of the Auroraconsurgens inasmuch as they also depict the alchemical stone as a biform,hermaphroditic human, but they further explore medieval understandingsof Christ as male and female to develop a new pair of images: the Jesus-Mary hermaphrodite and the Antichrist hermaphrodite.

Central to the Book of the Holy Trinity is the author’s claim that Christcontains within him his mother, the Virgin Mary, who comprises his femi-nine principle, as well as the principle of his humanity. The author statesthat ‘‘one can never see the mother of God without also seeing that Godeternally hides and intermingles [his mother] within him. God was and iseternally his own mother and his own father, human and divine, his divinityand his humanity intermingled within. And he depends on that which hewishes to be hidden most of all within himself, the divine and the human,the feminine and the masculine.’’40 The author further emphasizes the in-separable nature of Christ and Mary:

The humanity of bright Mary was the interior and exterior hu-manity of God Jesus Christ all made together; he had not and hasno other humanity. The two are thus eternal without end . . . Andthey have been eternally one, the Divinity Jesus Christ, which can-

39 On this work, see Obrist, 117–82; Denis Duveen, ‘‘Le Livre de la tres sainte trinite,’’Ambix 3 (1948): 26–32; Herwig Buntz, ‘‘Das Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit: Sein Autorund seine Uberlieferung,’’ Zeitschrift fur deutsches Altertum und deutsche Litteratur 101(1972): 150–60; W. Ganzenmuller, ‘‘Das Buch der heiligen Dreigfaltigkeit: Eine deutscheAlchemie aus dem Anfang des 15. Jahrhunderts,’’ Archiv fur Kulturgeschichte 29 (1939):93–146.40 Anonymous, Livre de la tres sainte trinite, Beinecke Library, Yale University, MellonMS 74, fol. 25r-v: ‘‘On ne peut iamais voir la mere de Dieu sans voir aussy eternellementDieu ainsy cache et mesle ensemble, Dieu etoit et est eternellement sa propre mere et sonpropre pere humain divin sous sa divinite et sous son humanite ensemble et il depend deluy lequel il veut etre le plus cache en soy le divin ou l’humain, le feminin ou masculin.’’

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not and could not be separated eternally from his exterior human-ity, thus Jesus-Mary is and was one being in the same substance.41

According to this view, Christ is the ultimate hermaphrodite, a unityof contrary parts—the human and the divine, the male and the female—much as Petrus Bonus described the philosophers’ stone as multiple pairsof incongruous qualities. The author of the Book also explicitly equates thehermaphrodite Christ with the hermaphrodite stone, writing: ‘‘[There] roseChrist, Jesus-Mary, the red stone, the carbuncle, throughout all the samething. They could not be separated, and they will never be separated. Andin the same way, Jesus and Mary are one blood, one moon, one sun.’’42 Theauthor relies here upon the traditional understanding of the philosophers’stone as male and female, sulphur and mercury, and, invoking the astro-nomical imagery of the Tabula smaragdina, sun and moon. The red stonethat transmutes metals into gold is also synonymous with the fusion ofJesus and Mary, whose union epitomizes the yoking of contraries that char-acterized the hermaphrodite in alchemical thought. The author of the Bookappears to have borrowed and conflated earlier images of the philosophers’stone as Christ with understandings of the stone as hermaphroditic, arriv-ing at a vision of the hermaphroditic Christ-stone. As in Petrus Bonus’ text,the narrative of the stone’s life and Christ’s life become one: both are natureand supernature, male and female, human and divine—the poles of thespectrum tethered together. The alchemical hermaphrodite is an eminentlydesirable union of opposites that transcends the normal operations of na-ture, a disruption akin to metal transmutation, the ultimate goal of thealchemist’s work.

Hermaphroditism is for the author of the Book such a significant tropethat it characterizes not only Christ, but also Antichrist. The anonymouswriter of the Book was almost certainly a descendent of the ‘‘Spiritual Fran-ciscans,’’ a radical sect of Franciscan friars who advocated absolute povertyand expected the appearance of Antichrist and the apocalyptic climax of

41 Mellon MS 74, fol. 25r: ‘‘[L]a transparente humanite de Marie claire etoit l’humaniteinterieur et exterieur de Dieu Jesus Christus tout a fait ensemble il n’a eu et n’a pointd’autre humanite toutes les deux sont icy eternelles sans fin. . . . Et ont este eternellementun, la Divinite Jesus Christus ne peut et ne peuvent pas eternellement estre separee de sonhumanite exterieure ainsy Jesus Maria est et etoit un en meme substance Jesus Maria.’’42 Mellon MS 74, fol. 16v: ‘‘Surrexit Christus, Jesus, Maria, lapis, rubeus, carbunculus,par tout une meme chose, ils ne pouvoient pas se separer et il[s] ne se separeront iamais.Ainsi de meme Jesus et Marie sont un sang, une lune, un soleil, ce qui est demontre partout dans ce livre.’’

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history within the near future.43 As a result, the author’s interests extendednot only to Christ, but also to Antichrist. Because Antichrist was in allsenses a perversion of Christ, he had to share in and subvert all of Christ’sattributes, including his hermaphroditic nature. As Jesus contained the Vir-gin Mary and the female sex within him, so Antichrist also would containhis own mother.44 A dramatic pair of illuminations represents these pairedentities—the good Jesus-Mary hermaphrodite and the evil Antichrist her-maphrodite—a melding of male and female bodies in the costumes of kingsand queens. In the image of the Antichrist hermaphrodite, a serpentinemonster extends two snakelike appendages to wrap around the legs of thehermaphrodite (Fig. 3, p. 211). One appendage ends in a male head, theother in a female head; they press their faces together near Antichrist’sgroin, suggesting the figure’s hermaphroditic genitalia. These images resem-ble the fifteenth-century illumination of Ovid’s Salmacis and Hermaphrodi-tus or the Aurora consurgens’ conjoined hermaphrodite, and they suggesta single entity that embodies contrary male and female qualities in equalproportions.

The Jesus-Mary and Antichrist hermaphrodites must be read in lightof the growing significance of mysticism in the late Middle Ages, whichdeveloped the tropes of the feminized Christ and Christ as mother. Al-though depictions of God or Jesus as mother were common in biblical scrip-ture and patristic texts, these images found new popularity in the high andlate Middle Ages, particularly in the writings of Cistercian monks and cer-tain female mystics.45 In the twelfth century, Bernard of Clairvaux, Aelredof Rievaulx, and William of St. Thierry, among others, spoke of Jesus inmaternal language. Their contemporary, the mystic Elizabeth of Schonau,referred to Christ’s humanity as a female virgin in her Visiones, an equationthat is repeated in the Book of the Holy Trinity. In the late fourteenth cen-tury, the English anchorite Julian of Norwich wrote her Revelationes, awork replete with her imaginings of the feminine characteristics of God.46

These examples point to a long tradition of assigning female gender traits

43 Obrist, 133. For the Spiritual Franciscan movement, see David Burr, The Spiritual Fran-ciscans (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001).44 Obrist, 160.45 Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘‘Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother: Some Themes inTwelfth-Century Cistercian Writing,’’ in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Sprituality of theHigh Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 110–69.46 Elisabeth of Schonau, Der Visonen der hl. Elisabeth und die Schriften der Aebte Ekbertund Emecho von Schonau, ed. F. W. E. Roth (Brunn: Verlag der Studien aus dem Benedic-tiner- und Cistercienser-Orden, 1884), 60, as cited in Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 140, n.105; Heimmel, God is Our Mother, 46–102.

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FIGURE 3. Antichrist hermaphrodite, Book of the Holy Trinity, Nurem-berg, Germanisches National Museum, MS 80061 (c. 1420), fol. 100r.

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to God; the texts, however, do not portray God as a hermaphrodite, nor dothey cite Jesus-Mary as an inseparable being in the manner of the Book.But the fourteenth-century Ovide moralise of Pierre Bersuire makes a clearconnection between the hermaphrodite of Ovid’s tale and Christ, writingthat: ‘‘for that son of Mercury [Hermaphroditus] is the son of God, bride-groom above all . . . he descended to the fountain of mercy, that is theblessed Virgin, where at once that nymph, that is, human nature, joineditself to him, and thus he adhered to himself through the blessed incarna-tion, since from two natures one being resulted.’’47 Here, the narratives ofOvid’s hermaphrodite and Christ’s incarnation are joined explicitly. Thehuman and divine natures within Christ create a hermaphroditic union fa-cilitated by the impregnated body of the Virgin Mary. Although this under-standing of Christ is not identical to that of the Book, it is clear that by thefifteenth century a number of texts were circulating that identified Jesus asa feminine or hermaphroditic figure while noting the role of the Virgin infurnishing Jesus with his humanity.

It is possible that the author or illustrator of the Book was also awareof Jewish interpretations of Genesis 1:27 (‘‘And God created man to hisown image, to the image of God he created him; male and female he createdthem’’) as indicative of a hermaphroditic adam and, by extension, a her-maphroditic creator.48 Although this reading was repeatedly denounced byChristian theologians, the need for clarification may indicate the persistenceof such an interpretation. The production of Eve from Adam’s rib may alsohave suggested the embodiment of the female within the male at the mo-ment of creation, indicating that hermaphroditism should be a part of al-chemical creation as well. Narratives that highlight the female sex as hiddenwithin a seemingly male body appear in a number of medieval saints’ lives.Hagiographical accounts of the saints Pelagia and Marina celebrate thepiety of women who concealed their actual female sex while they lived asmale monks among men.49

47 ‘‘Iste enim puer filius Mercurii est Dei filius super omnia sponsus. . . . iste in fontemmisericordie i. beatam Virginem descendit, ubi statim nimpha ista i. natura humana cumeo se coniunxit, et sic sibi per beatam incarnationem adhesit quod ex duabus naturis unapersona resultavit.’’ Pierre Bersuire, ‘‘L’Ovidius moralizatus di Pierre Bersuire,’’ ed. F.Ghisaberti, Studj romanzi (Rome: Presso La Societa, 1933), 116.48 For Jewish and early Christian interpretations of this passage, see Maryanne ClineHorowitz, ‘‘The Image of God in Man—Is Woman Included?’’ in Harvard TheologicalReview 72 (1979): 175–206; Elaine Pagels, ‘‘The Gnostic Vision: Varieties of AndrogynyIllustrated by Texts from the Nag Hammadi Library,’’ in Parabola 3/4 (1978): 6–9.49 Vern L. Bullough, ‘‘Sex Education in Medieval Christianity,’’ Journal of Sex Research13 (1977): 189–90.

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At least one saint’s life hints at the intermediate sex of its subject, in-spiring a tradition of hermaphrodite-Christ iconography. The cult of thehermaphrodite martyr Wilgefortis, the patron saint of monsters, was at itsheight in Germany during the fifteenth century, at the same time as thecomposition of the Book of the Holy Trinity.50 Illustrations and sculpturesof the saint depict him/her as a bearded woman crucified on a cross inimitatio Christi. Wilgefortis, who is nearly indistinguishable from Christ,hangs from the cross with one shoe off, one shoe on. According to DavidWilliams, an empty slipper was a common symbol for the female sex organ.He views this ‘‘one-shoe-off, one-shoe-on’’ imagery as a playful icono-graphical allusion to male and female genitalia and an indication of thesaint’s—and Christ’s—hermaphroditic nature (Fig. 4, p. 214).51 Some im-ages of the saint also include the phrase Salvator mundi (Savior of theWorld), a verbal cue that enhanced the viewer’s identification of Wilgefortiswith the hermaphrodite Christ.52 The representation of hermaphroditismby means of a lateral division in footwear moreover resembles the biformJesus-Mary hermaphrodite in the Book, who wears male clothing on oneside and female clothing on the other to denote his/her hermaphroditic sex.

Another quintessential creator according to the medieval Christianworldview, Nature, was also variously depicted as male, female, or her-maphroditic. Natura artifex, a late antique and medieval figure spanningfrom Macrobius’ fifth-century Somnium Scipionis to Alain of Lille’stwelfth-century De planctu naturae, was a feminine goddess who wieldedstereotypically masculine tools.53 In De planctu naturae, for instance, Alainof Lille describes Nature as a scholar who adopts the language and theauthority of a clerical male. Nature is both a mother and a virgin, yet Alainshows the goddess creating humans by means of a hammer and stylus, toolsthe author principally uses to designate male sexual activity. Nature is forAlain in possession of both a womb and a phallus, and thus a hermaphro-

50 On Wilgefortis, see Williams, 309–17; Ilse E. Friesen, The Female Crucifix: Images ofSt. Wilgefortis Since the Middle Ages (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001).51 Williams, 311–12.52 Ibid., 313.53 George Economou, The Goddess Natura in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1972), 19–20, 72–97; Larry Scanlon, ‘‘Unspeakable Pleasures:Alain de Lille, Sexual Regulation and the Priesthood of Genius,’’ Romanic Review 86(1995): 213–42, esp. 231–33; Mark D. Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in ChristianTheology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 70–71; Katharine Park, ‘‘Naturein Person: Medieval and Renaissance Allegories and Emblems,’’ in The Moral Authorityof Nature, ed. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2004), 54–55.

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FIGURE 4. Wilgefortis, from Baron L.A.J.W. Sloet van de Beele, De Hei-lige Ontkommer of Wilgeforthis (‘S-Gravenhagen: M. Nijhoff, 1884).

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dite of sorts.54 A manuscript illustration of Nature from the De planctunaturae furthermore shows Nature standing at a podium dressed in clericalgarb, perhaps lecturing or preaching; a related image of Nature fromAlain’s Anticlaudianus shows her fashioning a man with an axe.55 Becausealchemy was often described as an imitation of nature, it is possible thatalchemical authors and illustrators drew from textual and visual portraitsof Nature’s hermaphroditism to imagine alchemy as a similarly hermaphro-ditic agent of creation.

For alchemists pondering the philosophers’ stone, the metaphor of thehermaphrodite was an attractive solution. Ovid’s stories of metamorphosismirrored the alchemists’ goal in metal transmutation—the change of onething into another—and the hybrid nature of the hermaphrodite provideda useful model for the hybrid philosophers’ stone. The metamorphosis oftwo individuals into a single creature of biform sex was particularly usefulto characterize the sexed elemental qualities with which alchemists believedthey worked, as well as the biform quality of the alchemical product. Thehermaphrodite also satisfied the need to solve the linguistic puzzle of the‘‘rebis,’’ or ‘‘two thing.’’ Moreover, the image fit readily within the conven-tional vocabulary of sexual reproduction used in scholastic natural philoso-phy and medicine.

But Ovid’s tale was not the only model of hermaphroditism availableto alchemical authors. Traditional stories of creation, whether by God orby Nature, played upon the masculine and feminine aspects of the creator.These examples were likely inspirations for alchemical authors, who em-phasized the masculine and feminine qualities of the alchemical agent inorder to establish it as a creator in its own right. Furthermore, since manyalchemists drew a parallel between the philosophers’ stone and Jesus, thelongstanding tradition of imagining Jesus as both masculine and feminineseems to have been influential. The goal of alchemical writing was to ex-plain and defend the process of metal generation, particularly the genera-tion of gold and silver. How better to explain generation than by means ofa generator that was male and female, active and passive? The rationalebehind the philosophers’ stone was more persuasive when one imagined thesubstance as both mother and father, and thus capable of creating newforms through itself. When alchemists portrayed their art as creative, they

54 Jordan, 70–71.55 Mechtild Modersohn, Natura als Gottin im Mittelalter: Ikonographische Studien zuDarstellungen der personifizierten Natur (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997), 35–44 andfigs. 10 and 15a.

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did so by using the models of creation at their disposal: the medical lan-guage of sexual generation, the biblical language of genesis, and the literarylanguage of metamorphosis.

CONCLUSION

The metaphor of the hermaphrodite in premodern alchemical texts pro-vides historians with an opportunity to think about the fluidity of bound-aries between metals, as well as that between other sorts of bodies. Alchemywas perhaps in a unique position to capitalize upon the bothness and nei-therness of the hermaphrodite. For alchemists, the mixture of sulphur andmercury produced a hybrid of its male and female components; this productwas also a new and third substance that was neither male nor female. Al-chemy held that change was possible, both in the creation of the hybridphilosophers’ stone from its contrary parts, and in its transformation ofmetals during transmutation. The analogy of the hermaphrodite tappedinto the fertility of Ovid’s story of metamorphosis, invoking the playfulnessand instability of its reality. Ovid’s hermaphrodite, like the philosophers’stone, was not a complete transformation, but rather the creation of a thirdthing that held aspects of the previous two in tension. A hermaphrodite wasthus a dramatic, and sometimes unsettling, union of opposites—whethermale and female, heavenly and earthly, or natural and artificial. Alchemy’sadvocates followed this argument to its logical conclusion: Christ—the ulti-mate union of male and female, human and divine—must also be in somesense hermaphroditic.

I have argued that authors and illustrators solved the problem of the‘‘two thing’’ and imagined the alchemical hermaphrodite by relying uponearlier models of hermaphroditism in medical, theological, and mythologi-cal literature. But how closely did the alchemical hermaphrodite really cor-respond to the models that inspired it? The philosophers’ stone was notreally an intermediate point on a continuum of sex difference, as the Hippo-cratic/Galenic medical model held, nor could it really be the result of exces-sive generative matter, as the Aristotelian natural philosophical modelargued (and no matter what illustrations from the Aurora and the Bookmight have suggested). Similarly, the alchemical hermaphrodite did not fol-low the narrative of Ovid’s hermaphrodite precisely. The substance was not‘‘enfeebled’’ as a result of the change, as Hermaphroditus lamented in theMetamorphoses, and alchemical authors tended to emphasize the bothness

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rather than the more disturbing neitherness of hybridity.56 Yet the alchemi-cal hermaphrodite shared a significant element of Ovid’s tale: it forced con-traries together, highlighting their inherent differences. This process isevident in the Book of the Holy Trinity, in which the Jesus-Mary hermaph-rodite is a unity of integral and unmixed figures. Although Jesus and Marycomprise one substance that cannot be separated, the two characters retaintheir distinct identities and qualities. This achievement of neitherness andbothness was outside the ordinary course of nature, and it was the agent ofwondrous transformative possibilities, such as the salvation of humankindand, on a lesser scale, metal transmutation.

It is worth noting that the alchemical hermaphrodite stands in starkcontrast to the ambiguous position of intersex people in premodern society.Unlike the deformed monster of De secretis mulierum or the suspect figureof De vitio sodomitico, the Jesus-Mary hermaphrodite of the Book of theHoly Trinity is presented as an ideal. The hermaphroditic philosophers’stone and the hermaphroditic Jesus transmuted metals and redeemed hu-mans by means of their special and paradoxical both-neither natures. Sowhy was it permissible for both-neither hermaphrodites to exist in alchemy,but not in society? The hermaphrodite in alchemy was of course a purelyintellectual conceit. There was no danger of alchemical hermaphroditescommitting sodomitical acts or creating confusion about their genders insocial or juridical contexts. Nevertheless, there was something transgressiveabout them. The fluidity of sexes in the alchemical hermaphrodite hinted atthe fluidity of boundaries between metals, which alchemy argued could bechanged through the art of the alchemist. Whether the boundaries in ques-tion divided the sexes or the categories of humanity and divinity, the her-maphrodite of alchemical literature indicated that such boundaries werecrossable. In later centuries, the image of the alchemical hermaphroditeprovided an opportunity to question contemporary gender roles and sexu-ality, as scholars such as Kathleen P. Long have shown.57 Furthermore, thecrossing of boundaries in alchemical literature was linked to not disorderor confusion, but the creation of something precious. The hermaphroditewas a necessary agent in the transmutation of gold and silver; it was ameans to understand the God-man that was Jesus, the agent of human sal-vation.

The alchemical hermaphrodite may at first appear to be an obscurefigure, part of a literary genre known for its esotericism, if for nothing else.

56 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 4.380–81.57 Long, 237–43.

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Yet the alchemical hermaphrodite interrogated the stability of some of themost inviolable boundaries in the premodern world, and it offered a dis-course of fluidity that was not prominent in other sorts of naturalist texts.Although historians have often looked to natural philosophical and medicaldocuments for information about premodern categories of sex (and otherkinds of) difference, alchemical texts still constitute unexplored territory.Perhaps alchemical writings can tell us something important and unex-pected about the ways in which premodern naturalists imagined their worldand its ability to confound categorization. Although alchemy was never auniversity discipline, its proponents and audience were among the elitesmost likely to discuss and construct the boundaries of the natural world.Manuals of alchemy and ‘‘books of secrets’’ that included alchemical con-cepts were popular among literate audiences, and such texts became evenmore widely available with the advent of the printing press.58 Despite prohi-bitions against the art, alchemical research was long supported by royaland papal courts, and many of its known practitioners were physicians,university masters, and even prelates.59 The alchemical texts discussed inthis article may therefore serve as valuable insights into the presuppositionsof such thinkers about social, natural philosophical, and theological norms.Because alchemy existed alongside sanctioned academic disciplines, bor-rowing from them and informing them, it provided an alternative view ofthe natural and social world that had enormous—yet generally unacknowl-edged—influence. I hope that a closer look at the image of the alchemicalhermaphrodite will help us to think about the use of language and symbolin European naturalist texts, as well as what we cannot otherwise knowabout authors’ and readers’ understanding of difference, of change, and ofthe most central tenets of their society and religion.

Texas A & M University.

58 William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval andEarly Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).59 See, for instance, Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, The Pope’s Body, trans. David S. Pe-terson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 204–11; Pamela H. Smith, The Busi-ness of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1994).

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