A bird perches on a mountain peak and speaks, and what it says sounds like a riddle: "I am white and black, citrine and red." It adds that it is a bird without wings. Few emblems in Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens are as odd as the forty-third. Its vulture is a scavenger that turns out to be a messenger, and its words are a list of colors, the same colors that mark the stages of the alchemical Great Work. The emblem is an exercise in saying much with little. The Motto The Latin motto asks the reader to listen to a talkative vulture crying from the top of a mountain. The words it speaks are, in the Latin of the book, albus et niger, citrinus et rubeus : white and black, yellow and red. The emblem's closing line, as translators give it, says that the speaker is a bird without wings. English renderings differ in details, which is common with Maier's Latin. The speech runs through four colors, not two, and each color is a stage of the Work. Together they make...