Alchymic Journals

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 them 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.
I SAY THAT whatsoever fills up a man’s heart shall overflow into his mouth. And what his heart desires, that do