A Y-shaped “Tree of Rarity” in an old Sendivogius printing — the bivium as alchemical ascent
Found this woodcut on Sendivogius edition and it’s been sitting with me. It’s labeled ARBOR RARITATIS, Tree of Rarity, under a Greek header that reads ΤΥΡΑΝΝΟΣ ΠΝΕΥΜΑΤΙΚΟΣ — “spiritual sovereign.”
What strikes me is that it’s built on the Pythagorean Y. The letter as the fork in the road, the choice between the lower and higher path. Here the trunk rises through the ages of a human life — infancy, boyhood, youth — and at the fork the soul’s material nature splits and begins to climb. Earth and water at the base, thinning upward toward air and fire at the crown. Density giving way to rarity. The two upper branches carry the harder words: on one side ABYSSVS, VIS, FRAVS — abyss, force, deceit — and on the other the Greek ΣΟΦΟΣ and ΦΙΛΟΣΟΦΟΣ, wise and lover-of-wisdom, climbing toward “Adeptus” beside the fire at the very top.
So the image reads to me as a moral-cosmological map disguised as a diagram of the elements. The descent into matter and the possible ascent back out, with the adept’s path running up the side of fire. The “spiritual sovereign” of the title being what you become if you take the right branch.
What I keep turning over: the choice in a classical bivium is moral — virtue or vice. Here it’s mapped onto elemental rarity, as if becoming rarer, less dense, \*is\* the virtuous ascent. Has anyone seen this rarefaction-as-virtue move elsewhere in the Hermetic material, or is Sendivogius doing something his own here?
Flagging honestly that I’m reading some of the smaller labels off a photograph and haven’t fixed the exact edition, so corrections welcome on both.