Oedipus is the tragic hero of Greek mythology and Sophoclean drama — the prince of Thebes who, abandoned at birth because of a prophecy that he would kill his father, was raised in ignorance of his true parentage, solved the riddle of the Sphinx, inadvertently killed his father Laius, and married his own mother Jocasta. The incestuous marriage and the patricide, horrifying when read literally, are transformed in Maier's alchemical reading into allegories for the necessary destruction of the parental cause by its own effect and the reunion of the product with its material origin.

In the Atalanta Fugiens, Oedipus is the subject of Emblem XXXIX, whose motto reads: 'Oedipus, having conquered the Sphinx and having killed his father Laius, married his mother.' The discourse, drawing on the Turba Philosophorum's Bacasser, develops both the Sphinx's riddle and the Oedipus narrative as interconnected alchemical allegories. The Sphinx, Maier argues, represents the obscurity of alchemical doctrine, and those who attempt to solve her riddle and fail are ruined — they lose their possessions and are consumed by grief at having failed in the Work.

The Sphinx's riddle — What has four feet in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening? — receives a specifically alchemical answer in Maier's discourse, following Rhazes: 'The Stone is a Triangle in its essence, and a square in its properties' (De Jong, pp. 256-258). The four feet represent the square of the four elements; the two represent the hemisphere with its two lines (straight and curved), signifying the whitened Luna; and the three represent the triangle of body, soul, and spirit, or Sol, Luna, and Mercury. This geometric reading connects Emblem XXXIX directly to the formula of Emblem XXI: make a circle out of a man and a woman, out of this a square, out of this a triangle, and you will have the Philosopher's Stone.

The picture of Emblem XXXIX presents the Oedipus story in a circular composition, beginning with the Sphinx in the background and moving anti-clockwise through the stages: Oedipus meets the Sphinx; the foreground shows man as a crawling child (four feet, with the square of elements on his forehead), as an upright adult (two feet, with the hemisphere on his forehead), and as an old man leaning on a stick (three, with the triangle on his forehead); the patricide and the meeting of mother and son complete the circle. De Jong reads the circular composition as embodying the circular form of the alchemical process itself.

The patricide — Oedipus killing Laius — represents the consequence destroying its cause, just as in Emblem XII, Saturn is succeeded by Jupiter who unmans him. The marriage with the mother represents the reunion of the effect with its material origin, the union of opposites that produces the philosopher's stone. Oedipus's swollen feet, which prevent him from running, hide 'a great secret' connecting him to Emblem V's toad: his slowness means he reduces other things to a solid condition and is not volatile to fire — he is the fixed principle.

De Jong notes that in the story of Oedipus, Maier symbolizes the entire alchemical process from materia prima to the completion by the uniting of opposites, and that the process contains the same secrets as the Osiris-Isis mysteries.

For a general reader, Oedipus represents the alchemist as puzzle-solver. The riddle the Sphinx poses is the riddle of nature itself — encoded in contradictory language that destroys the unworthy but rewards the perceptive. Maier's message is that the alchemical texts are deliberately obscure, and only the reader with Oedipus's sharp intellect can penetrate their veil.

Meanings Across Registers

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

Alchemical

The interpreter of the Sphinx's riddle whom Maier (especially in his Arcana Arcanissima) treats as paradigm of the alchemical reader: the one whose decipherment of veiled language is itself the operation.

Medical

The diagnostician whose riddle-solving epitomizes Hippocratic semiotics: reading occult signs in surface symptoms to name the hidden cause, so that the physician's word itself begins the cure.

Spiritual

The seeker confronting the riddle of his own being; the soul whose self-recognition is both liberation and tragic burden, anticipating the modern hermeneutic of the unconscious.

Cosmological

The figure positioned at a cosmological crossroads where the human, the bestial, and the divine meet; the riddle of being-in-the-world that the four-elementary cosmos poses to its inhabitants.