Alchymic Journals Read online

  OTHER BOOKS BY EVAN S. CONNELL

  The Anatomy Lesson and Other Stories

  At the Crossroads

  The Aztec Treasure House

  The Collected Stories of Evan S. Connell

  The Connoisseur

  Deus lo Volt!

  The Diary of a Rapist

  Double Honeymoon

  Francisco Goya

  A Long Desire

  Mesa Verde

  Mr. Bridge

  Mrs. Bridge

  Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel

  The Patriot

  Points for a Compass Rose

  Saint Augustine’s Pigeon

  Son of the Morning Star

  The White Lantern

  Copyright © 1991, 2005 by Evan S. Connell

  Previously published under the title The Alchymist’s Journal

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Sources for Editor’s Note and Glossary

  The Alchemical Tradition in the Late Twentieth Century, edited by Richard Grossinger.

  Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 1983.

  Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., vols. I, 25. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago, 1987.

  Paracelsus: Selected Writings, edited by Jolande Jacobi; translated by Norbert Guterman. Bollingen Series 28, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973.

  Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance, by Walter Pagel. New York: S. Karger, 1958.

  Paracelsus: Magic into Science, by Henry M. Pachter. New York: Henry Schuman, 1951.

  Prelude to Chemistry: An Outline of Alchemy, Its Literature and Relationships, by John Read. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Connell, Evan S., 1924-

  Alchymic journals/by Evan S. Connell.—An expanded ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Paracelsus, 1493-1541—Fiction. 2. Alchemists—Fiction. 3. Europe—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3553.O5 A79 2006

  813.’54—dc22

  2005042599

  Text design by David Bullen Photo Credit : Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY “Ex. 4-Trinity’s Trine, 1964” Jess (1923-2004)

  Shoemaker Hoard

  An Imprint of Avalon Publishing Group, Inc.

  1400 65th Street, Suite 250

  Emeryville, California 94608

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-690-2

  To William D. Turnbull

  Contents

  Editor’s Note

  Alchymic Journals

  Glossary

  Heaven has become empty space for us, a fair memory of things that were.

  But our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being.

  JUNG

  Editor’s Note

  ALCHEMY IS THE PURSUIT of the artificial production of gold and the search for immortality via a mysterious substance called the philosopher’s stone. The pursuit has been regarded throughout history as either flimflammery or the honest attempt to release value from the prison of rude matter, knowledge from ignorance, good from evil. Principal to alchemy is the belief in the gradual evolution and transformation of substance and the faith that one’s inner being can be changed by participating in external chemical experiments. Generally, alchemy relies on a system of synchronistic correspondences between planets, herbs, minerals, species of animals, signs and symbols, and parts of the body. Fundamentally, it involves mystery.

  At one point or another, alchemy has appeared in nearly every major early civilization, in Greece, China, India, Egypt, and early Europe. The ideas of alchemy are universal and have influenced numerous other disciplines. The noble quest to free the very soul and spirit of things—less the secrecy, spells, religious procedures, and hermetic formulations—eventually gave rise to modern chemistry.

  GREEK ALCHEMY

  Pre-Socratic philosophers wanted to know what elements composed matter, how the invisible generated the visible, why motion was sustained, and where the mind lay in the formulation of things. Aristotle and Plato’s theories of nature as derived from four elements, fire, water, earth, and air, and their properties, hot, wet, dry, and cold, helped form the basis of alchemical thought. The system was often symbolized in alchemical writings as a square. By altering the proportions of the elements present, alchemists believed one body could be changed, or transmuted. For example, when heat is introduced, water, which is wet and cold, changes to an invisible vapor, which is wet and hot. Greek thought held a powerful influence over medieval alchemy.

  EUROPEAN ALCHEMY

  The word alchemy is European, derived from Arabic, though the origin of the root word chem is uncertain. By 1300, the subject of alchemy was being discussed by the leading philosophers, scientists, and theologians of the day. Many alchemists were artisans, and in an effort to preserve their trade secrets and the esoteric nature of their practices, they devised concealing, symbolic names for the materials with which they worked. As alchemy progressed through the Middle Ages, its practice eventually led to the emergence of medical chemistry, or pharmacology, under the influence of Paracelsus in the sixteenth century. Alchemical discoveries of the period include mineral acids and alcohol.

  Renaissance chemists and physicists began to discount the possibility of transmutation, because of a renewed interest in Greek atomism. Chemical data collected by alchemists were reinterpreted and used as the foundation for modern chemistry. Not until the nineteenth century was the possibility of chemical gold-making conclusively contradicted by scientific evidence.

  PARACELSUS

  The major European alchemists of their times—Flamel, Seton, Helvetius, Paykull (even Sir Isaac Newton believed in and practiced alchemy)—were figures of enormous controversy. No alchemist, however, was as radical yet ultimately modern as Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim (1493–1541), who called himself Paracelsus. Paracelsus, whose pseudonym means “above or beyond Celsus,” regarded himself as even greater than Celsus, the renowned Roman physician of the first century.

  The famous alchemist was born in a village near Einsiedeln, now in Switzerland, the only son of a poor German doctor and chemist. His mother died when he was a child, and his father wanted his only son to follow him in the “art of medicine.” Young Paracelsus attended Bergschule, where young people were trained as overseers and analysts for mining operations in gold, tin, and mercury, as well as iron, alum, and copper-sulfate ores. From miners he learned that metals “grow” in the earth; he watched the seething transformations in the smelting vats. His early insights into metallurgy and chemistry fostered his imagination and laid the foundation for his remarkable discoveries in the field of chemotherapy.

  He eventually grew discontent with school. “The universities do not teach all things,” he wrote, “so a doctor must seek out old wives, gipsies, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws and take lessons from them. A doctor must be a traveller . . . knowledge is experience.” Thus, from 1513 to 1524 he traveled extensively, freed from an outworn medical orthodoxy whose chief resources were bleeding, purging, and emetics. He visited almost every known part of the world until 1524, when he settled in Basel and received an appointment to the university. There he became infamous as a brilliant, renegade professor prone to inflated language and erratic behavior. He attracted as many people as he repelled; his antipathy to medical orthodoxy intensified. To dramatize his position,
he publicly burned the works of Avicenna, the eleventh-century Arab philosopher, and Galen, the second-century Greek scientist whose theories had gone unchallenged for centuries. The passionate alchemist placed the books into a brass vase into which he had cast potassium nitrate and sulfur. This defiant act, imitating Luther’s burning of the Papal Bull, became a symbol of rebellion against pedantry and the unthinking acceptance of ancient doctrines and earned him the nickname “the Luther of Medicine.” His defiance also incurred the hatred of the conservatives and cut him off forever from the established school of medicine. Like Luther, Paracelsus was more attentive to his inner voice than to established authority. And just as Luther translated the Bible into the people’s language, Paracelsus used the vernacular—his native Swiss dialect—in scientific and philosophical essays.

  He continued his career outside the university until a conflict with magistrates brought his career abruptly to a close. He had numerous quarrels with society: Landlords had to sue him for rent, and he continually evaded contracts. He answered with countersuits and childish, self-righteous letters to authorities. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, he was forced to flee for his life. He wandered toward Colmar, in upper Alsace, for eight years until his mysterious death on September 24, 1541, at the White Horse Inn in Salzburg. Best accounts state he was poisoned at the instigation of the medical establishment.

  As an alchemist, Paracelsus had found the making of gold beneath his talents: His interest was less in the material than in the human. He thoroughly investigated the philosophy of health and disease, but he did not limit himself to abstract thinking. He published a clinical description of syphilis in 1530 that maintained the disease could be successfully treated, foreshadowing the Salvarsan treatment of 1909. In 1536 he published The Great Surgery Book, a treatise that emphasized cleanliness in surgery. He declared that miner’s disease (silicosis) resulted from inhaling metal vapors and not, as it was then believed, from mountain spirits’ punishment for sin. Paracelsus was also the first to state that, given in small doses, “what makes a man ill also cures him,” an anticipation of the modern practice of vaccination. He was the first to connect goiter with minerals, especially lead, in drinking water. He taught according to the belief that “nature heals, the doctor nurses.”

  His great work, Sagacious Philosophy of the Great and Small World, considers man, salvation, the healing power of stones, meteorology, ghosts, and the possibility of the human voice being carried long distances “by the aid of pipes and crystals.” His curiosity and quest for knowledge resonated throughout his life and after his death contributed to the legend of Dr. Faustus.

  ALCHEMY IN LITERATURE, PSYCHOLOGY AND MYTH

  An errant knight of science, Paracelsus exerted a powerful influence not only on his own time but also on succeeding centuries as his persona became absorbed in the Western literary tradition. Goethe, Marlowe, Spenser, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare (notably Prospero in The Tempest), Yeats, H. D., and Joyce were concerned with alchemy and alchemists. Robertson Davies, Gabriel García Márquez, and many other contemporary writers incorporate alchemists or the idea of alchemy in their writing. Through literature, alchemy and its images have been internalized. Some current literary theories even suggest alchemic reading of texts. The metaphors of hermeticism, hidden meaning, transmutation or development, and the search for immortality lie at the crux of the analysis of literature.

  Paracelsus and his alchemy were no less an influence on modern psychology. Struck by the analogy between the symbolism found in the dreams of his patients and the symbolism of alchemy, the great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung seriously delved into alchemical literature. “Paracelsus, an almost legendary figure in our time, was a preoccupation of mine when I was trying to understand alchemy, especially its connection with natural philosophy. . . . We see in Paracelsus not only a pioneer in the domains of chemical medicine, but also [a pioneer] in those of an empirical psychological healing science,” he wrote. The conclusions Jung formed from the study of alchemy are an integral part of his work and modern psychological understanding, and they have given us a new perspective on the genius of Paracelsus in particular. Fascinated by the alchemists’ attention to the redemption of matter, Jung found that in the depths of the unconscious mind, processes occur that bear remarkable likeness to the stages of spiritual operation: mysticism, alchemy, hermeticism. The unconscious tends to be the trans-conscious: the quest to release and then possess the Self—what Jung called individuation. The alchemist’s philosopher’s stone—capable of making gold from lead, of changing the world, in other words—was an instrument for immortality and ultimate freedom. And Jung isolated a psychological philosopher’s stone in us all—our imaginations, hallucinations, and dreams.

  Writers like Joseph Campbell would later enlarge upon Jung’s work to show how all myth operates in this same transforming, ultimately healing manner—leading us back to the great vision of Paracelsus, his drive to separate wheat from chaff, wisdom from stupidity.

  ***

  Paracelsus wrote in the juicy pre-Lutheran Swiss German dialect, which he interspersed with medical and philosophical lingo from school Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and with imaginative coinages of his own. Moreover, the style is spiced with German slang, obscenities and epithets of a highly personal character. No translation can possibly render the individual flavor of this gasping, searching, and emphatic attempt to create a scientific medium in the vernacular.

  HENRY M. PACHTER, Paracelsus: Magic into Science

  What may be most impressive about Evan Connell’s Alchymic Journals is the perfect ventriloquism he achieves in channeling the distinctive voice and genius of Paracelsus from the sixteenth century to the present. Connell’s curiosity, art, and stylistic restlessness have established him as one of the great individualists of contemporary literature. Now, in a book that combines sumptuous language, startling historical clarity, and a visionary investigation of folly and the hope for healing, Connell uses the framework of Paracelsus’s alchemy (and the reactions to it) to portray humanity’s bullishness and great moments of grace. Connell’s voices transform and mock, announce dire news and imagine great harmonies, ferment and redeem.

  Alchymic Journals comprises seven sections, narrated in turn by Paracelsus, a devout novice, an elderly skeptic, a conscientious physician, a Christian historian, a revolutionary, and, finally, a philosopher. A tour de force of tonal recreation, the book resembles an alchemical puzzle—secretive, suggestive—while also being a genuinely modern “wisdom book”—attending to knowledge, ignorance, imperfection, sex, emotions, morals, history, mysteries, disaster, and, ultimately, harmony.

  FROM MY FATHER I LEARNED ASTROLOGY and medicine. Aged sixteen I entered the university at Basel but went away dissatisfied. I traveled to Würzburg yet there again I could not find what I wanted, nor at the metallurgic school of Sigismund Fugger. In the Savon valley at the convent of St. Andrew dutifully I listened to august bishops—to Mathias Schacht of Freisingen, Mathias Scheydt of Rottgach, and to Eberhardt Baumgartner. Yet all for what? I have traveled to Munich, Regensburg, Noerdlingen, Amberg, Hongary, Meran, Krain, Maehren, St. Gall and Kaernthen, encountering emptiness everywhere. Out of Germany I wandered through Italy and France to the gloomy Netherlands, to England, Scandinavia and Russia, but what did I gain? Aged twenty-three I returned to Basel, there to be crowned Professor! Hah! Like some mud-plastered Swiss boar reeking dung I pretended to wallow among obsequious compliments while plucking feathers from the tails of malt-worm pseudologues in blue velvet that strutted, preened and croaked from the dais like pigeons on a ledge. Now look at my reward! Say that I clutched a plough, greased wheels, served cabbage or played the lute—all would understand my trade. I would be welcome in any province. But for challenging dead doctrine and seeking the universal catholicon I am reviled by medicasters lost at the back of the world rammy and wet, blaring like goats to prank up themselves—gowned vultures, cock-chafers jumbling on the bed, temple thieves boasting more toes t
han teeth, maskers with legs aspew like arches under a bridge and tails more noteworthy than their heads. Oily saltimbanks! Brangling knaves! Fabulists! Strokers and scrapers with the eyes of blood-letting Saldanian chymists that prescribe a dying man twenty poisons for one. Mewling advocates of Greek sophistry. Red-brindled Hungarian pigs that mistake the Danube for the sea. What confounds them they curse as Beelzebub’s work! Curs barking after genius that think to bite my shoe! Hah! What are their names in the street? Sycophants vomiting yellowed lies, sons of cuckolds that grope toward paradise in a milk-maid’s crotch. Indentured almond-pickers prescribing slough water and sow-piss, brewing emetics of rinsings. I hear better medicine whistle from a cheesemonger’s bung. So they cry out how I inveigh upon Doctors, Councillors, Chirugeons, green-pizzle Pantologists. And this is true. But why? Because I know what they are made of because Nature has put her autograph on them. I despise the house which is faulty and lets in rain. Jiggish imposters! Rogues jabbering dead prayers! And there are others so numerous I do not name them. I have met plenty.

  I AM CALLED Heretic for asserting truth, called Luther’s Ass—impious—since I look to causes instead of gaping with disbelief like inhabitants of asylums that misjudge reality. I was not born Geber’s cook—my mouth a passport, ormolu my fortune. Neither was I ordained to be a fiddler nor iniquitous privy-rat. I am no silver-sucking roach or pocky Quean. Neither would I be strangled by any woman’s garter. So how would I accept the argument of lesser men with brains as blank as slates that ratify what others dictate? I hear the east wind blow through their souls. Scabby lechers on rattly shanks, atheists, flea-sprung wits, sons of potters, whoremasters scraped out of sheep, fleering grinning moldy mountebanks, liverish prostitutes hawking greasy nostrums with fingers that twitch and jerk to see a bulging leather purse, servile boasting quacks in shit-stained breeches, malsters, sodomites fornicating upon rear stoops with spaniels or kitchen help—how many mumble and glory at the title of Physician? Doctor Slop! Puppets skipping on a showman’s wire with brains delivered to them backward like a clyster, drips from a waning moon, thoughts scattered like nails in a peddler’s pack, emptying wormy cups while attending Egyptian athanors, hop-whistling rancid quarreling puking disciples, meat-shop philosophers ignorant of true medicine’s requisite—Sapientia! Tetrick bloat-herrings waxed fat with deceit that set up practice among hedgerows from Prague to Geneva and market vermifuge less salubrious than frog guts in a wine glass, all spouting windy proverbs for love of a florin! Summer breeds not half so many mosquitoes as those accursed horse pintles ripped with lice! The severity of their offences I will transcribe on their foreheads because I know their balance-sheet.