The Snake Woman as an Objet d’Art in A. S. Byatt’s “Art Work” and “A Lamia in the Cévennes”

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Notes

¹ Byatt incorporates Jean d’Arras’s story of Melusine in her novel Possession: A Romance. This snake woman is also the Paracelsian Melusine (Zhang 31–4).

² Paracelsus describes a typical alchemical process as follows: “[T]ake the electrum which has been destroyed and rendered evanescent, … place it in the Philosophic Egg, and seal it closely so that nothing may evaporate. Stand it in Athanor until, without any addition, it begins of itself to be resolved from above, so that it looks like an island in the midst of that sea, … and at last being changed into the resemblance of blacking … . Then it assumes the tail of a peacock, and subsequently acquires the wings of a swan. Lastly, it takes the highest red colour in the whole world, which is the sign of its fiery nature … ” (“The Philosophic Stone” 104–5). In this process, “the tail of a peacock” is the cauda pavonis, and the “wings of a swan” refer to the albedo. Some alchemists believe that the albedo is the purpose of the alchemical process (Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis 238).