Seal

Hermes’ seal the hermetic seal which closes the alchemical vessel and keeps it airtight by either fusion or welding. The sealing not only keeps the mixture in the glass vessel secure from the intrusion of outside influences, but also makes sure the mercurial contents do not escape.

Abraham defines Hermes’ seal as the operative alchemical closure that simultaneously guards the Work from external contamination and prevents the volatile spirit from dissipating — a double function of containment and protection central to the opus.

Abraham, Lyndy, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998thesis

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he would be a breaker of the heavenly seal who should communicate the secrets of nature and of the Art, and he adds that many evils follow after him who uncovers hidden things and reveals secrets.

Von Franz documents the Aurora Consurgens’ invocation of the ‘heavenly seal’ as a sacred prohibition against disclosure, framing the alchemical secret as divinely sealed knowledge whose violation entails metaphysical transgression.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966thesis

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‘would be a breaker of the heavenly seal.’ This is a clear indication of the divine nature of the secret. In antiquity the alchemical secret was in fact represented as having been stolen from God.

Von Franz links the ‘heavenly seal’ directly to the sacred, even stolen, character of alchemical gnosis, situating the seal as the divine boundary between human knowledge and the arcanum dei.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966supporting

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Philalethes’ The Marrow of Alchemy instructed the alchemist to ‘Seal up the neck [of the vessel] with Hermes seal, and then / The Spirits are secur’d within their den’.

Abraham cites Philalethes to show that the hermetic seal is the operative gesture that secures the spirits within the vessel — the precondition for the nigredo and subsequent transformations.

Abraham, Lyndy, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998supporting

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The boy scratched open the bundle and shook it out—it was his mother’s sealskin. Oh, and he could smell her all through it. And as he hugged the sealskin to his face and inhaled her scent, her soul slammed through him like a sudden summer wind.

Estés presents the sealskin as the vehicle of wild-soul transmission between worlds, the physical remnant of the instinctual mother whose contact floods the ego-child with numinous animating force.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis

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Like the seal woman’s child, we learn that to come close to the soul-mother’s creations is to be filled with her. Even though she has gone to her own people, her full force can be felt through the feminine powers of insight, passion, and connection to the wild nature.

Estés interprets the seal woman myth psychologically: proximity to the Wild Woman’s creative artifacts activates the pneuma of the deep-soul feminine, even in her physical absence.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting

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The child represents a new order in the psyche. His seal mother has breathed some of her own breath, some of her special kind of animation, into this child’s lungs, thereby, in psychological terms, transforming him into a medial being, one who is able to bridge both worlds.

Estés reads the seal mother’s breath as a psychological initiation that creates a medial being capable of bridging instinctual and consensual reality — a central archetype of the Self’s emissary.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting

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And I saw another angel ascending from the east, having the seal of the living God: and he cried with a loud voice to the four angels, to whom it was given [the power] to hurt the earth.

Edinger invokes the Apocalyptic ‘seal of the living God’ within a Jungian reading of Revelation, situating the seal as the divine mark that identifies and protects the elect within the individuation drama.

Edinger, Edward F., Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s Answer to Job, 1992thesis

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the power embodied in the seal enables Gyges to usurp power. Indeed, he is for the Greeks the prototype of the tyrant… Association of the coin-mark with the ancient power of the seal-mark may be reflected in the detail that Gyges’ seal-ring was said to have brought him much wealth.

Seaford demonstrates that the seal in the Greek imagination condenses royal power, invisibility, and wealth — a symbolic complex that is transferred to the coin’s stamped type as coinage displaces the personal seal.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004thesis

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common purpose of the seal impression seems to have been to signal to any viewer that a certain person as an individual or member of a group was present at a certain act, be it as witness, as overseer, or as controller.

Seaford grounds the ancient seal in its juridical-social function as the authentication of personal identity, establishing the historical and semiotic basis from which the seal’s symbolic power is derived.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting

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Another ruler whose legend embodies a reaction to the transition from seal to coin is a Greek, Polycrates. In order to avoid the resentment of the gods, he throws into the sea h[is ring].

Seaford marks the historical transition from seal to coin through the myth of Polycrates, whose seal-ring cast into the sea encodes the ambivalence attending the shift from personal-identity marks to abstract monetary signs.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting

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it was completed: the [father] the mother the child the five seals the invincible power who is the great [Christ] of all those who are incorruptible.

Meyer’s Gnostic text deploys ‘five seals’ as sacramental markers of pneumatic completion, situating the seal within an initiatory soteriology where sealed identity confers incorruptibility.

Marvin W. Meyer, The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus: The Definitive Collection of Mystical Gospels and Secret Books about Jesus of Nazareth, 2005supporting

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Hereupon follows the opening of the Book with Seven Seals by the ‘Lamb.’ The latter has put off the human features of the ‘Ancient of Days’ and now appears in purely theriomorphic but monstrous form.

Jung reads the opening of the Seven Seals in Revelation as a disclosure of previously contained divine energies, the seal functioning as the vessel that holds apocalyptic power until the moment of eschatological release.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting

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a group of 144,000—twelve thousand from each of the twelve Israelite tribes who are sealed as servants of God and protected from the outpouring of his final judgment.

Thielman establishes the New Testament theology of sealing as divine protection and eschatological marking, providing the scriptural context within which depth-psychological readings of the ‘sealed elect’ operate.

Frank S. Thielman, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting

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He waited again a moment… And he drew from behind him the letter that had remained in his hand. But her eyes only—though he held it out—met the offer. ‘Why you’ve not broken the seal’.

Bloom cites James’s unbroken letter-seal as a literary figure of withheld disclosure, offering a peripheral but resonant secular deployment of the seal as the boundary between knowledge and ignorance.

Bloom, Harold, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015aside

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Night-sea Journey of the Solar Barge. 2350-2150 bc. Cylinder Seal. Akkad Tell Asmar, Iraq.

Campbell’s iconographic catalogue references ancient cylinder seals as the primary pictorial medium through which cosmological and mythological narratives were transmitted in the ancient Near East.

Campbell, Joseph, The Mythic Image, 1974aside

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