The Rebis

Documented origin

The Rebis — from the Latin res bina, “double thing” — is an alchemical figure depicting a two-headed being, one head male and one female, standing atop a dragon or winged sphere. The image appears prominently in the tradition associated with Heinrich Khunrath’s Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae (1595) and the works attributed to Basil Valentine in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The figure’s dual-sexed body holds the sun and moon — the solar and lunar principles of alchemy — one in each hand, and stands as the visual summary of the Great Work’s culminating stage: the coniunctio, or sacred marriage of opposites.

The reading

In the alchemical tradition, Manly P. Hall reads the Rebis as the image of achieved wholeness — the point at which the Work is complete. The male and female principles that drive all of nature’s processes, held in tension throughout the alchemical stages, are here reconciled into a single integrated being. Mark Passio places the Rebis within the broader teaching on natural law: the figure embodies the understanding that solar (active, generative) and lunar (receptive, formative) forces are not opposed but complementary, and that mastery of the self requires holding both. The Rebis is, in this reading, a forerunner of the Baphomet’s androgyny — the same knowledge, a different vessel.

Where it hides today

The Rebis endures in occult and esoteric art as a teaching image of integration. Symbolism scholars and students of Jungian psychology find in it an early Western articulation of the conjunctio oppositorum — the union of apparent opposites as the path to wholeness. The figure is quiet now, confined mostly to illustration and academic study, but the idea it carries — that completion requires the union of contraries, not the victory of one over the other — has never left the tradition.