grünende
Anne Rößner

Scarcely has she made this plea, when she feels a heavy numbness move across her limbs, her soft breasts are enclosed by slender bark, her hair is changed to leaves, her arms to branches, her feet, so swift a moment before, stick fast in sluggish roots, a covering of foliage spreads across her face. All that remains of her is her shining beauty. Phoebus loved her in this form, as well.

(Ovid, Metamorphoses, early first century)

The first Treatise

The Philosopher’s Stone is produced by means of the Greening and Growing Nature. Hali the Philosopher, says thereof : ” This Stone rises in growing, greening things.” Wherefore when the Green is reduced to its former nature, whereby things sprout and come forth in ordained time, it must be decocted and putrefied in the way of our secret art. That by Art may be aided, what Nature decocts and putrefies, […].

(Salomon Trismosin, Splendor Solis or Sonnenglantz, early 16th century)

The lady in green: sat there, looking only occasionally over her narrow shoulder: she had been waiting for me for 500 years! She prepared the coat, more refined, lifted the white powdered nose and put the clever forehead further back: the thin fingers showed a funny and astonished game branched out decameronically (especially the stem-small ones) and the pointed grass tongue licked itself lesbian deeper under her robe.

(Arno Schmidt, Scenes from The Life of a Faun, 1953)