The Rosarium Philosophorum ("Rosary of the Philosophers") is an influential sixteenth-century alchemical text, printed in 1550 at Frankfurt as the second part of a compilation, and famous above all for its series of twenty woodcuts portraying the conjunction of a King and Queen, Sol and Luna, as a cycle of union, death, putrefaction and resurrection. The images dramatise the chemical wedding at the heart of alchemical symbolism: the naked pair meet, join, lie together in a single grave as the "dead" conjoined body, the soul departs and returns, and a reborn hermaphroditic figure rises, the whole read as the marriage and rebirth of opposing principles.
The text itself is a compilation of older authorities. Its later fame owes much to C. G. Jung, who used the Rosarium woodcuts as the backbone of his long essay "The Psychology of the Transference," reading the sequence of union and death as a symbolic account of the relationship between analyst and patient and, more generally, of the integration of the psyche, so that a Renaissance chemical allegory became a central document of twentieth-century depth psychology.