saturnian baptism

Saturn — god of time, transformation, and death — presides in alchemy over the Nigredo: the first stage of the work, the raw matter before its transmutation. The tree stump, dead but still present, becomes the object of an initiation rite — marked with colors as one marks what one wants to pass into another state. Baptism as an act of naming and transformation: giving a name to the matter is beginning to transform it. What is inert can become something else. In patience is your soul.