ABSTRACT
Adam is masculo-feminine also in Jewish tradition. In Midrash Rabbah VIII, ι 162 he is an androgyne, or a man and woman grown into one body with two faces. God sawed the body in two and made each half a back.163 Through his androgyny Adam has affinities with Plato's sphere-shaped Original Being as well as with the Persian Gayomart. This idea has left a few traces in alchemy. For instance, Glauber attributes the sign of the circle to Adam and the square to Eve.164 The circle is usually the sign for gold and sun. It is found in the latter sense in the "Book of the Cave of Treasures": "Then God made Adam. . . . And when the angels saw his glorious appearance, they were moved by the beauty of the sight; for they saw the form of his countenance, while it was enkindled, in shining splendour like to the ball of the sun, and the light of his eyes like to the sun, and the form of his body like to the light of a crystal." 1β5 An Arabic Hermes-text on the creation of Adam relates that, when the virgin (Eve) came to power, the angel Harus (Horus) arose from
the unanimous will of the planets. This Harus took sixty spirits from the planets, eighty-three from the zodiac, ninety from the highest heaven, one hundred and twenty-seven from the earth, three hundred and sixty spirits in all, mixed them together and created out of them Adamanus, the first man, "after the form of the highest heaven." 1ββ The number 360 and the "form of heaven" both indicate his circular shape.
