Brass

rulers will be appointed who have lost the guardian power of testing the metal of your different races, which, like Hesiod’s, are of gold and silver and brass and iron. And so iron will be mingled with silver, and brass with gold, and hence there will arise dissimilarity and inequality and irregularity

Plato treats brass as one stratum in a psycho-political metallurgy of souls whose improper mixture produces civic discord, making it a marker of constitutional degeneration.

Plato, Republic, -380thesis

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another third kingdom of brass, which shall bear rule over all the earth… the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver and the gold broken to pieces together, and became like chaff

Pascal’s transcription of Daniel’s vision positions brass as the third world-empire in a descending metallic hierarchy, where the succession of kingdoms maps onto a cosmological schema of decline and eschatological dissolution.

Pascal, Blaise, Pensées, 1670thesis

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when the iron blocks were red with heat, he said: ‘Bring me molten brass to pour on them.’ Gog and Magog could not scale it, nor could they dig their way through it.

Jung’s citation of the Quranic Dhulqarnein narrative presents molten brass as a civilizational barrier-substance, fused with iron to create an impenetrable psychic and cosmic boundary against chaos.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959thesis

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it is, like gold, a precious metal, but it is inferior to gold. Similarly, the race of silver, which is inferior to the race that preceded it, exists and is defined only in relation to that race.

Vernant’s structural analysis of Hesiodic myth contextualizes brass within a relational hierarchy of metals-as-races, where each substance acquires its psychic meaning only through its differential relation to gold.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting

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The whips they bore were brass-studded thongs. They carried torches and serpents. Their home was below the earth, in the Underworld.

Kerényi associates brass with the chthonic authority of the Erinyes, whose brass-studded instruments of punishment link the metal to underworld vengeance and the enforcement of blood-kinship bonds.

Kerényi, Karl, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951supporting

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iron and brass and all metals were jumbled together and had disappeared in the chaos; nor was there any possibility of extracting ore from them; and they had scarcely any means of felling timber.

In the Laws, Plato envisions a primordial catastrophe in which brass and iron collapse into undifferentiated chaos, requiring the gradual re-emergence of metallurgical arts as a precondition for civilization.

Plato, Laws, -348supporting

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Whatever her partner required of her, she rendered and fulfilled with brass and with gold, as fully as he wished.

Campbell’s citation of Gottfried’s Tristan uses brass alongside gold as a formulaic phrase denoting full and complete fulfillment, preserving a residual connotation of brass as a lesser but still valued metal in an erotic-sacrificial context.

Campbell, Joseph, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968aside

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