Atalanta Fugiens, Emblem 49: The Philosophical Child with Three Fathers
Men stand in a wide, hilly landscape around an ox hide stretched between their hands. One wears a winged cap and holds a staff with two snakes. Another has a plumed helmet and a breastplate. A third, with a cloth wrapped around his head, grips the hide at its center.
At the far left, a man waits with a bow. This is the forty-ninth emblem of Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens, and its motto says: the philosophical child knows three fathers, like Orion.
The book was printed in 1617 at Oppenheim. It has fifty emblems, and each one joins an engraving, a Latin verse, a prose discourse and a fugue for three voices. The engravings are attributed to the workshop of Matthäus Merian. Maier, a physician at the court of Emperor Rudolf II, built the book to be seen, read and sung.
The Motto
The Latin line is short and odd. The child of the philosophers has three fathers, just as Orion did. Anyone who knows the myth of Orion will smile. Anyone who does not will need the story.
The picture shows the moment of the tale: men gathered around a hide, and the strange birth about to begin.
The Birth of Orion
The myth is told by the Latin writers Hyginus and Ovid. A man named Hyrieus, who had no children, once welcomed three gods into his house: Jupiter, Neptune and Mercury. In thanks, they asked what he wished. He said he wanted a son.
The gods took the hide of an ox that he had sacrificed, and they did something rude to it. They told him to bury the hide, and in time a boy was born from the ground. He was named Orion, and the tale says the name came from that crude act. The ancients themselves knew the story was coarse, and they told it anyway.
Three Fathers
The figure with the winged cap and the staff is Mercury, whom the Greeks called Hermes. The other men around the hide complete the three of the tale. Each one has a part in the birth of the child.
A child with three fathers is a child with no ordinary lineage. In the emblem, that is exactly the idea: the Philosophical Child is born from a union of several forces, and not from one source alone.
The Philosophical Child
In alchemy, the Stone was sometimes called a child, the "son of the philosophers." It was said to be born at the end of a long process, from the union of the principles that came before.
Some readers connect the three fathers with the three principles of Paracelsus: sulphur, mercury and salt. This is a reading, and not something the emblem itself states. It fits the picture, because three parents join to produce one new thing.
The Hunter Among the Stars
Orion became a great hunter, and at last the gods placed him among the stars. Every winter the constellation climbs the sky, with its three bright stars in a row, called the Belt.
An image of the sky gives the myth a final meaning. The child who began in the earth, under a cowhide, ends in the heights. Many writers saw in that path a picture of the Work: from the lowest matter to the highest light.
A Reading for Today
Each of us is the child of more than two sources. Family, language, teachers, accident and choice all shape a life. The emblem suggests that we honor all of them, and not only the nearest.
The strangest origin can still lead to a place among the stars.
The Fugue
Music is part of the design. Atalanta Fugiens joins an engraving, a verse and a discourse with a fugue for three voices, and the three voices circle one another like runners. The name of the book recalls Atalanta, the swift huntress of Greek myth, who lost a race when Hippomenes dropped golden apples and she stopped to pick them up.
Maier read the story as a picture of the volatile and the fixed. Recordings of the fugues are available, and they pair well with this picture.
Contemplating the Emblem
For those who wish to work with this image:
- Look at the men around the hide and imagine the story behind it.
- Name three people or influences that made you who you are.
- Ask which of them you have forgotten to thank.
- Think of what could be born of all three.
Closing
An ox hide, three gods, a boy yet to be born. Maier took a coarse myth and made it a teaching about the Stone and its many fathers. For the seeker, the emblem offers an idea worth keeping: what is born of many sources can reach higher than any one of them.
Related Esoteric Inquiries
- Atalanta Fugiens, Emblem 24: The Wolf That Devoured the King
- Atalanta Fugiens, Emblem 18: The Fire of the Spirit
- Atalanta Fugiens, Emblem 48: The King Healed by the Waters
Lux Esoterica.
2026.
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