The Jesus Hermaphrodite: Science and Sex Difference in Premodern Europe

Leah DeVun
Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 69, Number 2, April 2008, pp. 193-218 (Article)
Published by University of Pennsylvania Press DOI: 10.1353/jhi.2008.0013

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The Jesus Hermaphrodite: Science and Sex Difference in Premodern Europe

Leah DeVun

In Book IV of Ovids Metamorphoses, a lovestruck water nymph named Salmacis attempts to seduce Hermaphroditus, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, at the edge of her fountain.1 Despite the youths apparent lack of interest, Salmacis follows him into the water, forcibly kissing and fondling him. 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 for Humanities Research, the Huntington Library, and the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute for their generous support for this project. I would also like to thank Caroline Walker Bynum, Mary Doyno, Anna Harrison, Kathleen P. Long, Cary J. Nederman, Elissa Popoff, and Anna Trumbore Jones for their assistance during the preparation of this article. Thanks especially to the staff of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France and, in particular, Christoph Eggenberger of the Zen` tralbibliothek in Zurich. 2 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1971), 4.37579: velut, si quis conducat cortice ramos, / crescendo iungi pariterque adolescere cernit, / sic ubi conplexu coierunt membra

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

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Ovids tale was well known in the Middle Ages, as revealed by the large number of manuscript copies of the Metamorphoses and by the many glosses and notes on the work that circulated after the late eleventh century. Late medieval vernacular poets, including Dante, Chaucer, Chretien de Troyes, Guillaume de Lorris, Jean de Meun, Christine de Pizan, and Boccaccio, among others, all made extensive use of Ovidian material in their writings. The myth of the hermaphrodite, in particular, found a number of admirers and interpreters.3 Among the readers most fascinated with tales of transformation were alchemists, naturalists who explored the properties and composition of matter, as well as the possibility of manufacturing precious metals through human technology. Alchemists struggled to explain the material changes they believed metals underwent during the process of transmutation. Although alchemical writers offered a number of analogies, including plantgrafting and spontaneous generation, to characterize transmutation, such explanations were limited in their power to discuss alchemical change in terms of the sexed elemental qualities with which alchemists believed they worked.4 But such change was at the heart of Ovids metamorphoses, and the hermaphrodite story provided a particularly apt model for alchemists: it described a fusion of male and female sexed parts into a biform body that was, as Ovid claimed, both and neither. It should come as no surprise that alchemists seized upon the image of the hermaphrodite to describe the philosophers stone, the chemical agent they thought transmuted base metals into silver and gold. According to alchemists, their work combined male and female elemental qualities into a compound substance of both sexesa hermaphroditethat was capable of transmutation. This body (since chemicals and metals were often called bodies in alchemy) was both, but also neither, because the alchemical process held contrarieties in stasis, creating a 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, neutrumque et utrumque videntur. 3 Lauren Silberman, Mythographic Transformations of Ovids Hermaphrodite, Sixteenth Century Journal 19 (1988): 64352; Marilynn R. Desmond, Introduction, and Frank T. Coulson, The Vulgate Commentary on Ovids Metamorphoses, both in Mediaevalia: A Journal of Medieval Studies 13 (1987): Ovid in Medieval Culture: A Special Issue, 18, 2961; Marilynn Desmond and Pamela Sheingorn, Myth, Montage, and Visuality in Late Medieval Manuscript Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 14851. 4 William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 6465.

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birth; the alchemical hermaphrodite was merely a metaphor used to represent a chemical substance. Alchemy borrowed ideas and vocabulary freely from medical and religious conversations, using familiar stories and images to explain sophisticated states of chemical change by analogy. As a result, alchemical texts are rife with medical images of human reproduction, religious images of death and resurrection, and even hermaphrodites. Because the alchemical hermaphrodite was a symbol and not a person capable of illicit behaviors, it carried with it few of the negative connotations associated with intersex humans, who were classied as monsters in moral and medical texts, and who were treated with equal parts curiosity and disapprobation. But the alchemical hermaphrodite depended upon understandings of intersex people in medieval society, and it therefore shared in some of the transgressive elements of intersex, as I shall argue below. Even so, the composite nature of the hermaphrodite was elevated to an ideal in alchemical literature, leading authors to a startling conclusion. Alchemical texts played upon the metaphorical parallelism of the philosophers stone and Jesus Christ to claim Christ him/herself as a hermaphrodite, the perfect combination of contrariesmasculine and feminine, human and divinein one body. Many historical studies of hermaphrodites have been published in recent years, chiey because historians view societal attitudes towards intersex 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 arguments that current understandings of sex and sexuality are neither natural nor inevitable.5 Building upon these studies, a number of new scholarly works have delved into medical, legal, and literary sources to explore the meanings of intersex in premodern and modern society.6 But hermaphrodites in al5 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 3 vols. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978 1986); John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender 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 the Hermaphrodite in Twelfth-Century Europe, Journal of the History of Sexuality 6 (1996): 497517; Miri Rubin, The Person in the Form: Medieval Challenges to Bodily Order, in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 100122; Ruth Gilbert, Early Modern Hermaphrodites: Sex and Other Stories (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Alice Domurat Dreger, Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Julia Epstein, Either/OrNeither/Both: Sexual Ambiguity and the Ideology of Gender, Genders 7 (1990): 99142; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion

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chemical literature have so far attracted little analytic attention.7 In the midtwentieth century, scholars such as C.G. Jung and Mircea Eliade made important contributions to the study of this subject, but they tended to view such images either as evidence of an unchanging psychological collective unconscious or as part of a cross-cultural mythological system.8 Yet historians have more to learn from the specic cultural context of the alchemical hermaphrodite in premodern Europe; moreover, the alchemical hermaphrodite can tell us something we may not be able to learn from other texts about the meanings of sex, difference, and change in alchemy and beyond.

HERMAPHRODITES IN MEDIEVAL MEDICINE AND SOCIETY Hermaphrodites appear with regularity within discussions of sexual generation and sex difference in medieval medical texts. As Joan Cadden has shown, the premodern medical world inherited two distinct and often contradictory theories of generation, the Hippocratic/Galenic model and the Aristotelian model, which led to divergent understandings of hermaphroditism.9 According to the older tradition, originated by the writers of the Greek Hippocratic corpus and popularized in the Middle Ages by the Pseudo-Galenic tract De spermate, hermaphrodites were neither male nor female, but an intermediary sex that combined male and female characteristics in equilibrium. During the normal process of conception and gestation, a number of factorssuch as the childs position in the womb, or the relative strength of the mother and fathers spermdetermined the sex of an offspring, which might be male, female, or hermaphroditic.10 The competing Aristotelian model, which derived chiey from Aristotles De generatiof Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Katharine Park and Lorraine J. Daston, The Hermaphrodite and the Orders of Nature: Sexual Ambiguity in Early Modern France, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 1 (1995): 41938. 7 The exception is Kathleen P. Longs Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 10962. 8 C.G. Jung, Jung on Alchemy, ed. by Nathan Schwartz-Salant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 126, 21113; Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible, trans. Stephen Corrin (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962), 5862, 138, 161; The Two and the One, trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Harvill Press, 1965), 1023. 9 Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, trans. Matthew Adamsom (Oxford: Polity Press, 1988). 10 Cadden, Meanings, 198202.

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one animalium and became widespread in the thirteenth century, argued that hermaphrodites were not so much an intermediate sex as the product of doubled or superuous genitalia. A hermaphrodite occurred when matter contributed by the mother (in the form of menstrual blood) exceeded the amount needed to produce one fetus, but was not enough for two. The extra matter could form either conjoined twins or a single fetus with extra appendages, including a second set of genitals. Aristotle held, however, that the sex of a hermaphrodite was only supercially ambiguous: the true sex was determined by the complexion of the body (that is, the combination of heat, cold, dryness, and moisture within it), which always indicated either male (hot and dry) or female (cold and wet) sex. Medical discussions of hermaphrodites often gure in chapters devoted to monsters (usually meaning humans with birth defects), which authors attempted to explain according to the various theories of generation.11 A thirteenth-century medical tract, De secretis mulierum (attributed to Albert the Great, but likely written by one of his followers) places its analysis of hermaphrodites within a customary discussion of monstrous births. The author notes that while a hermaphrodite participates in both male and female natures, he should always be called male simply because the male is the worthier sex.12 While the author views hermaphrodites as a combination of masculine and feminine qualities, he nevertheless determines the hermaphrodites sex according to the value of men and women within a binary gender system. Other authors discuss hermaphroditism in the context of not only monsters, but also sodomy or other forms of sexual deviance, or they attempt to x the true sex of a hermaphrodite in terms of sexual activity and passivity. In his Summa de confessione, written about 1216, Peter of Poitiers cites hermaphrodites as a part of his polemic against masturbation, which Peter claims is more monstrous than sodomy, since the person practicing it is both active and passive, and thus as if man and woman, and as if a hermaphrodite.13 A similar association between herOn monsters, see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 11501750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998); David Williams, Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1996). 12 Pseudo-Albertus Magnus, Womens Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnuss De Secretis Mulierum With Commentaries, ed. Helen Rodnite Lemay (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 116. 13 In hoc quidem distans ab illo quod in hoc corrumpitur una sola persona, et in illo duae, sed in eo monstruosius est quam illud, quia hic eadem persona t agens et patiens, et ita quasi uir et mulier, et quasi hermaphroditus. Peter of Poitiers, Summa de Confessione: Compilatio praesens, ed. Jean Longere, in Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medi` aevalis, vol. 51 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1980), 1819.
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maphroditism and sodomy appears in Peter the Chanters twelfth-century De vitio sodomitico, which warns that the hermaphrodite should be permitted to use only the sexual organ by which s/he is more aroused, or the one to 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, but never as both. These medieval texts emphasize the problematic nature of individuals who do not t easily into binary sex categories. Despite the continuum of sex difference proposed by the Hippocratic/Galenic model, Pseudo-Albert, Peter of Poitiers, and Peter the Chanter limited the transgressive potential of a hermaphrodite by establishing him/her rmly within either one of two gendershe/she cannot be neither or both in social contexts.15 As noted, hermaphroditism was also readily associated with sexual practices considered deviant or undesirable, such as masturbation or sodomy. And because monstrous births were often thought to result from some secret sexual sin of the parents, hermaphrodites may have been doubly connected to sexual vice.16 These examples suggest that hermaphrodites were a source of confusion and even suspicion to their contemporaries, necessitating their division into binary gender categories of male and female, and conveying the extent to which neitherness and bothness had the potential to threaten social and natural norms.

SEXUAL LANGUAGE IN ALCHEMY Hermaphrodites had much more positive connotations in alchemy, which placed them within a larger discussion of the parallels between metal transmutation and sexual reproduction. Since metals had no obvious means to reproduce themselves, alchemists relied upon the metaphor of sexual reproduction to explain their generation, as well as to theorize the philosophers stone, the substance thought to transmute metals by hastening the natural processes of metal formation that normally occurred in the earth.17 The
Non erit consortium viri ad virum, vel mulieris ad mulierem, sed tantum viri ad mulierem, et econtrario. Unde Ecclesia homini androgyno, id est habenti instrumentum utriusque sexus, aptum scilicet ad agendum et patiendum, instrumento, quo magis calescit, quove magis est inrmus, permittit uti. Peter the Chanter, De vitio sodomitico, ch. 138 of Verbum abbreviatum, Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne (184492), 205: 334. 15 Nederman and True, 51517. 16 De secretis mulierum, 11416; Williams, 175. 17 For theories of transmutation, see Newman, Promethean Ambitions, esp. 34114.
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Tabula smaragdina, one of the foundational works of alchemy, stated that the 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 thought to be the building blocks of metals in the Arab alchemical tradition), which they identied as components of an alchemical reproductive process. For instance, in his Epistola boni viri, John Dastin quotes from the Tabula smaragdina, 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 and moon, heat and cold, sulphur and mercury.19 That is, the philosophers stone is produced in a manner parallel to sexual reproduction among humans, with hot sulphur taking on the sexual role of the male, and cold mercury, the female. The Tabula smaragdina was not the only alchemical text that required decoding. During the thirteenth century, European alchemists encountered Latin translations of Arabic writings, some of which included discussion of an unidentied alchemical base material, the rebis.20 Latin alchemists such as Constantine of Pisa and Richardus Anglicus attempted to decipher the word, apparently a transliteration of a still-unknown Arabic term. Richardus interpreted rebis as an abbreviation for res bina, or two thing, which he identied with the philosophers stone, and which many subsequent alchemists understood as a hermaphrodite.21 This attempt to solve the linguistic puzzle of the rebis was no isolated incident. Alchemists spent much of their time struggling to identify the meaning of cryptic alchemical language and imagery in order to prove their worthiness among the 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
Pater ejus est Sol, mater ejus Luna. Julius Ruska, Tabula Smaragdina: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der hermetischen Literatur (Heidelberg: Winter, 1926), 2. 19 Non ergo perturbent te haec verba vel alia consilia, quia lapis nihil aliud est quam masculus et femina, sol et luna, calor et frigus, sulphur et mercurium [sic]. From John Dastin, Epistola boni viri, ed. and trans. Wilfred R. Theissen in John Dastins Letter on the Philosophers Stone, Ambix 33 (1986): 81. 20 Andree Colinet, Le livre dHermes intitule Liber dabessi ou Liber rebis, Studi ` medievali 36 (1995): 101152. 21 See, for example, Constantine of Pisa, The Book of the Secrets of Alchemy, ed. Barbara Obrist (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 111, 212, n. 372; Richardus Anglicus, Correctorium alchemiae, in Alchemiae quam vocant artisque metallicae . . . (Basel: Petrum Pernam, 1572), 55355. 22 Robert Halleux, Les textes alchimiques, Typologie des sources du moyen age occidental 32 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1979), 11319.
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rebis by imagining a hermaphrodite. Even authors who did not explicitly use the word rebis began to describe the alchemical agent as a hermaphroditic substance. Scholastic thinkers Albert the Great (ca. 11931280) and Petrus Bonus of Ferrara (. ca. 1330) used sexual and reproductive analogies in their work, and they exemplify the early development of the idea of hermaphroditism in mineralogy and alchemy. Although Albert the Greats De mineralibus was not strictly an alchemical work, Albert drew from alchemical sources in order to supplement the Aristotelian natural philosophical corpus, which lacked an extensive analysis of minerals. Albert explained the formation of stones and metals by means of prolonged comparisons to sexual reproduction, which he rendered in language drawn from Aristotles De generatione animalium. Moreover, he described sulphur (which he believed was simultaneously hot, cold, wet, and dry) as a hermaphroditic, plantlike substance.23 For Albert, a substance that contained all four qualities was in some 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 qualities within a substance was formative. Petrus Bonus of Ferrara seems to have been among the rst to connect hermaphroditism explicitly to the alchemical agent of transmutation, a substance that transformed metals into gold and silver upon contact. Unlike Alberts De mineralibus, Petrus Pretiosa margarita novella was wholly concerned with alchemy and particularly with the philosophers stone.24 Petrus described the philosophers stone as a combination of sulphur and mercury, which he explained in terms of sexual reproduction: [They] call the milk that is coagulated the female, and the male that which coagulates, since activity is attributed to the male, and passivity to the female. For when this stone arises, since it is itself liquid and owing and passive, it is called female. Its coagulum, that which coagulates it, when it is solid, rm, permanent, and active in it, is called male. The combination of these is called the compound stone, perfect and composite, and in the mixing they
Albertus Magnus, De mineralibus, ed. and trans. Dorothy Wyckoff (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 205 (IV, 1). 24 On Petrus Bonus, see Chiara Crisciani, The Conception of Alchemy as Expressed in the Pretiosa Margarita Novella of Petrus Bonus of Ferrara, Ambix 20 (1973): 16581.
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become altogether one . . . Therefore the male and female are joined, and become one.25 The aftermath of this conjunction did not follow the same trajectory as human reproduction. According to both Galenic and Aristotelian models of conception, nearly all human pregnancies would result in an unambiguously male or female child; a hermaphroditic child would be born only in a rare case. At the end of a successful alchemical gestation, in contrast, a hermaphrodite is always the result. Petrus notes that when the process is complete, the philosophers stone embodies both male and female complexionary qualities: And it must be known that the male and the female are the same and in the same substance, and they have diverse powers in such unity of subject . . . [s]uch a union is able to be called Hermaphrodita: since plants and seeds impregnate wherever, and are also impregnated, and this denotes that activity and passivity in the same subject are mixed together into a certain unity. When, therefore, 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 consequently to transmute metals. For Petrus, the alchemical hermaphrodite is a unity of contrary qualities. Although he may not have had Ovids story in mind, Petrus alchemical stone bears a strong resemblance to the mythological Hermaphroditus, who underwent a similar process to become a fusion of the sexes. Petrus alchemical stone is a new chemical compound (neither the female nor male that existed before), yet he prefers to discuss it in terms
[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 uens et patiens dicitur foemina: suum autem coagulum, a quo cogulatur cum sit solidum, rmum, permanens et agens in illud, dicitur masculus: compositum autem ex iis, dicitur lapis commixtus, perfectus et compositus, et unt in commixtione unum omnino. . . . Masculus ergo et foemina conjunguntur, et unum unt, et cetera. Petrus Bonus of Ferrara, Pretiosa margarita novella, in Bibliotheca chemica curiosa, 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 sunt habentes virtutes diversas in tali subjecti unitate. . . . talis copulatio potest dici Hermophrodita: quia plantae et semina ubicunque impraegnant, impraegnantur etiam, et hoc denotat 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 the Ovidian story, the alchemical hermaphrodite is not merely a midpoint between opposites, but a body that holds contraries in stasis and conversation. While Petrus comments suggest that he imagined the stone in terms of a hermaphroditic plant or egg, he also referred to the constituent parts of the substance as woman, king, or wife, adding an anthropomorphic dimension to his analogy.27 The metaphor of biological reproduction was not the only image that Petrus used to characterize the philosophers stone. He noted that the stone had a comprehensive nature that allowed it to be likened to multiple pairs of opposites, including the corporeal and incorporeal . . . corruptible and incorruptible, visible and invisible, to spirit, soul, and body, and their union and separation, among other concepts.28 For Petrus, the stone was both nature and divinity, corruptibility and incorruptibility, and by extension, it was parallel to Christ. According to the scholar Chiara Crisciani, Petrus claimed that the stone bore all the chief aspects of Christ and his life: it was a union of divine and natural elements, the product of a miraculous birth, and subject to death and resurrection.29 Other alchemical treatises of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries drew similar parallels between Christ and the alchemical stone. In De lapide philosophorum, the author organized his description of the alchemical operation with respect to the life of Christ, ending the work with a symbolic death and resurrection.30 The fourteenth-century alchemist John of Rupescissa explained the crucixion of the philosophers stone in his Liber lucis; after the death of the stone, it was to be entombed in the alchemists equipment just like Christ inside the sepulcher.31 Analogies between the philosophers stone and Christ
Ibid., II: 51. For instance: Veneramini regem et uxorem suam, et nolite eos comburere, et cetera. Et Theophilus:Philosophi tamen mulieres suos conjuges intercientes, neci dederunt, illius enim mulieris venter armis plenus est et veneno, et cetera. 28 Tam corporeis quam incorporeis . . . et de corruptibilibus et incorruptibilibus, et visibilibus 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 University Press, 1966). 29 Crisciani, The Conception of Alchemy, 17173. 30 Antoine Calvet, Alchimie et joachimisme dans les alchimica pseudo-arnaldiens, in Alchimie et philosophie a la Renaissance, ed. Jean-Claude Margolin and Sylvain Matton ` (Paris: J.Vrin, 1993), 99100. 31 John of Rupescissa, Liber lucis, 24v: Sic extrahe ipsum de vase predicto quod vocatur ovum Philosophorum, et Magister Arnaldus dicit quod Lapis est clausus in eo sicut Christus in sepulcro. A fascimile of the manuscript has been reproduced in Il libro della luce, 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 divinity, of corporeality and incorporeality, of opposites united in one subject. The works of Albert the Great and Petrus Bonus reveal early stages in the development of the alchemical hermaphrodite. Both Albert and Petrus appear to have drawn from notions of the hermaphrodite as a fusion of male and female attributes, rather than from the understanding of the hermaphrodite as a result of doubling or superuity. In addition, the alchemical hermaphrodite was not a midpoint between opposites; instead, it was a unity of pre-existing and contrary parts that remained distinct. Petrus text also reveals the multiplicity of analogies used to characterize the philosophers stone: the stone was Christ, the stone was a king, and the stone was a hermaphrodite. These analogies were carried further in the works of other alchemical authors, who combined metaphors in new ways, exploring the interplay of balance and doubling in the image of the hermaphrodite and borrowing from a longstanding tradition of viewing Jesus as both male and female.

THE JESUS HERMAPHRODITE By the turn of the fourteenth century, Latin alchemy was in the process of changing from a self-consciously scholastic discipline, wedded to the language of Aristotelian natural philosophy, to a eld of study that was increasingly religious in its sentiments and vocabulary. The image of the hermaphrodite became crucial to these new writings, as can be seen from the text and manuscript illuminations of the undated Aurora consurgens and the early fteenth-century Book of the Holy Trinity. While Albert the Great and Petrus Bonus tended to view the philosophers stone as a hermaphroditic plant or egg, these texts clearly represented the philosophers stone as a hermaphroditic human. While the precise date of the Aurora consurgens composition remains uncertain, the earliest exemplar of the Aurora consurgens is a lushly illustrated manuscript produced in the 1420s and now housed at the Zentralbibliothek of Zurich (Codex Rhenoviensis 172).32 The text of this
On this text, see Barbara Obrist, Les debuts de limagerie alchimique, XIVe-XVe siecles ` (Paris: Sycomore, 1982), 183245; Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 23540.
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anonymous treatise exemplies the trend of religious language in alchemy, as well as the symbolic use of the alchemical hermaphrodite. The work draws from an array of Arab and Latin alchemical authors, as well as from sapiential theology of the biblical books of wisdom, to create a tapestry of biblical quotations and poetic imagery more akin to a mystical tract than a practical manual of alchemy. It opens with a paean to the female gure of Sapientia, or Wisdom, who is a gift and sacrament of God and a divine thing, which most of all and in many ways has been hidden in gurative speech by the wise.33 In the second section, Sapientia herself speaks in seven parables that ostensibly reveal the secrets of alchemy but are delivered in highly metaphorical prose. The personied wisdom of biblical scripture, which patristic and medieval authors identied variously with the female Virgin Mary or the male Christ, is equated here with personied alchemythe lapis, or stone.34 The voice of alchemy in the Aurora consurgens is thus chiey female, but also sometimes male. In one passage, the feminine Sapientia describes herself in distinctly masculine terms: [To the one for] whose love I languish, in whose ardor I melt, in whose fragrance I live, by whose taste I regain my health, by whose milk I am nourished, in whose embrace I grow young, in whose kiss I receive the breath of life, in sleeping with whom my whole body is emptied of life, I will yet be as a father to him and he will be to me as a son.35 Sapientia here shows her/himself to be youthful and aged, revivied and drained, and united with a male who is both sexual partner and son (and who may be either the aspiring alchemist or the chemical sulphur, the male component of the alchemical stone). Alchemy is described by a seEst namque donum et sacramentum Dei atque res divina, quae maxime et diversimode a sapientum sermonibus typicis est occultata. Aurora consurgens, ed. Marie-Louise Von Franz, trans. R. F. C. Hull and A. S. B. Glover (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1966), 42. 34 On personied Wisdom, see Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegards Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 4288. For patristic and medieval understandings of Wisdom as feminine, see Jennifer Heimmel, God is Our Mother: Julian of Norwich and the Medieval Image of Christian Feminine Divinity (Salzburg: Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universitat Salzburg, 1982), 2124. 35 Cuius amore langueo, ardore liquesco, odore vivo, sapore convalesco, cuius lacte nutrimentum suscipio, amplexu iuvenesco, osculo spiraculum vitae recipio, cuius condormitione totum corpus meum exinanitur, illi vero ero in patrem et ipse mihi in lium(emphasis is mine). Aurora consurgens, 58.
33

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ries of opposing images, much like the multiple pairs of opposites cited by Petrus Bonus in the Pretiosa margarita novella. More important, the usually feminine protagonist in the Aurora consurgens is transformed into a father, suggesting that Sapientiaand the alchemical stonehave both masculine and feminine aspects. A series of unusual illustrations accompany the text of the Aurora consurgens and explore the theme of the alchemical hermaphrodite in new ways. While similar illuminations appear in at least seven manuscripts of the Aurora consurgens, the earliest extant copythe Zentralbibliothek manuscriptis perhaps the most interesting.36 One particularly evocative painting from this manuscript envisions the alchemical stone as a hermaphroditic 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 biform person with two heads, two pairs of arms, two chests, and two sets of genitalia. The image draws upon the understanding of the stone as a combination of sulphur (represented by its male half) and mercury (represented by 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 and moist) qualities, but its doubled heads and genitalia also invoke the Aristotelian notion of the hermaphrodite as a superuity of bodily matter. The shape of the body recalls similar images of conjoined twins, another monster thought to be caused by excessive matter at the time of conception. The alchemical hermaphrodite, as the illustrator imagined it, was both an equilibrium of unlike qualities and a redundant melding of extra limbs and organs. This image bears a striking resemblance to a fteenth-century manuscript illumination of Ovids Metamorphoses (Fig. 2, p. 207), which depicts the Ovidian hermaphrodite as conjoined bodies split at the waist. The similarities between the two images point to the debt of the alchemical imagination to Ovids tale. In both illustrations, the male and female bodies are fused into a new shape that still retains the distinct characteristics of its partsthe neither and the both. In the Aurora consurgens, the animals clasped in the hands of the hermaphrodite add yet another level of meaning. The rabbit, which symbolizes alchemical xity, hints at the hypersexuality of rabbits: both male and female rabbits were thought to give birth, and they were sometimes considered to be hermaphroditic.37 The bat, symbolizing alchemical volatility, likewise invokes the hermaphroditism or split
36 37

Obrist, 18889. See, for instance, Boswell, 14143, 3037.

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FIGURE 1. Alchemical hermaphrodite, Aurora consurgens, Zurich, Zen

tralbibliothek, MS Rhenoviensis 172 (early fteenth century), inside frontispiece.

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FIGURE 2. Hermaphrodite, Ovid, Metamorphoses, in Paris, Biblio-

theque Nationale, MS Fr. 137 (fteenth century), fol. 49. `

nature of bats in the medieval bestiary tradition.38 These iconographical references invoke the two contradictory aspects of the alchemical hermaphrodite: its doubled sex, encompassing both male and female, and its lack of dened 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: Pontical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980), 94.

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Aurora consurgens to a similar program of miniatures attached to the anonymous Book of the Holy Trinity, also from the early fteenth century and from the same southern German area of production.39 Although we cannot identify the author, we know that he visited the Council of Constance in order to promote his work before the Emperor Sigismund, and that he attracted the interest of other nobles, including the emperors brother, Wenceslas of Prague, and the margrave Friedrich of Brandenberg, who subsequently became his patron. Perhaps due to the enthusiasm of aristocrats for the alchemical manufacture of gold, the Book enjoyed enough success to survive in at least twenty manuscripts, many of which are vividly illustrated. The Books illuminations resemble those of the Aurora consurgens inasmuch as they also depict the alchemical stone as a biform, hermaphroditic human, but they further explore medieval understandings of Christ as male and female to develop a new pair of images: the JesusMary hermaphrodite and the Antichrist hermaphrodite. Central to the Book of the Holy Trinity is the authors claim that Christ contains within him his mother, the Virgin Mary, who comprises his feminine principle, as well as the principle of his humanity. The author states that one can never see the mother of God without also seeing that God eternally hides and intermingles [his mother] within him. God was and is eternally his own mother and his own father, human and divine, his divinity and his humanity intermingled within. And he depends on that which he wishes to be hidden most of all within himself, the divine and the human, the feminine and the masculine.40 The author further emphasizes the inseparable nature of Christ and Mary: The humanity of bright Mary was the interior and exterior humanity of God Jesus Christ all made together; he had not and has no other humanity. The two are thus eternal without end . . . And they have been eternally one, the Divinity Jesus Christ, which canOn this work, see Obrist, 11782; Denis Duveen, Le Livre de la tres sainte trinite, ` Ambix 3 (1948): 2632; Herwig Buntz, Das Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit: Sein Autor und seine Uberlieferung, Zeitschrift fur deutsches Altertum und deutsche Litteratur 101 (1972): 15060; W. Ganzenmuller, Das Buch der heiligen Dreigfaltigkeit: Eine deutsche Alchemie aus dem Anfang des 15. Jahrhunderts, Archiv fur Kulturgeschichte 29 (1939): 93146. 40 Anonymous, Livre de la tres sainte trinite, Beinecke Library, Yale University, Mellon ` MS 74, fol. 25r-v: On ne peut iamais voir la mere de Dieu sans voir aussy eternellement Dieu ainsy cache et mesle ensemble, Dieu etoit et est eternellement sa propre mere et son propre pere humain divin sous sa divinite et sous son humanite ensemble et il depend de luy lequel il veut etre le plus cache en soy le divin ou lhumain, le feminin ou masculin.
39

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not and could not be separated eternally from his exterior humanity, thus Jesus-Mary is and was one being in the same substance.41 According to this view, Christ is the ultimate hermaphrodite, a unity of contrary partsthe human and the divine, the male and the female much as Petrus Bonus described the philosophers stone as multiple pairs of incongruous qualities. The author of the Book also explicitly equates the hermaphrodite Christ with the hermaphrodite stone, writing: [There] rose Christ, Jesus-Mary, the red stone, the carbuncle, throughout all the same thing. They could not be separated, and they will never be separated. And in the same way, Jesus and Mary are one blood, one moon, one sun.42 The author relies here upon the traditional understanding of the philosophers stone as male and female, sulphur and mercury, and, invoking the astronomical imagery of the Tabula smaragdina, sun and moon. The red stone that transmutes metals into gold is also synonymous with the fusion of Jesus and Mary, whose union epitomizes the yoking of contraries that characterized the hermaphrodite in alchemical thought. The author of the Book appears to have borrowed and conated earlier images of the philosophers stone as Christ with understandings of the stone as hermaphroditic, arriving at a vision of the hermaphroditic Christ-stone. As in Petrus Bonus text, the narrative of the stones life and Christs life become one: both are nature and supernature, male and female, human and divinethe poles of the spectrum tethered together. The alchemical hermaphrodite is an eminently desirable union of opposites that transcends the normal operations of nature, a disruption akin to metal transmutation, the ultimate goal of the alchemists work. Hermaphroditism is for the author of the Book such a signicant trope that it characterizes not only Christ, but also Antichrist. The anonymous writer of the Book was almost certainly a descendent of the Spiritual Franciscans, a radical sect of Franciscan friars who advocated absolute poverty and expected the appearance of Antichrist and the apocalyptic climax of
Mellon MS 74, fol. 25r: [L]a transparente humanite de Marie claire etoit lhumanite interieur et exterieur de Dieu Jesus Christus tout a fait ensemble il na eu et na point dautre humanite toutes les deux sont icy eternelles sans n. . . . Et ont este eternellement un, la Divinite Jesus Christus ne peut et ne peuvent pas eternellement estre separee de son humanite 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 par tout dans ce livre.
41

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history within the near future.43 As a result, the authors interests extended not only to Christ, but also to Antichrist. Because Antichrist was in all senses a perversion of Christ, he had to share in and subvert all of Christs attributes, including his hermaphroditic nature. As Jesus contained the Virgin Mary and the female sex within him, so Antichrist also would contain his own mother.44 A dramatic pair of illuminations represents these paired entitiesthe good Jesus-Mary hermaphrodite and the evil Antichrist hermaphroditea melding of male and female bodies in the costumes of kings and queens. In the image of the Antichrist hermaphrodite, a serpentine monster extends two snakelike appendages to wrap around the legs of the hermaphrodite (Fig. 3, p. 211). One appendage ends in a male head, the other in a female head; they press their faces together near Antichrists groin, suggesting the gures hermaphroditic genitalia. These images resemble the fteenth-century illumination of Ovids Salmacis and Hermaphroditus or the Aurora consurgens conjoined hermaphrodite, and they suggest a single entity that embodies contrary male and female qualities in equal proportions. The Jesus-Mary and Antichrist hermaphrodites must be read in light of the growing signicance of mysticism in the late Middle Ages, which developed the tropes of the feminized Christ and Christ as mother. Although depictions of God or Jesus as mother were common in biblical scripture and patristic texts, these images found new popularity in the high and late Middle Ages, particularly in the writings of Cistercian monks and certain female mystics.45 In the twelfth century, Bernard of Clairvaux, Aelred of Rievaulx, and William of St. Thierry, among others, spoke of Jesus in maternal language. Their contemporary, the mystic Elizabeth of Schonau, referred to Christs humanity as a female virgin in her Visiones, an equation that is repeated in the Book of the Holy Trinity. In the late fourteenth century, the English anchorite Julian of Norwich wrote her Revelationes, a work replete with her imaginings of the feminine characteristics of God.46 These examples point to a long tradition of assigning female gender traits
Obrist, 133. For the Spiritual Franciscan movement, see David Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001). 44 Obrist, 160. 45 Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother: Some Themes in Twelfth-Century Cistercian Writing, in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Sprituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 11069. 46 Elisabeth of Schonau, Der Visonen der hl. Elisabeth und die Schriften der Aebte Ekbert und 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, 46102.
43

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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 do they cite Jesus-Mary as an inseparable being in the manner of the Book. But the fourteenth-century Ovide moralise of Pierre Bersuire makes a clear connection between the hermaphrodite of Ovids tale and Christ, writing that: for that son of Mercury [Hermaphroditus] is the son of God, bridegroom above all . . . he descended to the fountain of mercy, that is the blessed Virgin, where at once that nymph, that is, human nature, joined itself to him, and thus he adhered to himself through the blessed incarnation, since from two natures one being resulted.47 Here, the narratives of Ovids hermaphrodite and Christs incarnation are joined explicitly. The human and divine natures within Christ create a hermaphroditic union facilitated by the impregnated body of the Virgin Mary. Although this understanding of Christ is not identical to that of the Book, it is clear that by the fteenth century a number of texts were circulating that identied Jesus as a feminine or hermaphroditic gure while noting the role of the Virgin in furnishing Jesus with his humanity. It is possible that the author or illustrator of the Book was also aware of Jewish interpretations of Genesis 1:27 (And God created man to his own image, to the image of God he created him; male and female he created them) as indicative of a hermaphroditic adam and, by extension, a hermaphroditic creator.48 Although this reading was repeatedly denounced by Christian theologians, the need for clarication may indicate the persistence of such an interpretation. The production of Eve from Adams rib may also have suggested the embodiment of the female within the male at the moment of creation, indicating that hermaphroditism should be a part of alchemical creation as well. Narratives that highlight the female sex as hidden within a seemingly male body appear in a number of medieval saints lives. Hagiographical accounts of the saints Pelagia and Marina celebrate the piety of women who concealed their actual female sex while they lived as male monks among men.49
Iste enim puer lius Mercurii est Dei lius super omnia sponsus. . . . iste in fontem misericordie i. beatam Virginem descendit, ubi statim nimpha ista i. natura humana cum eo se coniunxit, et sic sibi per beatam incarnationem adhesit quod ex duabus naturis una persona resultavit. Pierre Bersuire, LOvidius 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 Cline Horowitz, The Image of God in ManIs Woman Included? in Harvard Theological Review 72 (1979): 175206; Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Vision: Varieties of Androgyny Illustrated by Texts from the Nag Hammadi Library, in Parabola 3/4 (1978): 69. 49 Vern L. Bullough, Sex Education in Medieval Christianity, Journal of Sex Research 13 (1977): 18990.
47

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At least one saints life hints at the intermediate sex of its subject, inspiring a tradition of hermaphrodite-Christ iconography. The cult of the hermaphrodite martyr Wilgefortis, the patron saint of monsters, was at its height in Germany during the fteenth century, at the same time as the composition of the Book of the Holy Trinity.50 Illustrations and sculptures of the saint depict him/her as a bearded woman crucied on a cross in imitatio Christi. Wilgefortis, who is nearly indistinguishable from Christ, hangs from the cross with one shoe off, one shoe on. According to David Williams, 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 iconographical allusion to male and female genitalia and an indication of the saintsand Christshermaphroditic nature (Fig. 4, p. 214).51 Some images of the saint also include the phrase Salvator mundi (Savior of the World), a verbal cue that enhanced the viewers identication of Wilgefortis with the hermaphrodite Christ.52 The representation of hermaphroditism by means of a lateral division in footwear moreover resembles the biform Jesus-Mary hermaphrodite in the Book, who wears male clothing on one side and female clothing on the other to denote his/her hermaphroditic sex. Another quintessential creator according to the medieval Christian worldview, Nature, was also variously depicted as male, female, or hermaphroditic. Natura artifex, a late antique and medieval gure spanning from Macrobius fth-century Somnium Scipionis to Alain of Lilles twelfth-century De planctu naturae, was a feminine goddess who wielded stereotypically masculine tools.53 In De planctu naturae, for instance, Alain of Lille describes Nature as a scholar who adopts the language and the authority of a clerical male. Nature is both a mother and a virgin, yet Alain shows the goddess creating humans by means of a hammer and stylus, tools the author principally uses to designate male sexual activity. Nature is for Alain in possession of both a womb and a phallus, and thus a hermaphroOn Wilgefortis, see Williams, 30917; Ilse E. Friesen, The Female Crucix: Images of St. Wilgefortis Since the Middle Ages (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001). 51 Williams, 31112. 52 Ibid., 313. 53 George Economou, The Goddess Natura in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 1920, 7297; Larry Scanlon, Unspeakable Pleasures: Alain de Lille, Sexual Regulation and the Priesthood of Genius, Romanic Review 86 (1995): 21342, esp. 23133; Mark D. Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 7071; Katharine Park, Nature in Person: Medieval and Renaissance Allegories and Emblems, in The Moral Authority of Nature, ed. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5455.
50

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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 planctu naturae furthermore shows Nature standing at a podium dressed in clerical garb, perhaps lecturing or preaching; a related image of Nature from Alains Anticlaudianus shows her fashioning a man with an axe.55 Because alchemy was often described as an imitation of nature, it is possible that alchemical authors and illustrators drew from textual and visual portraits of Natures hermaphroditism to imagine alchemy as a similarly hermaphroditic agent of creation. For alchemists pondering the philosophers stone, the metaphor of the hermaphrodite was an attractive solution. Ovids stories of metamorphosis mirrored the alchemists goal in metal transmutationthe change of one thing into anotherand the hybrid nature of the hermaphrodite provided a useful model for the hybrid philosophers stone. The metamorphosis of two individuals into a single creature of biform sex was particularly useful to characterize the sexed elemental qualities with which alchemists believed they worked, as well as the biform quality of the alchemical product. The hermaphrodite also satised the need to solve the linguistic puzzle of the rebis, or two thing. Moreover, the image t readily within the conventional vocabulary of sexual reproduction used in scholastic natural philosophy and medicine. But Ovids tale was not the only model of hermaphroditism available to alchemical authors. Traditional stories of creation, whether by God or by Nature, played upon the masculine and feminine aspects of the creator. These examples were likely inspirations for alchemical authors, who emphasized the masculine and feminine qualities of the alchemical agent in order to establish it as a creator in its own right. Furthermore, since many alchemists drew a parallel between the philosophers stone and Jesus, the longstanding tradition of imagining Jesus as both masculine and feminine seems to have been inuential. The goal of alchemical writing was to explain and defend the process of metal generation, particularly the generation of gold and silver. How better to explain generation than by means of a generator that was male and female, active and passive? The rationale behind the philosophers stone was more persuasive when one imagined the substance as both mother and father, and thus capable of creating new forms through itself. When alchemists portrayed their art as creative, they
Jordan, 7071. Mechtild Modersohn, Natura als Gottin im Mittelalter: Ikonographische Studien zu Darstellungen der personizierten Natur (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997), 3544 and gs. 10 and 15a.
54 55

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

CONCLUSION The metaphor of the hermaphrodite in premodern alchemical texts provides historians with an opportunity to think about the uidity of boundaries between metals, as well as that between other sorts of bodies. Alchemy was perhaps in a unique position to capitalize upon the bothness and neitherness of the hermaphrodite. For alchemists, the mixture of sulphur and mercury produced a hybrid of its male and female components; this product was also a new and third substance that was neither male nor female. Alchemy held that change was possible, both in the creation of the hybrid philosophers stone from its contrary parts, and in its transformation of metals during transmutation. The analogy of the hermaphrodite tapped into the fertility of Ovids story of metamorphosis, invoking the playfulness and instability of its reality. Ovids hermaphrodite, like the philosophers stone, was not a complete transformation, but rather the creation of a third thing that held aspects of the previous two in tension. A hermaphrodite was thus a dramatic, and sometimes unsettling, union of oppositeswhether male and female, heavenly and earthly, or natural and articial. Alchemys advocates followed this argument to its logical conclusion: Christthe ultimate union of male and female, human and divinemust also be in some sense hermaphroditic. I have argued that authors and illustrators solved the problem of the two thing and imagined the alchemical hermaphrodite by relying upon earlier models of hermaphroditism in medical, theological, and mythological literature. But how closely did the alchemical hermaphrodite really correspond to the models that inspired it? The philosophers stone was not really an intermediate point on a continuum of sex difference, as the Hippocratic/Galenic medical model held, nor could it really be the result of excessive generative matter, as the Aristotelian natural philosophical model argued (and no matter what illustrations from the Aurora and the Book might have suggested). Similarly, the alchemical hermaphrodite did not follow the narrative of Ovids hermaphrodite precisely. The substance was not enfeebled as a result of the change, as Hermaphroditus lamented in the Metamorphoses, and alchemical authors tended to emphasize the bothness
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rather than the more disturbing neitherness of hybridity.56 Yet the alchemical hermaphrodite shared a signicant element of Ovids tale: it forced contraries together, highlighting their inherent differences. This process is evident in the Book of the Holy Trinity, in which the Jesus-Mary hermaphrodite is a unity of integral and unmixed gures. Although Jesus and Mary comprise one substance that cannot be separated, the two characters retain their distinct identities and qualities. This achievement of neitherness and bothness was outside the ordinary course of nature, and it was the agent of wondrous transformative possibilities, such as the salvation of humankind and, on a lesser scale, metal transmutation. It is worth noting that the alchemical hermaphrodite stands in stark contrast to the ambiguous position of intersex people in premodern society. Unlike the deformed monster of De secretis mulierum or the suspect gure of De vitio sodomitico, the Jesus-Mary hermaphrodite of the Book of the Holy Trinity is presented as an ideal. The hermaphroditic philosophers stone and the hermaphroditic Jesus transmuted metals and redeemed humans by means of their special and paradoxical both-neither natures. So why was it permissible for both-neither hermaphrodites to exist in alchemy, but not in society? The hermaphrodite in alchemy was of course a purely intellectual conceit. There was no danger of alchemical hermaphrodites committing sodomitical acts or creating confusion about their genders in social or juridical contexts. Nevertheless, there was something transgressive about them. The uidity of sexes in the alchemical hermaphrodite hinted at the uidity of boundaries between metals, which alchemy argued could be changed through the art of the alchemist. Whether the boundaries in question divided the sexes or the categories of humanity and divinity, the hermaphrodite of alchemical literature indicated that such boundaries were crossable. In later centuries, the image of the alchemical hermaphrodite provided an opportunity to question contemporary gender roles and sexuality, as scholars such as Kathleen P. Long have shown.57 Furthermore, the crossing of boundaries in alchemical literature was linked to not disorder or confusion, but the creation of something precious. The hermaphrodite was a necessary agent in the transmutation of gold and silver; it was a means to understand the God-man that was Jesus, the agent of human salvation. The alchemical hermaphrodite may at rst appear to be an obscure gure, part of a literary genre known for its esotericism, if for nothing else.
56 57

Ovid, Metamorphoses, 4.38081. Long, 23743.

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Yet the alchemical hermaphrodite interrogated the stability of some of the most inviolable boundaries in the premodern world, and it offered a discourse of uidity that was not prominent in other sorts of naturalist texts. Although historians have often looked to natural philosophical and medical documents for information about premodern categories of sex (and other kinds of) difference, alchemical texts still constitute unexplored territory. Perhaps alchemical writings can tell us something important and unexpected about the ways in which premodern naturalists imagined their world and its ability to confound categorization. Although alchemy was never a university discipline, its proponents and audience were among the elites most likely to discuss and construct the boundaries of the natural world. Manuals of alchemy and books of secrets that included alchemical concepts were popular among literate audiences, and such texts became even more widely available with the advent of the printing press.58 Despite prohibitions against the art, alchemical research was long supported by royal and papal courts, and many of its known practitioners were physicians, university masters, and even prelates.59 The alchemical texts discussed in this article may therefore serve as valuable insights into the presuppositions of such thinkers about social, natural philosophical, and theological norms. Because alchemy existed alongside sanctioned academic disciplines, borrowing from them and informing them, it provided an alternative view of the natural and social world that had enormousyet generally unacknowledgedinuence. I hope that a closer look at the image of the alchemical hermaphrodite will help us to think about the use of language and symbol in European naturalist texts, as well as what we cannot otherwise know about authors and readers understanding of difference, of change, and of the most central tenets of their society and religion. Texas A & M University.

William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 59 See, for instance, Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, The Popes Body, trans. David S. Peterson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 20411; Pamela H. Smith, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
58

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