A hand rises from a cuff, its fingers carrying a key, a lamp, a sun, a star and other small emblems. A fish swims in a glowing oval on the palm. The whole design is framed by outstretched wings, with an eye in a round medallion at each corner. It is one of the strangest and most striking images in twentieth-century occult art.
An 18th-century original
The design is older than the painting. A line printed on the plate says it was redrawn from an early eighteenth-century watercolor by an unknown artist. The plate calls the original “the hand of the philosopher,” extended to those who enter the Mysteries.
Alchemy and the Great Work
Alchemy treated the Great Work as the transformation of base matter into something purified, and as a picture of the transformation of the soul. Latin alchemists often described it as a sequence of colors, black, white, yellow and red. In medieval theory metals were built from two principles, mercury and sulphur, and in the sixteenth century Paracelsus added a third, salt. The plate’s caption reads the fish and the flame in those terms, with each finger bearing the emblem of a divine agent.
Keys and secret books
The key on one finger is a standard alchemical image. A famous treatise printed in 1599 under the name of the monk Basil Valentine was called The Twelve Keys, and the idea that the Work can only be unlocked by a hidden key runs through the literature. Some alchemical books went further and dropped words entirely: the Mutus Liber, the “silent book,” printed in 1677, is a sequence of fifteen engravings with almost no text.
The Master Mason’s grip
The caption also links the hand to the Kabbalistic One Power and to the hand of a Master Mason raising the martyred Builder. In the Masonic legend of Hiram Abiff, the murdered master builder is raised from the grave by the strong grip of the Lion’s paw, one of the central moments of the Master Mason degree.
The painting
The hand, fish and winged frame were redrawn from the older watercolor. It was painted by J. Augustus Knapp for Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928).
Little-known facts
- The painting is a copy of a copy. The artist behind the early-eighteenth-century original is unknown.
- The mercury and sulphur theory of metals is traditionally traced to the Arabic writings credited to Jabir ibn Hayyan in the eighth and ninth centuries. Latin alchemists later published under the name Geber.
- Isaac Newton is reported to have left more than a million words of alchemical notes, more than he wrote on many of his better-known subjects.
- Hands have long been charged symbols in esoteric traditions, from the raised hand in Masonic ritual to the protective hamsa.
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