Jason

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Jason is the hero of one of the oldest stories in Greek myth: the prince who gathered a crew of heroes, sailed the ship Argo to the far edge of the known world, and brought back the Golden Fleece. He is named already in Homer — the Odyssey speaks of the Argo as the ship known to all men — and the voyage was old when the surviving versions were written. The fullest account, the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, dates only from the third century BCE, by which time the tale had been retold for centuries. (This Apollonius, the Alexandrian poet and librarian, is a separate man from the later sage Apollonius of Tyana.)

The voyage and its outline

The outline is constant across the tellings. Jason, son of Aeson, is cheated of his kingdom of Iolcus by his uncle Pelias, who has seized the throne and fears a prophecy that a man wearing a single sandal will bring him down. When Jason arrives at court with one foot bare — he had lost a sandal carrying a disguised goddess across a river — Pelias sends him after the fleece of a golden ram, kept in distant Colchis at the eastern edge of the Black Sea, hung on a tree in a sacred grove and guarded by a sleepless dragon, on the understanding that he will not return.

He does return. To do it he assembles the Argo and a crew drawn from the first generation of Greek heroes — the catalog of Argonauts varies, but it gathers the strongest names the age could muster, Hercules among them on the outward leg, and Orpheus, whose lyre sets the rowers’ stroke and whose song outsings the Sirens where strength would fail. The voyage out is an episodic catalog of dangers passed: the Symplegades, the clashing rocks that grind shut on whatever sails between them, threaded by sending a dove ahead and rowing through in the instant they recoil; the Harpies, the snatching bird-women who foul the food of the blind seer Phineus until the sons of the North Wind drive them off; and at the homeward edge of the world the bronze giant Talos, the living statue who circles the shore of Crete and hurls boulders at any ship that nears, undone at last through the single vein that runs the height of his body.

The fleece itself is won only with the help of Medea, the Colchian king’s daughter, a sorceress and granddaughter of the sun who falls in love with Jason and turns her powers to his cause. It is she who gives him the salve that armors him against fire and iron so that he can yoke the fire-breathing bronze-hoofed bulls and survive the crop of armed men that springs from the sown dragon’s teeth; she who lulls the guardian dragon to sleep so that the fleece can be taken down; she who, in flight, contrives the pursuers’ delay by the most savage means the tradition records. Her later story — when Jason sets her aside in Corinth to marry a king’s daughter, and she answers by destroying the bride and killing the children she bore him — becomes the bleakest in the whole body of Greek myth.

Jason is in this respect an unusual hero. Much of what he accomplishes is done for him or to him — by gods who back the expedition, by Medea whose magic clears every obstacle the bulls and the dragon present, by the strength of a crew that includes the strongest man alive. He persuades, he endures, he is rescued; he rarely simply overpowers. The figure who gives the Argonautica its name is often its most passive presence, and his great failures are failures of fidelity rather than of nerve — the oath broken with Medea is what the tradition remembers against him, not any want of courage on the water. When the voyage is done, the Argo is drawn up and dedicated, and the ship is set among the stars: the constellation Argo Navis, cataloged by Ptolemy among the forty-eight figures of the Almagest in the second century CE, and so large that the eighteenth-century astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille later broke it into three — Carina the keel, Puppis the stern, Vela the sails — which still ride the southern sky.

The fleece as the alchemical secret

That ambiguity did little to dim the myth’s afterlife, and one strand of it carries the figure into the long memory of the hermetic arts. Readers working in the tradition that treated pagan fable as veiled philosophy took the quest for the Golden Fleece as an image of the alchemical work — the fleece standing for the secret of transmutation, the voyage for the staged labor of the process, the guardian dragon for the obstacle the adept must subdue. In the fullest of these readings every element of the story finds its place at the furnace: Jason becomes the philosopher who undertakes the work, Medea the exact meditation or art that governs it, the sea-passage the succession of operations, the fire-breathing dragon the volatile principles of salt and sulphur, and the fleece itself the tincture — the perfected substance, the goal that crowns the labor. The reading is not native to the myth; it is the kind of allegorical recovery that flourished from late antiquity through the Renaissance, when alchemists routinely found their own pursuit prefigured in older texts and read their craft back into Homer, Ovid, and the Egyptian gods. No ancient teller of the Argonaut story meant the fleece so, and the matter is one of how the alchemists read rather than of what the Greeks intended. The association nonetheless became durable enough that the Golden Fleece served as a recognized byword for the alchemical secret.

The byword has an oddly literal root. Already in late antiquity a rationalizing current held that the fleece was never an animal pelt at all but a book — a text written on prepared skin, a parchment treatise teaching how to make gold, and that this, not a magical ram, was the prize the Argo sailed for. The seventh-century Byzantine chronicler John of Antioch records the claim that the fleece was a book on parchment teaching the manufacture of gold by the art; the tenth-century lexicon known as the Suda repeats it, naming the art by the word that would harden into “alchemy”; and the grammarian Eustathius of Thessalonica, writing in the twelfth century, preserves a still earlier version traced to Charax of Pergamon, who made the fleece a technique for writing in gold upon skins. The pun was too good to lose: a fleece of gold, written on a hide, holding the formula for gold. The alchemists of the Latin West inherited it ready-made.

So when the art acquired its great printed compendia, the Golden Fleece was already a title in waiting. Giovanni Aurelio Augurello (1441–1524), the Italian humanist of Giorgione’s Venice, composed the Chrysopoeia — the “gold-making” — a Neo-Latin poem in Virgilian hexameters, modeled on the Georgics and dedicated to Pope Leo X, that took the making of gold as its subject and the Argonautic voyage among its governing images; it stands as the first sustained alchemical poem in classical Latin verse. A century on, the Aureum Vellus — “The Golden Fleece” — appeared under the name of the half-legendary Salomon Trismosin, printed at Rorschach in 1598 and carrying within it the first printing of the illuminated Splendor Solis; it was Englished in the seventeenth century simply as The Golden Fleece, the myth’s name now serving plainly as the name of the work itself. Guglielmo Mennens of Antwerp gathered his Aurei Velleris libri tres (“Three Books of the Golden Fleece”) in 1604, a treatise read into the great Theatrum Chemicum among the texts that built the Latin tradition of medieval and early-modern alchemy. Michael Maier, court physician to Rudolf II and the most learned of the mythographers of the art, turned the whole apparatus of Greek and Egyptian fable into a cipher for the work in his Arcana Arcanissima of 1614, the founding text of what later scholarship calls his mythoalchemy. The same reading runs back through the imagery handled in Renaissance hermetism — where every old fable was a leaf of the one ancient wisdom — and forward into the eighteenth century, when Dom Antoine-Joseph Pernety devoted long pages of his Fables égyptiennes et grecques dévoilées (1758) to decoding Jason, Medea, and the dragon as the matter, the art, and the perils of the laboratory. The hero’s name had become, in this second life, a heading under which the secret was filed.

The Argonaut belongs in this company alongside the other classical figures the allegorists pressed into the service of the art: Hercules, whose labors mapped onto stages of purification, and whom Maier set beside Jason as a worker of the great work; the Hermes of the alchemists, whose name the metal mercury still carries; the whole roster of gods and heroes read as encoded chemistry in the manner the art took from Zosimos of Panopolis onward and built into a genealogy of hidden wisdom — the prisca theologia that let a Greek poem and an alchemical recipe be two faces of one truth. The practitioners who quarried the myth most heavily for it — Paracelsus, to whom Trismosin was reputed teacher, and the great cosmographer of the art Robert Fludd — worked in a world where the fleece on the tree and the stone in the crucible were the same prize told twice.

Sources and the textual record

The myth’s primary witness is the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, an epic in four books composed in Hellenistic Alexandria and surviving entire; R. C. Seaton’s 1912 Loeb translation remains the standard public-domain English text, and is freely readable in full. The older strata — Homer’s passing references, Pindar’s fourth Pythian ode, the lost epics — are mapped against the surviving evidence in Timothy Gantz’s Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), the reference standard for the early tradition, while Richard Hunter’s The Argonautica of Apollonius: Literary Studies (Cambridge University Press, 1993) treats the Hellenistic poem itself.

The alchemical afterlife has its own scholarship. The keystone study is Antoine Faivre’s The Golden Fleece and Alchemy (a translation of his Toison d’or et alchimie, with a foreword by Joscelyn Godwin), which traces the motif from late paganism through the Renaissance and the chivalric Order of the Golden Fleece into the alchemical and Masonic readings of the eighteenth century; the publisher’s record sets out its scope. Augurello’s poem is now available in Matteo Soranzo’s critical edition, Giovanni Aurelio Augurello (1441–1524) and Renaissance Alchemy: A Critical Edition of Chrysopoeia and Other Alchemical Poems (Brill, 2020, in the Renaissance Society of America Texts and Studies series). The broader mythoalchemy of Michael Maier — the reading of Greek fable as alchemical code that made the Golden Fleece a working figure of the art — is treated in the scholarship gathered around the Atalanta Fugiens and its kin, and the place of the Mennens Aurei Velleris and the Aureum Vellus within the Latin compendia is documented in the modern history of the printed alchemical canon, Lawrence Principe’s The Secrets of Alchemy (University of Chicago Press, 2013) chief among the surveys.

What the early sources offer is not a moral hero but a successful one, carried by the help of others toward a prize whose later meanings would far outrun the story that first held it. The ship was set among the stars and broken there into three; the fleece passed into a second life as the name of a secret its first tellers could not have foreseen, written, the rationalizers insisted from the start, on skin.

→ In the library: The Hermetic Museum (Waite, 1893) · The Turba Philosophorum (Waite, 1896)

→ Related: Medea · Hercules · Orpheus · Alchemy · Latin Medieval Alchemy · Zosimos Of Panopolis · Paracelsus · Robert Fludd · Prisca Theologia · Renaissance Hermetism · Hermes Trismegistus · Mercury