stratharchives:Week 14 – ‘Hic est Draco caudam suam devorans.’ (Here is the dragon that devours his
stratharchives:Week 14 – ‘Hic est Draco caudam suam devorans.’ (Here is the dragon that devours his own tail.)[Emblem 14 from Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens (1618), Young Collection]Dr James ‘Paraffin’ Young made a fortune in the Scottish shale-oil industry and he became a great benefactor to his alma mater. After becoming President at Anderson’s University in 1868 he established the Young Chair of Technical Chemistry (1870-1886) and gathered a collection of early printed books on the history of chemistry that he bequeathed to the Chair. This collection is the subject of the Bibliotheca Chemica (Glasgow, 1906), and contains books and manuscripts on alchemy, chemistry and early science in English, German and Latin.The image above is from Atalanta Fugiens, an alchemical emblem book containing fifty woodcut images accompanied by poems and music in the form of ‘fugues’. It is regarded as one of the earliest examples of multimedia, using different forms to express complex alchemical ideas. The symbol of a snake or dragon devouring its tail, an ouroboros, stands for infinity or wholeness. -- source link
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