ABSTRACT
A new motif appears in this picture: the bath. In a sense this takes us back to the first picture of the Mercurial Fountain, which represents the “upwelling.” The liquid is Mercurius, not only of the three but of the “thousand” names. He stands for the mysterious psychic substance which nowadays we would call the unconscious psyche. The rising fountain of the unconscious has reached the king and queen, or rather they have descended into it as into a bath. This is a theme with many variations in alchemy. Here are a few of them: the king is in danger of drowning in the sea; he is a prisoner under the sea; the sun drowns in the mercurial fountain; the king sweats in the glass-house; the green lion swallows the sun; Gabricus disappears into the body of his sister Beya, where he is dissolved into atoms; and so forth. Interpreted on the one hand as a harmless bath and on the other hand as the perilous encroachment of the “sea,” the earth-spirit Mercurius in his watery form now begins to attack the royal pair from below, just as he had previously descended from above in the shape of the dove. The contact of left hands in Figure 2 has evidently roused the spirit of the deep and called up a rush of water.
