Alchymic Journals

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