Alchymic Journals Read online

  THEY SAY I am full of knots. This is true. Like a bear cub was I suckled among pine forests. Like damp moss do I cling to what I knew best early in the morning. How could I wear gossamer? Why would I go prancing through female apartments? What man is sweetly turned if in the province of his birth they do not weave or spin silk? And I was born Theophrastus! I am the Prince of Physicians—monarcha medicorum. Aureolus I am called and so be it. Was a tongue endowed with speech? No. It is the presiding spirit grown impatient with vacuity since every creature is compacted of elements. Therefore I condemn all those that distil by prescription as Chymists. Are they like a good tailor that carefully cuts a cloak? No. I denounce them because they would lay straw in a sick man’s bellie. Juggling sophists! Catchpoles! They do not encounter infirmity but at the declining. Gravely do they march forth like judges to give peremptory sentences of death, thereby expecting to be honored as prophets with deep prescience! Bah! Unctuous rakes honing after wonders that neigh toward other men’s wives, shanks wet with rot, stout on porridge and mutton and stinking like a goblin’s fart. Back-sliders with the elevation and ostent of serpents that would subtract honor from jackals by their presence. So they come pouring across good reports, and does not a pig call a pig gorgeous? See the consul of Astorza! Niger! See Muffel parade through Nuremberg! Hah! But this is not their end. This is not all. I know of others. Black bougiers with kneecaps made of horn which if they quit praying would bite their tongues for devotion, slip-weary toothless maskers with raddled bones struggling hard as January to hoist one foot across the door-sill and scratch their balls. Croups to affright Asmodeus, drizzling yellow or green as a rainbow. They collect like August flies at the lip of a milk-pail to drink and discuss philosophy. I have watched them draw out figures and hawk wax talismans or amulets filched from a grimoire at Ratisbon. Philtres with grainy powders they provide, hence they denigrate with covin the true art of alchymy. Has not all jurisdiction its limit? They would plunder what cannot be replaced. Yet as the guilty by their rhetoric exercise unwarranted dominion, so the moon indifferently presides above good and evil. This is loathsome! How are the travesties of invidious art expunged? Groveling kabbalists know less than children shut inside a narrow room who because they have observed little must doubt the wealth of exteriorities. False doctors like vile preachers go lying and masquerading and mincing across a stage spun out of hope, fleastung tumorous carcasses indentured to worms mistaking turds for topaz. How do they know the neck of the afflicted? I alone am monarcha medicorum that through unremitting study has become Prince of Physicians and therefore they hate me. Such is the lot or malison of genius. I bid them warm their buttocks in Satan’s vestibule! I do not copy inferiors. I am Paracelsus.

  CACOPHRASTUS! SO THEY snap their teeth, declaiming vituperative poetry composed in hell for my benefit. Cacophrastus! Yellow cringing curs snarl and bark. The least hairs of my breech display more learning than their mightiest. My shoe-buckles shine brighter than Avicenna and Galen in conference. Theophrastus am I!—skillful, zealous, adept at the Holy Kabbala, arch-enemy to distemperature, advocate of theology, ascetic defender of freedom, illustrious pharmacist, bald foe of folly. Am I not Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim? I am Helvetius Eremita, Philippus, Suevas, Arpinus, Germanus. Or I am the Luther of physicians—Lutherus medicorum. But what difference does it make? I heal patients abandoned by charlatans to sickness or death, restore youth to the aged with marvelous elixirs. And by our Lord I would this gleaming pate might fend off gnats as well as I fend off academic sophistry. Hah! What good is a shining coat-of-mail and buckler? Why gag on stinking panaceas falsely concocted by apothecaries in sculleries? Dizzards! Graziers! Chymists swarming through filthy basements! Vermin begot to brew up foul broth! Dung-prophets! Quacksalvers! None can equal Paracelsus. I am wiser by seventy than all such cod-merchants. Thisselwarps! Whifflers! Daubers! Puffers that coagulate, sublimate and distill—tending bubbling apparatus toward what? I would sooner tabulate every butterfly in Holland. I am the most puissant and numinous doctor on earth, ruled not by the motionless fabric of constellations but incessant study. There be a more pregnant sense to my doctrine than their wits construe.

  I HOLD ALL secrets of nature, Magnalia Artium, by which God endows a great physician. Let windly raving clotpoles claim I am drunk. I am lucid. If I knew not all bones and varieties of human flesh and where each was placed, how could I choose the palliative that each wound needs? Leech-doctors say I am irreverent—coarse and uncivil—because on Saint John’s Day I sprinkled with gunpowder and sulfur the fatuitous books of bygone theoreticians so they went up in smoke to vast applause from students, which is what ancient science merits! Rheumy academics join hands to clap against me. Why? Because I illuminate the fount, progress and fall of their tedious conceit. They parade in sheep’s russet, parched brains riveled like apples. I lift my hind leg at them! Costermongers! University catechism is a mildewed cloak for pedagogues hatched in a viper pit wistly dreaming antique fable. Why expound the opinions of others—Dioscorides, Galen, Macar? What is learned by rote? No reliance have I set on Avicenna’s consorts because Nature is the physician, not I. It is she that composes, not I. From her alone I take my orders and study the art of her pharmacies—behind what leaf she writes each virtue, in which box each is kept. Not in Mesue nor Lumine nor Praeposito. No teacher have I met surmounting this world save God, snakes, magic and angels. I say there will be dowsers and spagyri and Archei and they will have Quintum Esse and tincture, then where will your soup-kitchens go? What will become of quacks that give up a patient to die while working out his complexion from stools and piss? Joskins! Drovers fixed at their poison! Wicked, wrong, unjustifiable—so do they brabble against my meteorics, my physics, my theories, my practice. How might I seem less than erroneous or strange? What greatness is there that was not first maledicted?

  PSEUDO-PHYSICIANS SUPPOSE THAT by jugglery and cunning they can cheat Nature out of her dues, thereby acting with impunity against the manifesto of God—behavior at once intolerable and specious, a summit of vanity. And for the novelty of constructing artificial systems why disparage familiar treatment? Nor should a doctor pluck apart a sick man’s wallet while prevaricating, ramping—spewing foaming gibberish at spotted invalids weak with anguish who conclude this must hold meaning—because such art does not consist of healing the sick but of creeping toward favor with the rich and powerful like some moldy itinerant smiling and bowing, scraping muddy boots on the step of a nobleman’s kitchen. Well, it is natural that there should be crafty swindlers laying hollow claim to the honored title of alchymist while scheming after coins, darkening the moon, sifting down like famished locusts whistling depravity, glossing deceit, doubtful of what they themselves have uncovered. How ingeniously they contrive to answer urgent questions posed by desperate innocents—praising agate liquefied, jaspar metamorphosed, frost congealed, or the marvelous values of excrescence. Bah! I hear them spout inanities while stuffing contributions into their split breeches. Who has not seen it?

  THE TRUTHFUL PHYSICIAN prescribes nothing without its merit, disdaining immedical calamities, avoiding what is mendacious or absonant. Neither will he lie, cog or foist restoratives extracted from leper skat and maggots on credulous patients. I see the moribund that fall subject to phlegm or deliracy sacrifice a fortune to apothecaries puffed up with turgent titles—sails plumped on empty wind—purveyors of fraud greasing their fundament for love of a Swiss franc. Weasels flaunting velvet caps! Dogs trot forth to sniff their vomit! Chickens clustered in a knot provide more nobility, peacocks choked with rage sound less vain and stupid. As if gabbling fraud might rinse their slimy mouths! As if the Holy Ghost of Christian theology should countenance imposture! Lacking skill enough to carve initials on a cherrypit, Cuman asses capering about in lion-skins, ulcerated flatulent druggists with oat-cake faces, three-fingered magicians quick to mulct apoplectic curates—they traffic lotion to soothe the spirit while Lazarus lies howling outside the gate. Christ bid them greet the
arrow at mid-flight or collapse in joint depravity with the inward grace of donkeys whose latter vent winks open more modestly than their hearts. Grazing sheep would give up grazing to see such Turkish medicasters. What brains they own they keep sealed in bottles beyond the moon.

  I HAVE HEARD doctors aspire to the wisdom of forest apes while espousing an imbalance among humors: phlegm, bile, blood yellowed or black. Rot! Disease hides externalities that are its cause, selecting the most susceptible organs for degenerative goals. Men fall subject to more illnesses than a horse and computation by planets is but one aspect. I say sickness arouses waves of heat throughout the body because its constituents have been twisted, tied into knots. Consequently, balance is restored with assuasives such as essentiam antimonii, aurum-potabile, oleum solis or materiam perlarum, arcana quintae-essentiae, aquavitae and so forth. And I believe man cannot enough praise God or give thanks with all diligence for his generosity in providing these because they suffice. And one morning I think all of this will be heard as clearly as the cataract of the Rhine.

  NOW WHAT INJURES a man is what heals him, therefore similars are good. Does the liver seek its medicament in sugar, manna, honey, or a polypody fern? No. Like affects like. Shall heat be a cure for cold or the opposite? Seldom in anatomy’s order. It would be wild disproportion to find a cure in contraries. If a child should ask his father for bread would he be given a snake? Hence they are not physicians that prescribe acid if alkali is needed. Gall must have what it asks, the liver and the heart as well. Why? Because nature admires logic.

  THERE ARE SEVERAL kinds of salt in man that devour and gnaw like hidden fires and one may kindle the next. This is true also of wolves and other animals whose bodies are surfeited by such salts as arsenic which crawl about among the organs putrefying and digesting. Now, just as we are taught through the seething of these minerals how food is torn by interior viscera, so we make further discoveries with the preparation of alum or the fuming of lime. Things are sought and found, yes, but sometimes prove difficult to separate.

  THE CARPENTER THINKS out a cottage—how it should be built—and then he goes to work. Not so the physician who does not think out how a disease should be, since he did not make it. Nature invents disease and therefore knows its constitution, so if a doctor would know what to do he must acquaint himself with what she has to teach. The carpenter may hew down a tree and work with this as he needs or pleases. Not so the doctor, because medicine does not wish to be altered—like the garden of Attalus where nothing grew except venomous plants.

  MALADIES THAT AFFLICT mankind are not inherent but arise out of sources directed against the cycle which penetrate and suck and dilute our vital essence. I say that Magnes Microcosmi since it is composed of urine, blood, excrement and hair—when it is applied to the corpus it will absorb vitality like a sponge drawing water, thereby alleviating the inflammation of harmonious members due to congestion by precipitant fluids. But illness acquired from a patient manifests itself elsewhere because all things correspond, hence the toxicant released from a body must contaminate others. Remedies invert, breeding their own abuse.

  BECAUSE THE EARTH has been enclosed within a vaporous sphere as the egg is enclosed within a shell and cosmic influences converge toward a nucleus, it follows that epidemics develop when miasma pollutes this involucrum—which is not strange. Possibilities could not be limited by our knowledge of them since who among us pretends to fathom God?

  SOME ARGUE HOW man collects understanding from his own self and from constellations, so that if one’s star is favorable one may learn everything. But if each man was born to inherit the kingdom of God how shall he be a child of constellations which are doomed to perish? And therefore how should one seek wisdom except where it resides beyond the stars and planets? Who could believe that there lives concealed inside an egg the animus of a bird with all of its members and feathers arid whatever else pertains thereto? Similarly who would say of gold that within it lies a recipe for universal healing? Yet just as the white and the yolk conspire to bring forth a ringdove or a finch, so must time, nature and alchymic art conspire to fertilize the Grand Catholicon. This is because of nature’s predictability since everything that takes place must coincide with reason.

  WHAT IS HEAVIER than gold? What weighs less than the wind? What could be whiter than a swan yet blacker than a crow? What is more hurtful than a serpent? Are not these things all in Nitre? Yes. Professors cry out with a single voice, saying fix the volatile and volatilize that which is fixed, then you will find the universal panacea. But a sensual eye deprived of light—what does it perceive except darkness? Thyme is seen to bloom throughout the year while the crocus has a moment in autumn. Experience does not run one way but many thousand ways.

  I SAY THE martiality of a sickness is enhanced by its aura blossoming from the center yet clinging to its locus. Thus, if a magnet shall be placed upon the center it must attract a widening aura, thereby circumscribing the flow of disease. But how so? Because metallic particles infest man’s blood. By contrast, the scent of an orchid travels from its petals into the atmosphere and this aura cannot be circumscribed. I do not know why. The curve of thinking has no end.

  I SAY IT is clear how incorporeal pernicious influences are capable of burning and devouring, such as vitiation of the surrounding air which secretly encourages impure vapors seeking entrance to the body, or the convulsions engendered by drinking decadent water so that a victim falls down writhing and vomiting. Thus the pharmacology of heaven should be studied much as we diagram the veins of a suffering patient if we would devise an efficacious cure for astralic impairment because analeptics subside under the reign of malevolent planets. Illness withers if the regent compounding it does also and is a mandate from God which we should recognize, since he administers to our necessity. If we scorn a light above, how does it reveal our path? How does it assist our progress?

  I HAVE SAID that chymists who seek out nature’s probities or inclinations should consult within themselves, only then addressing externalities. Why is this? Because all things proceed from pole to pole, as we learn from Egyptian tombs where painted noblemen march forward to the past, preceding their descendants in hieratic order. Now this is harmonious, marvelous and immutable.

  I HAVE SAID that alchymists plot the course of each disease with its premonitory symptoms because a disease is a plant that will develop into a tree if it has not been rooted out while it is young. I say a child is able to cut down an oak soon after it springs from the acorn, but given time enough this will require a strong man with an ax. And I say further that men must see by what operation nature conducts her work in order to revise the meaning of what they think.

  PSEUDO-ALCHYMISTS THAT LABOR against quicksilver, sea salt and sulfur dream of hermetic gold through transformation, yet they fail to grasp the natural course of development since what they employ are literal readings of receipts. Accordingly they bring baskets of gilded pebbles to sell, or drops of vinegar in cloudy alembics—futile panaceas meant for a charnel house. This is false magistery.

  THOUSANDS PROCLAIM THEMSELVES Adept that have dealt little with spagyric matter. By such conceit they disenfranchise the conscientious aspirant. Puffers abound—monk-bellied wizards proposing deleterious recipes in lieu of knowledge. Granted a crock of paste I doubt any could fix a fractured pot. Their persuasions are wretched, false and degenerate, their devices precarious.

  I HAVE WATCHED charlatans with the help of greasy advocates cloaked in malfeasance skipping and bleating merry as goats. But as a metallic stone attracts and repels iron particles according to its animus, so does every man attract or repel effluvia for evil or good. And what he is, that will he be at his death since the spirit does not deviate from itself. Consequently each man endows the atmosphere with a vestige and register of his life. And I say that as the angry light of dawn will diminish a candle, so does alchymic magistery eclipse and shame the artifice of squint-eyed gutbucket butchers serving slabs of deceit. I would not award t
hem Christian burial. I would hang them upright like Diogenes to scare off crows. Cucurbit, alembic, furnace, retort—only thus shall we hear the human predicament annunciated, since within our Philosophic Egg begins a fabulous process of fermentation, distillation and extraction.

  CACOPHRASTUS! HAH! CACOPHRASTUS is how they deride me because I endorse principles, not catechism. Mock-doctors swaggering round about in spangled coats! Foals that presume themselves stallions! Buggers leading one another so that if one tumbles in a ditch the others follow, unable to separate their brains from their asses. Piebald knaves! I have watched them coaxing victuals out of monks, I have seen the ravens that supervise murder rise screaming from their perch, for leaven and ferment are Christ, and I say Verbum Domini is the word of the father that has become Matter and is the material food of the soul. And such a word is present in each object in which it dwells. And I have seen them worse than Archbishops order up relics to fumble at a sick man’s mouth. But I say sickness is neither endogenous nor constitutional, and a mineral seed is required to engender what once was sown into the earth by our Lord God at a time when he regretted the creation of man.