The Surgical Principle
(For now, I’ll be using this weblog to work on my book Love’s Secret Domain. The book will be published in English, though I naturally write more intuitively in Dutch.)
As we drove through the Høyanger Kommune, we saw a shadow-lion moving across one of the black-silver mountains.
When the landscape speaks to you, you must listen. Mountains speak—they are a kind of mirror. In Norway, they resemble that obsidian mirror given to John Dee, looted from the Aztecs, through which he developed the angelic language by skrying the Aethyrs.
The alchemical image of the “green lion devouring the sun” (Latin: leo viridis Sol devorans) has a long history. Its origins likely reach back to late antiquity. In a 3rd-century Greco-Egyptian alchemical text by Zosimos of Panopolis (Cheirokmeta, ca. 300 AD), a vision is described that closely matches a green lion consuming gold (the sun). This is considered the earliest known reference to this metaphor, where the green lion symbolizes a solvent capable of digesting gold—chemically speaking, aqua regia, a blend of acids that dissolves gold.
In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the image appears explicitly in alchemical treatises and illustrations. One of the most famous early depictions is found in the Rosarium Philosophorum (Rosary of the Philosophers), an influential alchemical work printed around 1550.
This treatise contains a woodcut of a green lion devouring a radiant sun in the sky. The caption reads: “I am the true green and golden Lion without worries; in me all the secrets of the Philosophers are hidden.”
This demonstrates that the symbol had already acquired a fixed place in the visual language of alchemy. The Rosarium itself cites older sources, suggesting that the motif had circulated in manuscripts from the 14th and 15th centuries. There are also references to a “green lion” in works attributed to the alchemist Arnaldus de Villanova and the mystical text Aurora Consurgens (15th century), as well as in the writings of the English alchemist George Ripley (15th century). The image was thus firmly rooted in the alchemical tradition long before the Rosarium appeared in print.
It wasn’t uncommon for alchemists to write their entire (thick) books in verse—consider George Ripley’s The Compound of Alchymy from 1591, in which he lays out all the secrets of alchemy in endless rhymes.
If you take the trouble to decipher the Old English, you’ll discover gems like this:
Of Putrefaction
Spend not thy money away in waste,
Give not to every spirit credence,
But first examine, grope, and taste;
And as thou provest, so put thy confidence,
But ever beware of great expense:
And if the Philosopher does live virtuously,
The better thou mayst trust his Philosophy.
And then you’re reminded of that recurring promise: the dream of turning things into gold. And you realize, yes, a savings account doesn’t bloom on its own like a rose in May. No—Ripley already knew: don’t hand over your money to every spirit lounging on a sulfur cushion, whispering that his tincture will let you harvest rainbows instead of paying rain taxes.
Ripley lived in an age when a good rhyme could pass for proof of esoteric knowledge. Today, we call that an Instagram quote on a marble background.
Back to our green lion. What on earth does it have to do with LSD?
In Basil Valentine’s Twelve Keys, the Green Lion appears in the context of dissolution. Valentine describes it as a devouring force that eats the Sun to extract its inner purity. The Sun here is often interpreted as gold or sulfur and symbolizes the fixed or essential principle, while the Green Lion represents the volatile spiritual element, often associated with Mercury. Valentine writes:
“The Green Lion devours the Sun, and from this act the soul of the King is liberated to undergo purification.”
And in this, we can recognize—using a bit of alchemical license—the early outlines of the LSD experience. For what is LSD if not a Green Lion in molecular form? A volatile spirit that bites into the Sun of your consciousness, allowing the inner sovereign—the long-neglected king of your soul—to finally crawl out of the cellar and reform the world.
Consider that in Ripley’s time—the late 15th century—Europe was struck by mysterious dancing plagues. Entire crowds danced themselves to death for days to music only they could hear. These epidemics, like the one in Strasbourg in 1518, have been linked by modern historians to ergot, a mold on rye containing LSA—the psychoactive sibling of LSD. In other words, the Green Lion was already prowling about then, tucked into a moldy sandwich.
I’ll explore in a separate chapter how this tale was swiftly adopted by Christianity to spread rapidly across Europe.
On a symbolic and spiritual level, the Green Lion represents the first, raw phase of the Opus Magnum (the Great Work of the alchemists). It stands for the prima materia—the untamed primal matter or driving force of nature—required to initiate transformation. The sun symbolizes the fixed, exalted principle (gold, perfection, the conscious self). When the lion devours the sun, it depicts the phase of dissolutio or nigredo: the dismantling of fixed structure, the death of the old to make way for renewal.
And that is exactly what LSD does.
Thus, the alchemical metaphor returns as chemical reality: the Green Lion is the substance that releases our inner gold—if necessary, with claws. The only difference? Where Ripley and Valentine saw a mythical beast, we now know it by its three-letter abbreviation—and a grin just a bit too wide.
Gold is the sky in concentrate / Power in its purest state
as the alchemist-rapper L-Eye once surgically summarized, before he vanished in a fountain of esoteric foam and now exists only as the scent of lavender and ozone, audible on a quantum level.
For those skeptical about the power of the nigredo that LSD provokes—that alchemical phase of total dissolution, the blackest of blacks in which the ego melts like syrup in a storm—there is a video on YouTube in which unsuspecting British soldiers are administered LSD.
What begins as a proper military drill derails within an hour into a surreal scene: the commander forgets what orders are, soldiers roll giggling across the ground as if the grass is cracking jokes, and some climb trees cheerfully—not to spy on the enemy, but to get closer to the sun, that golden principle the Green Lion always seeks.
The military machine becomes a toy. Hierarchy evaporates. Rationality dissolves.
This is not a drug. This is not a joke.
This is solve et coagula in realtime.
An entire platoon caught in an alchemical storm: the mind dissolved, the mask melted, the inner ape released.
What you witness is the Green Lion, in full uniform, devouring the sun of command-driven consciousness—and letting the soul of the king dance across a field that practiced war just yesterday.
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In alchemical literature itself (often written in verse or allegory), the green lion is a beloved motif. A 15th-century alchemical poem titled The Hunting of the Green Lion describes the quest for the secret of transmutation as a symbolic lion hunt. Such hermetic poetry continued in the 17th century in Dutch. An example is the Dutch alchemist Goossen van Vreeswyk, who wrote several works featuring color-lions in their titles. In The Green Lion, or the Light of the Philosophers (Amsterdam, 1674), he expanded on the classical symbol, clearly outlining both the practical chemical processes and their allegorical meanings. The title suggests that the “Green Lion” represents the light of the sages—in other words, the key to alchemical wisdom and the vitriol process that unlocks the philosopher’s stone. That same year he also published The Red Lion: The Salt of the Philosophers (1672) and The Golden Lion: The Vinegar of the Wise (1675), in which each colored lion corresponded to a phase or substance of the Great Work. These works combine practical metallurgical knowledge with alchemical symbolism and demonstrate how the lion metaphor flourished in the 17th-century Low Countries.
*
If we summarize the connection from a scientific perspective:
There is a chemical parallel: acid that dissolves gold vs. “acid” that unravels thought patterns
• In medieval manuals, the Green Lion is often equated with vitriol or an early form of aqua regia—a corrosive acid capable of dissolving gold (the “sun”).
• LSD is literally an acid (lysergic acid diethylamide) and commonly known as “acid.” It doesn’t dissolve precious metals, but within minutes it loosens the brain’s “golden” networks—particularly the default mode network—allowing previously separated brain regions to communicate freely. fMRI studies show a marked increase in neural entropy and reduced modulation by the DMN.
• For alchemists, the Green Lion was volatile Mercury: a spirit that attacks fixed structures to release a more subtle essence.
• Pharmacologically, LSD acts as an extraordinarily “volatile” spirit in a biological sense: it is a potent agonist at 5-HT2A receptors. This activation triggers intracellular pathways that lead to a cascade of gene and protein expression promoting synaptic plasticity—a measurable neurochemical purification process.
• The Green Lion emerged in the same late medieval era when mass dancing manias (St. Vitus’s Dance) erupted. A likely explanation is ergot poisoning: the rye fungus Claviceps purpurea produces ergotamine, which is structurally nearly identical to lysergic acid—the base molecule from which LSD was synthesized in 1938.
• The ergot alkaloids caused hallucinations, spasms, and compulsive movement—a clinical nigredo before neurons had names. Where the alchemist spoke of “lion devours sun,” the modern pharmacologist speaks of serotonergic dysregulation that “devours” the central nervous system and temporarily restructures it.
With regards,
Martinus Benders, 14-06-2025