Decoding the Hermetic Discourse in Salomon Trismosin's Splendor Solis - A Semiotic Study of Three Ways of Reading

Authors

• J. Södergård Uppsala University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30674/scripta.67236

Keywords:

Hermetism, Language and religion, Hermeneutics, Alchemy, Esotericism, Psychoanalysis and religion, Philosophy and religion

Abstract

Alchemy and the Hermetic Art are terms that denote a most interesting transitional space, circumscribing an opaque region of human cultural history, shared between matter and psyche, between phantasmagoric reveries and practical experiments, between sincere natural theology and conscious fraud. This is an area of human experience that has been notoriously difficult to define and understand, and which has triggered off contradictory interpretations that are, in their own, of semiotic interest. It has been said that a text — in our case Splendor Solis, and the Hermetic–alchemical texts at large — is a picnic, a Dutch party, in which the author provides the words and the reader, especially a reader with too much or too little erudition, comes up with the meaning of the words. In this article, the author tries to give an overview of the general interpretations of alchemy that have been put forward, and apply Umberto Eco's intentional approach to these interpretations, viz. consider them as various sorts of intentions. The author uses a pseudonymous alchemical tractate from the sixteenth century, Salomon Trismosin's treatise Splendor Solis as an opportunity to picture and evaluate the three main decodings of alchemy that have been attempted; a chemical, a religious—soteriological and a psychological. The author also explores the intertextual web in the Hermetic discourse, and see if its mapping can generate usable knowledge about what has, since the Middle Ages, been called alchemy: a term acknowledging the taking up of a science or art which had been cultivated by Muslim and Nestorian scholars, but with its fountain head in Late Antiquity.