What an egg can tell us about the four elements

The Splendor Solis is a sixteenth-century German alchemical work transmitted under the name Salomon Trismosin. One of its most concrete passages calls for an object any reader might find in a kitchen. A person opening an egg meets several quite different materials in succession. The work takes that familiar sequence and uses it to make the relation of the four elements imaginable.

Reading from the outside in

The Philosophers take for example an Egg, for in this the four elements are joined together. The first or the shell is Earth, and the White is Water, but the skin between the shell and the White is Air, and separates the Earth from the Water; the Yolk is Fire, and it too is enveloped in a subtle skin, representing our subtle air, which is more warm and subtle, as it is nearer to the Fire, and separates the Fire from the Water. In the middle of the Yolk there is the Fifth Element, out of which the young chicken bursts and grows.

– Splendor Solis, Splendor Solis, 1920, p. 32.^[1]

On the outside a finger encounters a hard shell. Just beneath it there is a thin membrane that will peel away. Inside, the clear white and the coloured yolk have different consistencies of their own. A reader can follow the text’s correspondences through those differences. Firmness, transparency and colour offer distinct occasions to think of earth, air, water and fire. Even the little skin easily overlooked when an egg is cracked receives a place of its own in the model.

A model that fits in one hand

As an image for readers thinking about the philosophers’ stone, the egg has a particular advantage. It holds quite different things together in a single recognisable form. While the shell is closed the parts can scarcely be distinguished from the outside. Once it is open the observer has already altered the unity whose structure was in question. That difficulty could matter to an alchemical reader. The chick at the end of the passage adds something one can scarcely discover from an empty shell. What holds the four elements together in an egg is also meant to help explain how a new and different body can emerge from it.