Naaman is the Syrian military commander whose story is told in 2 Kings 5 of the Hebrew Bible. A powerful general in the army of the king of Aram, Naaman suffered from leprosy — a disease that in the ancient world carried connotations of spiritual as well as physical impurity. On the advice of a captive Israelite servant girl, he traveled to the prophet Elisha in Israel, who instructed him to wash seven times in the Jordan River. Initially offended by the simplicity of the prescription, Naaman eventually complied and was healed: his flesh was restored 'like the flesh of a young boy.'

In the Atalanta Fugiens, Naaman appears centrally in Emblem XIII, whose motto reads: 'The ore of the philosophers is dropsical and wants to be washed seven times in the river, just as Naaman the leper washed in the Jordan.' De Jong places this emblem within the albedo washing sequence running through Emblems XI through XIII (De Jong, pp. 70-71). The philosophical ore, like Naaman's body, is afflicted with impurity — described as 'dropsical,' meaning swollen with excess fluid and corrupted matter — and requires repeated cycles of washing and purification to be restored to health.

The discourse traces the Naaman allegory to the Clangor Buccinae, which instructs that the dropsical ore 'wants to be washed seven times in the river.' The sevenfold repetition corresponds to the iterative nature of alchemical purification: the substance must be dissolved, washed, and recongealed multiple times before the impurities are fully removed. De Jong notes that the Jordan River functions simultaneously as a chemical solvent and a baptismal font — the water that cures Naaman's physical disease is also the water that prefigures Christian baptism.

This sacramental overtone is deliberate on Maier's part. The history of Naaman is explicitly described as a prefiguration of baptism: the Jordan water expels the illness, the baptismal water purifies the soul. Maier exploits this typological reading to connect alchemical purification with spiritual cleansing — the washing of the ore participates in the same economy of purification as the Christian sacrament. Szulakowska reads this baptismal dimension as evidence of Maier's concealed Eucharistic theology, arguing that the AF systematically encodes sacramental meanings beneath its mythological and chemical surface.

The emblem connects to the broader purification sequence in the Atalanta Fugiens. Emblem III presents the washerwoman who cleanses soiled linen; Emblem XI demands that Latona be made white; Emblem XXVIII cures King Duenech's melancholy through the steam bath; and Emblem XIII washes the dropsical ore in the river. All encode the same stage of the Work — the albedo, the whitening — through different allegorical registers: domestic, classical, medical, and biblical.

Alchemically, the leprosy represents the impurity or 'dropsical' condition of the unrefined prima materia — the excess moisture and corruption that must be removed through repeated dissolution and evaporation. The sevenfold washing encodes the iterative character of the purification process, where each cycle removes another layer of impurity. The restoration of Naaman's flesh 'like the flesh of a young boy' corresponds to the emergence of the purified white substance — the philosophical silver or white stone — from the corrupted black matter.

For a general reader, Naaman demonstrates how Maier drew on biblical as well as classical sources for his symbolic vocabulary. The Syrian general's humiliating but effective cure — simply washing in a river, seven times, as a prophet instructed — mirrors the alchemist's challenge of trusting simple, repeated processes rather than seeking a dramatic single transformation.

Meanings Across Registers

De Jong shows that alchemical terms operate simultaneously across material, medical, spiritual, and cosmological dimensions.

Alchemical

The Syrian commander whose sevenfold immersion in the Jordan cleanses his leprosy: a biblical analogue Maier and earlier adepts read for the seven washings (ablutions) that purify the matter.

Medical

The paradigmatic case of cure-by-bathing: the therapeutic immersion that humoral and Paracelsian medicine alike inherited from biblical and classical balneology.

Spiritual

The pride-stricken seeker who must accept a humble remedy; the soul whose healing depends on relinquishing its own scheme and submitting to the prescribed sevenfold work.

Cosmological

The seven planetary spheres traversed by the soul in its purification, each ablution corresponding to the soul's stripping of one planetary garment in the Hermetic ascent.