ABSTRACT
Here the reconciler, the soul, dives down from heaven to breathe life into the dead body. The two birds at the bottom left of the picture represent the allegorical winged and wingless dragons in the form of fledged and unfledged birds. 1 This is one of the many synonyms for the double nature of Mercurius, who is both a chthonic and a pneumatic being. The presence of this divided pair of opposites means that although the hermaphrodite appears to be united and is on the point of coming alive, the conflict between them is by no means finally resolved and has not yet disappeared: it is relegated to the “left” and to the “bottom” of the picture, i.e., banished to the sphere of the unconscious. The fact that these still unintegrated opposites are represented theriomorphically (and not anthropomorphically as before) bears out this supposition.
