Alchymic Journals Read online

  AS SURELY AS Jehovah charged miners with the onerous task of purifying ore so that mineral wealth may be extracted, so did He enjoin each alchymic physician to reconstitute Mankind. Once the body becomes reconciled with the spirit, delivered of gross impurity, Man will come striding forth to stun the universe with his eminence. Who could dispute his legacy were he to embrace the morning star?

  THE SIGNATURE BENEATH which each hermetic novitiate labors we say is the Cross. This must be true because Man resembles an infant that was privileged to stand upright, surmounting what has determined him in order to observe and to approve his own validity. Therefore, Man makes himself subservient to that lacerating solitude which follows upon perception. Accordingly he feels anguish throughout his life, and dying takes precedence over complacent animals. Such is the Crown he was given, such is the Sceptre.

  WE ASK WHAT becomes of religious prophets in our impious age. We recall how twelve merchants from Genoa sailing past Tunis wondered at the radiance that issued from a pyramid of rock, so forthwith put ashore and discovered the bloody corpse of Raimundus Lullius, stoned by Mahometans for whom the message of Christ’s apotheosis aroused unspeakable rage and loathing. That a man be right or wrong at his judgment seems no matter, he makes a beacon either way.

  FROM THE ORBIT of the firmament we watch lights cast out by an astonishing hand that has determined their course, the pace and circuit of each—which ascends or declines—because no single thing can be superior to its equivalent and each was meant to fulfill its indecipherable purpose. But as we inhabit a stationary earth oblivious to its end, with faint ideas of Genesis and listen to reverberations of faint voices, how could we not feel subject to limits, like the helpless Mussel twisting against umbilical sinew. We ask when the light of life, which is the Golden Fleece, shall diffuse its glory around the body of the seeker.

  LET US NOT abbreviate the curricula of philosophy nor grind and quibble against our lot. Why suck and chew a withered globe of dreams? Rather, let us like Synesius feel gratitude that we have been endowed with two pairs of eyes, one above, one below. Let us not compare our stipend to that of the Sun, nor to pleasant exsufflations of rising planets, nor to those circuitous pathways of love and remembrance nor of moments which affront and persecute the day by ordering each gesture, none of which can we establish, since the wisest instructors of chymistry and theology and mathematics have proved unable to document their existence. False exits delude us. Thus we pause, undecided between painted openings.

  THERE IS CONCEALMENT to Metaphysic, but for every science its key, earthly or unearthly, since otherwise we are lost and travel perplexed, aggrieved, solitary and disconsolate. The benefit of learning we equate with that of experience, troubled, passive yet querulous, inciting what we deplore while pursuing moderate charities, afraid and censorious, seeking disparate comfort beneath senseless tides of music, but like an empty barrel booming portentous sound.

  ARE WE NOT quick to observe the beauty of an uncurled rose? Yet superior attributes manifest themselves while the form disintegrates. And much as we annotate divinity with Galen’s De Usu Partium which we consider equivalent to the philosophy of Suarez, so with a single flower do we forecast the intent and progress of universal renovation that makes up prismatic images of joy and to all changeable things their changeless inclination.

  NOW THERE BE many coarse movements to earth with equivocal shapes like Egyptian tricks, or that famous river Arethusa which loses its current one place only to rise up distant. Thus the world is as it was while men reiterate their lives round about the periphery, complete with flexible judgment. So must each anagogic philosopher seeking first principles theurgically prepare himself by passing among incandescent solutions and dissolutions and ordeals with corrosive tests. Indifferent to popularity will he advance from Centricities to Extremes, visiting the Indies—both greater and lesser—by which men implicate heaven and earth, Daphne or Phoebus, considering the harmony in liberation.

  NOW THE CHYMIST with his trade prepares to analyze and distil and refine occluded liquid, whereas an alchymist at his craft sets forth to direct the novice through qualified reflections, and therefore he must demonstrate how the Magnum Opus begins. At first the initiate will observe Nigredo, or retrogression, during which components are relegated to primary constituents. Next appears Rebirth, while shadows reorganize their elements. Third appears the stage of Albedo during which matter whitens. Last he observes Rubedo, symbol of finality when transcendent matter surpasses yellow—whereupon an Imperial Infant arises beneath whose aegis the bitterest dregs and sords of humanity shall be protected.

  LET US SAY our novice invests the Stone with its huge reward. He would not privately hold this talent for his collection of dry appointments but commit everything to his brothers, meditating upon how he was provided a treasure among bones since he will be required to give accounts by an inflexible judge that abhors periphrastic words. And if he act properly according to his understanding, so in accordance with theirs shall others act. Now this is true, although we have neither touched, watched, nor listened to the atoms of divinity.

  OPPOSED BY TWO-FOLD labors of duality, because the secret of material transmutation promises neither more nor less than spiritual regeneration, the neophyte should undertake gnomic experiments against a foundation of inconceivable anguish, lest the crucible be shattered, lest he may vaunt irrational power. Nature we liken to a Sieve through which enlightenment may be assigned or withheld.

  LET THE APPRENTICE know that what he writes or professes is not his own since all things precede and outlast him so that he has but one contribution, which is the pattern of their embellishment. Therefore he is but a transitory instrument to calculate uncommon shapes for common truth. Who would impeach the light?

  FIVE CENTURIES BEFORE Abraham marched down to Egypt, which was before the Deluge, Adam’s grandson Hermes Trismegistus lifted the sacred chalice to his lips. Homage to this master, thrice-greatest, resting in his private apartment in Cheops’ pyramid, from whose hand Alexander took the Tabula Smaragdina with that unmentionable formula. But to the covetous or delinquent graduate we would award false profit—a wealth of drifting ash.

  LET IT BE understood how the temple of Solomon was erected with the help of Hiram and Queen Sheba. So shall the stone of the wise be perfected through successive circulations. Now this immaculate stone becomes the rock of Christianity, a Numinous Child whose essence is two-fold, whose exoteric nature grows manifest while the esoteric remains concealed. And we wonder if glass might not be compared to that stone like those fools among men who take up attitudes or aspects of color with all sorts of divers and contradictory shapes and without melting can be repaired, but stream from sight like pretty liquors poured on sand in whose soul the agent of transfiguration which we call holy grace has yet to act.

  WE HAVE HEARD the voices of Commerce naming us possessed that conjoin poverty with dungbeds and urge metal upward, crushing egg-shell by the cast of sooty lamps to grapple at mystery, summoning old correctives to meliorate brutish residue, so much in exchange for a glimpse of incandescent yellow slag. Peasants quarrel, lie bugger, drink and shout upon scullery maids by the hedgerow while great discoveries flutter from patched bellows to pockets vacant as a skull. Such are the wages of hermetic philosophy. But let it be. We ask no unprecedented honorarium since by alchymic craft we transmute men to makers of prodigious dreams.

  WE LEARN HOW Beguinius discourses with his Tyrocinium on the extraction of quick-silver from diurnal atmosphere, of oleaginous sulphur that is a viscid balm conserving the interior warmth of human organs as well as of alchymy’s third hypostatic principle, or Salt, which resembles earth dryly encrusted, conferring brackishness and solidity with taste, thereby preserving all from putrefaction—counsel at once sacred and profane. And because we think it unwise to formulate answers prematurely, we repudiate disclosure through subscription to riddle.

  WE ASSERT THAT Solomon himself withheld the incomprehensible while thric
e-famous Hermes earlier had sought an exaltation of imperfect metals through the development of quicksilver, which emulates gold in quality and weight but was prohibited from enjoying prosperity by crudities beneath the soil. Thus we expect Mankind to lament its future not unlike this metal denied a legitimate place on earth, or like a hapless beast watching Death examine the horizon. So we say of each object that it must be the fruit of its element and that its origin is revealed by the element to which it returns. Quick-silver regresses to poverty, nymphs to liquid, witches to the wind. Man himself protests, roils, and having poured out his gifts lies down wretchedly next to darkness. None can dispute this. Who would doubt that particular numbers possess secret magic? Who doubts that Apollo’s music reverberated from the walls of Troy?

  WE ASSERT THAT the Red Lion, Tinctura Physicorum, beloved of five hundred authors but thought impossible to achieve, has been accomplished by Hali, Albertus Magnus and Hermes Trismegistus. We regard its nature as wholly indescribable since each distillation requires the presence of two adepts laboring in unimaginable harmony. Revelation of this formula would cause the sophist to grow blasphemous just as the venal might shiver with anticipatory delight. Therefore a claimant expects less than nothing, pointing to the Ladder of Paradise whose seven rungs correspond to seven vowels or seven planets, each comprised of a different essence. So this is an alphabet conceived in secrecy to withhold magisteric art from chapmen instructed at birth like rapacious hornets to pillage flowers, from commonalities trudging between Jupiter and Pluto.

  WE BELIEVE VESSELS holding flatulent or vaporous palliatives should be ordered like the alembic because delicate spirits must be drawn through a slender neck. Consider the Giraffe which is famous for his generosity, unlike the Hippopotamus or the Bear, or barnyard Swine. Nature devises various forms and proposes for each creature that shape thought congenial to its animus. Nor can any one be what it is not. The Tiger—could he play a flute?

  IS IT NOT imperative to mark a disposition among entities of individuality or of kind? Consider the wrathful Leopard who rushes and springs after his prey with little regard, which is extravagant. So does the insistent Harlot make bold and we call her mendacious. Also, there is a natural enmity and amity among beings which will command them to disperse or to rejoice, like the amiable Dog jumping and frolicking about the foot of its master while the cowardly Sheep rushes bleating from the Wolf. And so, being engrafted by nature, essences do not change, albeit we have seen herbs withdraw from their purpose to resuscitate the ailing and morient, stars deviate from their course to signal imminent events, and upon its passionate flight we have witnessed the Soul accomplish more than alchymic ligatures.

  WE BELIEVE THREE elements unite in the Soul. The nutritive we share with vegetables, and with animals the susceptive, but rationality is our private possession. How excellently is Man arranged, how much more attractive than subordinate creatures, since upon his countenance drifting expressions indicate divine comprehension while his generative members display their exquisite and noble symmetry. So we dispute those Manichees who claim we were denied a throne on earth and announce them wrong in the argument. With its cornucopia of jewels and fruits this world was meant for our pleasure. But of various gifts bestowed upon humanity we would assert the greatest to be that of Philosophers who guide and escort and direct us through blazing thickets.

  NOW ARE THERE not four elements to the square? Or the circle, where does it lead if not upward? Or the habitat of divinity, is not this triangular? Yet how do we compute the mathematics of Heaven? If it has neither beginning nor end its boundaries cannot be estimated and its embodiment we fail to construe.

  LET US SAY we admit sentience to the most frivolous weed, then what should be dismissed—left alone next to the gate with its face turned aside? What fails to share the mercy and beneplacit of our Lord?

  SUPPOSE THAT A man refuses to identify the evil he observes, how might he profit? Upon what watch was he ordered, if not to adjudicate? Do we define ourselves with consonant pieties, knitting the scattered remnants of what once was?

  BEHOLD THE ANCIENT fabric of our tapestry—how it deteriorates. Women have brought forth sightless basilisks dressed in scales, furious in hair and talons. Lord, with what unseemly confidence has Mankind usurped Thy vast prerogative. And do they call Thee Ourobouros?

  SO! WHO APPEARS cloaked with rage? On this restful Sabbath what journey seems imperative? Saint Augustine has affirmed the existence of but one sovereign philosophy that was absent from the world since Time began, which is called Christian and has endured by passing through innumerable vicissitudes with many shapes of transgression and of wickedness, being rephrased and magically elucidated when Mankind is debased. And with its one office it has but one catholic watchword: Ye shall be born again.

  Rumors of a wandering magus conceived in heresy and mistrust that would resurrect us before the gates of Prague have shut.

  Glossary

  The language of alchemical writing is weighted with technical terms and neologisms. For readers unfamiliar with alchemical literature (and Connell’s erudite vocabulary), the following glossary is provided. Any attempt to translate Paracelsus’s terminology into modern chemical or psychological terms neglects the metaphysical implications present for Paracelsus (and Connell) and any sixteenth-century reader. Furthermore, it should be remembered that an understanding of these Alchymic Journals depends largely upon the reader’s imagination.

  adamantine: composed of adamant, a fabulous mineral, diamond, or lodestone; having the qualities of an imaginary stone of impenetrable hardness; rigidly hard or resembling diamond in luster

  adumbrate: to shade; to represent a shadow of

  afreet: a powerful, evil jinni, demon, or monstrous giant in Arabic mythology

  Agrippa, Cornelius (1486–1535): German physician, theologian, and philosopher, author of De occulta philosophia, a cosmology based on cabalistic and Pythagorean analyses and magic that helped link his name to the Faust legend, and of De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium, which rejected all scientific knowledge for biblical piety

  albifaction: the process or art of making white

  alembic: an apparatus that refines or transmutes as if by distillation

  aludel: a pear-shaped pot of earthenware or glass, open at both ends so that a series could be fitted one above the other; used in sublimation

  amma: the soul; also used to designate everything similar to the breath; all refined, volatile matter, as well as the specifically effective part of a medicine, its essence

  analeptic: a restorative agent or drug that acts on the central nervous system

  Antipode (pl., Antipodes): the exact opposite of a person or thing; pl., those who dwelt directly opposite to each other on the globe, as if with feet against feet

  astral: related to the impression engraved in a person at the hour of birth by the external heaven, which inside the person’s body forms a separate “heaven” and which constitutes this person’s specific heaven

  athanor: a digesting furnace used by the alchemists, in which a constant heat was maintained by means of a self-feeding apparatus

  augury: divination by interpretation of omens as portents or of chance phenomena, as in the flight of birds or entrails of sacrificed animals

  Avicenna (980–1037): Arab philosopher whose canon was publicly burned by Paracelsus

  Beccher, Johann Joachim (1635–1682): German chemist and physician who carried on experiments for transmuting Danube sand into gold; advanced a theory of combustible earth that influenced Stahl’s phlogiston theory of combustion

  Böhme, Jakob (1575–1624): German mystic who read works of alchemists, Paracelsus, etc.; author of a manuscript condemned as heretical by ecclesiastical authorities; his philosophy, concerned especially with the problem of evil, rested on the thesis of dualism of God; his writings were translated into other languages, notably English; strongly influenced development of idealism, Romanticism, and theology, especially o
f Quakers and Pietists

  brigandage: practice of brigands; highway robbery, freebooting, pillage

  Cacophrastus: nickname for Theophrastus (Paracelsus’s real name); has an obscene connotation in German; reference first found in a poem or squib nailed to the church door and lecture hall in defense of Galen; the name stuck and Paracelsus never got over it

  calefaction: the act of warming or the state of being warm

  calx: the friable residue (e.g., a metal oxide) left when a mineral or metal has been subjected to calcination or roasting

  Cardano (Cardan, Geronimo, 1501–1576): Italian astrologer, physician, and mathematician

  catchpole: one who makes arrests for debts

  celandine: plant whose thick yellow juice was supposed to benefit weak sight

  Chaldean: a person versed in the occult arts

  chalybs: Latin term for steel

  cinnabar: the red or crystalline form of mercuric sulfide; the most important ore of mercury

  cockatrice: a serpent, identified with the basilisk, fabled to kill by its glance and to be hatched from a cock’s egg

  costermonger: a street seller of fruit

  croslet: a crucible; a small cross

  cryptogram: a communication in cipher or code

  cucurbit: a gourd-shaped vessel or flask for distillation, used with or forming part of an alembic

  deemster: a judge

  Democritus (c. 460–370 B.C.): Greek philosopher known as “the laughing philosopher” because of his amusement at the foibles of humankind; regarded as one of the most important Greek physical philosophers, although only fragments of his works survive