Part 13
The prologue directs the aspirant to the supreme temple of everlasting wisdom to know God and Jesus Christ whom He hath sent, to know also himself, and the mysteries of the macrocosmos. The whole treatise is purely mystical and magical. The seven steps leading to the portals of universal knowledge are described in an esoteric commentary on some portions of the Wisdom of Solomon. The _lapis philosophorum_ is declared to be identical with the Ruach Elohim who brooded over the face of the waters during the first period of creation. The Ruach Elohim is called _vapor virtutis Dei_, and the internal form of all things. The perfect stone is attained through Christ, and, conversely, the possession of that treasure gives the knowledge of Christ. The _Amphitheatrum Sapientiæ Æternæ_ seems to be the voice of the ancient chaos, but its curious folding plates are exceedingly suggestive.
FOOTNOTES:
[Y] Chausepié, _Dictionnaire_.
MICHAEL MAIER.
This celebrated German alchemist, one of the central figures of the Rosicrucian controversy in Germany, and the greatest adept of his age, was born at Ruidsburg, in Holstein, towards the year 1568. In his youth he applied himself closely to the study of medicine, and establishing himself at Rostock, he practised that art with so much success that he became physician to the Emperor Rudolph II., by whom he was ennobled for his services. Some adepts, notwithstanding, succeeded in enticing him from the practical path which he had followed so long into the thorny tortuosities of alchemical labyrinths. _Il se passionna pour le grand œuvre_ and scoured all Germany to hold conferences with those whom he imagined to be in possession of transcendent secrets. The _Biographie Universelle_ declares that he sacrificed his health, his fortune, and his time to these “ruinous absurdities.” According to Buhle,[Z] he travelled extensively; and on one occasion paid a visit to England, where he made the acquaintance of the Kentish mystic, Robert Fludd.
He appears as an alchemical writer a little before the publication of the Rosicrucian manifestoes. In the controversy which followed their appearance, and which convulsed mystic Germany, he took an early and enthusiastic share, defending the mysterious society in several books and pamphlets. He is supposed to have travelled in search of genuine members of the “College of Teutonic Philosophers R.C.,” and, failing to meet with them, is said to have established a brotherhood of his own on the plan of the _Fama Fraternitatis_. These statements rest on inadequate authority, and there is better ground for believing that he was initiated, towards the close of his life, into the genuine order. A posthumous tract of Michael Maier, entitled “Ulysses,” was published in 1624 by one of his personal friends, who added to the same volume the substance of two pamphlets which had already appeared in German, but which, by reason of their importance, were now translated into Latin for the benefit of the literati of Europe. The first was entitled _Colloquium Rhodostauroticum trium personarum, per Famam et Confessionem quodamodo revelatam de Fraternitate Roseæ Crucis_. The second was an _Echo Colloquii_, by Benedict Hilarion, writing in the name of the Rosicrucian Fraternity. It appears from these pamphlets that Maier was admitted into the mystical order, but when or where is uncertain. He became the most voluminous alchemical writer of his period, publishing continually till his death in the year 1622.
Many of his works are Hermetic elaborations of classical mythology, and are adorned with most curious plates. They are all hopelessly obscure, if his Rosicrucian apologies be excepted; the latter are not deficient in ingenuity, but they are exceedingly laboured, and, of course, completely unsatisfactory. He does not appear to have been included among the adepts, and he is now almost forgotten. His chemical knowledge is buried in a multitude of symbols and insoluble enigmas, and believers in spiritual chemistry will not derive much comfort or profit from his writings.
FOOTNOTES:
[Z] See De Quincey’s “Rosicrucians and Freemasons.”
JACOB BÖHME.
After the publication of the psycho-chemical philosophy of the illuminated shoemaker of Görlitz, the adepts are believed to have despaired of any longer retaining their secrets, and in their own writings they began to speak more freely. In this way the mystery of the _vas philosophorum_ is said to have become less impenetrable than previously, when it was considered a divine secret in the keeping of God and his elect.
Jacob Böhme, who may perhaps be considered as the central figure of Christian mysticism, was born in the year 1575, at Old Seidenberg, a village near Görlitz, in what was then called German Prussia. His parents were poor but honest and sober peasants, and were unable to procure him more than the usual religious schooling and the most simple elements of common education. In his spare time he tended cattle with other boys of the village. “He was a quiet, introspective lad,” says one of his latest biographers, “whose face bore somewhat of the dreamy expression which is frequent in poetic natures.” Even at this early age he was rich in inward visions. On one occasion he retired into a cave, in the rock called Land’s Crown, and discovered a large wooden vessel full of money, from which he precipitately retired without touching it, as though it were something diabolical. He told his companions, but there was no such cavern to be found at the place in question, though they often visited the spot in search of the concealed treasure.
On leaving school, Jacob was apprenticed to a shoemaker, and while he was one day serving in the shop during the absence of his master, an old man, of remarkable and benevolent mien, entered and asked for some shoes, for which the lad, fearing to conclude a bargain without his employer, demanded an extravagant price to deter the stranger from buying. The latter, however, paid the sum asked, and then calling him by his name, beckoned him into the street, when taking him by the hand, with sparkling eyes and earnest, angelical countenance, he said:--
“Jacob, thou art as yet but little; nevertheless, the time will come when thou shalt be great, and the world shall marvel at thee. Therefore, be pious, fear God, and reverence the Word. Read the Holy Scriptures diligently; in these thou shalt have comfort and instruction through the misery, poverty, and persecution which are in store for thee. Be courageous and persevere; God loves thee, and is gracious unto thee.”
The stranger then disappeared, or departed, leaving Jacob more serious and devotional than ever. The words of instruction and inspired admonition which he was frequently prompted to give to his fellow apprentices brought him into disputes with his master, and eventually led to his dismissal. He became a journeyman shoemaker, but returned to Görlitz in 1594, where he married the daughter of a tradesman, by whom he had four children.
In 1598 he imagined himself to be surrounded with the divine light for several consecutive days; he beheld the virtue and nature of the vegetable world, gazing into the very heart of creation, and learning the secrets of the physical cosmos by means of the self-interpreting “signatures” which seemed to be impressed on all around him. A similar experience recurred in 1600, when he passed into the hypnotic state by accidentally fixing his eye on a burnished pewter dish. These visions did not interfere with his capacity for work, or with his attention to his domestic affairs. Ten years passed away, and his psychic perceptions became suddenly clearer. “What he had previously seen only chaotically, fragmentarily, and in isolated glimpses, he now beheld as a coherent whole and in more definite outlines.” He wrote what he experienced under a fervour of inspiration, and in this way his first book was produced--“Aurora, the Day Spring, or Dawning of the Day in the East, or Morning Redness in the Rising of the Sun.” It was not originally intended for publication, but manuscript copies were circulated by one of his friends, and he suffered much consequent persecution from the ecclesiastical authorities of Görlitz. He was forbidden to write any more books, and was commanded to stick to his trade. For five years he meekly obeyed the tyrannous mandate, and afterwards contented himself with writing simply for his intimate friends. From 1619 to 1624 he produced a number of voluminous treatises, of which the book of the “True Principles,” the “Mysterium Magnum,” and the “Signatura Rerum” are perhaps the most characteristic and important. The publication, apparently surreptitious, of his “Way to Christ” again brought him into conflict with the orthodoxy of Görlitz, and led to his temporary exile. He was invited to the electoral court at Dresden, where a conference of eminent theologians examined him, and was so greatly impressed by the man that they declared themselves incompetent to judge him.
In 1624 he was attacked by a fever at the house of a friend in Silesia, was carried at his own request to his native town, and there on the 22nd November he expired in a semi-ecstatic condition.
While serving his apprenticeship at Görlitz, Jacob Böhme acquired some knowledge of chemistry, and he subsequently made use of Hermetic terminology in a transfigured and spiritual sense. His example was followed by his disciples, including the illustrious Saint Martin, Dionysius Andreas Freher, and William Law. The second-named writer has treated of the analogy in the process of the philosophic work to the Redemption of man through Christ Jesus, as unfolded by Jacob Böhme.
A treatise on metallurgy is ascribed to the theosophist himself, and there are several alchemical references in his numerous private epistles. The Holy Ghost is stated to be the key to alchemy; there is no need of hard labour and seeking (presumably among physical substances). “Seek only Christ, _and you will find all things_.” He describes the philosophers’ stone as dark, disesteemed, and grey in colour. It contains the highest tincture. Like Henry Khunrath before him, he deprecates any expenditure beyond that of the time and cost of the operator’s maintenance. “It doth not cost any money, but what is spent upon the time and the maintenance, else it might be prepared with four shillings. The work is easy, the act simple. A boy of sixteen years might make it, but the wisdom therein is great, and it is greatest mystery.”
The seal of God is elsewhere declared to be set on the secret of alchemy, “to conceal the true ground of the same upon pain of eternal punishments, unless a man know for certain that it shall not be misused. There is also no power to attain it, no skill or art availeth; unless one give the tincture into the hands of another, he cannot prepare it, except he be certainly in the new birth.”
* * * * *
The following lines, copied from a manuscript inserted in a volume of his works, are included in the original edition of the “Lives of Alchemysticall Philosophers”:--
“Whate’er the Eastern Magi sought, Or Orpheus sung, or Hermes taught, Whate’er Confucius could inspire, Or Zoroaster’s mystic fire; The symbols that Pythagoras drew, The wisdom God-like Plato knew; What Socrates debating proved, Or Epictetus lived and loved; The sacred fire of saint and sage Through every clime, in every age, In Bohmen’s wondrous page we view Discovered and revealed anew. ‘Aurora’ dawned the coming day: Succeeding books meridian light display. Ten thousand depths his works explore, Ten thousand truths unknown before. Through all his books profound we trace The abyss of nature, GOD, and grace; The seals are broke, the mystery’s past, And all is now revealed at last. The trumpet sounds, the Spirit’s given, And Bohmen is the voice from Heaven.”
J. B. VAN HELMONT.
In the year 1557, at Bois le Duc, in Brabant, John Baptist van Helmont was born of a noble family. He studied at Louvain, and became eminent in mathematics, algebra, the doctrines of Aristotle and Galen, and the medicine of Vopiscus and Plempius. At seventeen he lectured on physics as prælector, and took his degree of medical doctor in 1599. He read Hippocrates and the Greek and Arabian authors before he was twenty-two years old. He then passed ten years in the unsuccessful practice of physic, until he met a Paracelsian chemist, who discovered various chemical medicines to him. He retired thereupon to the castle of Vilvord, near Brussels, and laboured with unremitting diligence in the chemico-experimental analysis of bodies of every class. He passed his life in retirement, and was almost unknown to his neighbours, whom he, nevertheless, attended in illness, without accepting a fee. He declined an invitation and flattering offers from the Emperor and the Elector Palatine, and after writing several tracts, which even at this day are held in considerable estimation, he died in the sixty-seventh year of his age.
This author, so illustrious throughout Europe for his scientific knowledge, and no less celebrated for his noble rank than by the probity of his character, testifies in three different places that he has beheld, and himself performed, transmutation. In his treatise, _De Vita Eterna_, he declares himself as follows:--“I have seen and I have touched the philosophers’ stone more than once; the colour of it was like saffron in powder, but heavy and shining like pounded glass. I had once given me the fourth part of a grain--I call a grain that which takes six hundred to make an ounce. I made projection therewith, wrapped in paper, upon eight ounces of quicksilver, heated in a crucible, and immediately all the quicksilver, having made a little noise, stopped and congealed into a yellow mass. Having melted it in a strong fire, I found within eleven grains of eight ounces of most pure gold, so that a grain of this powder would have transmuted into very good gold, nineteen thousand one hundred and fifty-six grains of quicksilver.”
Had Helmont possessed the art of making the transmuting powder, his testimony might be open to suspicion. He says, on another occasion, that an adept, after a few days of acquaintance, presented him with half a grain of the powder of projection, with which he transmuted nine ounces of quicksilver into pure gold. He tells us further, that he many times performed a similar operation in the presence of a large company, and always with success. On these grounds he believed in the certainty and in the prodigious resources of the art, citing his acquaintance with an artist who had so much of the red stone as would make gold to the weight of two hundred thousand pounds.
Though ignorant of the nature of this powder of projection, Helmont professed the knowledge of the alcahest, and the methods of preparing medicines of transcendent efficacy by its means.
BUTLER.
In the reign of James the First the attention of the curious was attracted by a report of several transmutations performed in London by an artist of the above name. He was an Irish gentleman, who had recently returned from his travels. It was said that he was not himself acquainted with the secret of the stone, so far as regards its manufacture. To account for possessing it, the following story was related:--The ship in which he took passage during one of his voyages was captured by an African pirate, and on arriving in port he was sold as a slave to an Arabian, who was an alchemical philosopher. Butler, appearing to his master skilful and ingenious, was employed in most difficult operations in the laboratory. Having a perfect knowledge of the importance of the process, as soon as it was finished he bargained with an Irish merchant for his ransom, and made his escape, taking with him a large portion of the red powder.
The performers of public transmutations generally found it necessary to conceal their real knowledge by similar inventions. A physician, who was a countryman of Butler, however formed a plan for discovering his secret. He presented himself as a servant in search of a place, and was hired in that capacity by Butler. He found the philosopher so circumspect that he sought in vain for some circumstance to justify the public report of his treasures, until at last Butler sent him into the city to purchase a large quantity of lead and quicksilver.
The disguised doctor now hoped to make a discovery. He executed his commission with dispatch, and prepared a little hole in the wall of his master’s room, through which, from the adjoining apartment he could see what was going on. He soon perceived Butler taking something out of a box, which he put on the melted lead, and deposited the box in a concealed place under the floor of his room. At this moment the table and chair on which the doctor was elevated to the spy-hole, gave way, and he fell with a loud noise to the ground. Butler rushed out of his room to learn the cause of this disturbance, and perceiving the spy-hole, he with difficulty refrained from running his servant through the body with his sword.
Finding there was no hope of obtaining anything from Butler, the doctor expected to surprise his treasures by reporting to the officers of justice that he was a coiner of false money. A vigilant search was made according to his directions, but nothing was found, for Butler had already removed whatever could betray him--his furnace, crucibles, and eighty marks of gold were all he appeared to possess. He was therefore liberated from the prison in which he had been confined during the investigation.
Butler was afterwards entombed in the Castle of Vilvord, in Flanders, where he is said to have performed wonderful cures by means of Hermetic medicine. A monk of Brittany, who was one of his fellow-prisoners, having a desperate erysipelas in his arm, was restored to health in an hour by drinking almond milk in which Butler had merely dipped the stone. The next day at the rumour of this circumstance, the celebrated Helmont, who abode in the neighbourhood, went with several noblemen to the prison, where Butler cured, in their presence, an aged woman of a megrim by dipping the stone into oil of olives and then anointing her head. An abbess, whose arm was swelled, and whose fingers had been stiff for eighteen years, was also cured by a few applications of the same stone to her tongue.
These cases are attested by the illustrious van Helmont in his works.
JEAN D’ESPAGNET.
This Hermetic philosopher is known to us by two treatises--_Enchiridion Physicæ Restitutæ_ and _Arcanum Philosophiæ Hermeticæ_, which, however, has also been claimed as the production of an unknown individual who called himself the _Chevalier Impérial_.[AA] “The Secret of Hermetical Philosophy” comprises the practical part of the _magnum opus_ and the Enchiridion, the physical theory on which the possibility of transmutation is founded. D’Espagnet is also the author of the preface to the _Tableau de l’Inconstance des Démons_, by Pierre Delancre.
“The Arcanum of Hermetic Philosophy” is better known under the title of the “Canons of Espagnet,” and, as I have shown in the Introduction, it is claimed as a treatise on mystical alchemy. The author, however, very plainly states that “the science of producing Nature’s grand Secret is a perfect knowledge of Nature universally and of art, concerning the realm of metals; the practice whereof is conversant in finding the principles of metals by analysis.” Moreover, the authors whom Espagnet recommends as a guide to the student include those who, like Trévisan, are known to have spent their existence in practical alchemy. The Sethon-Sendivogius treatises are also respectfully cited. At the same time, it may be freely granted that much of the matter in the canons, though treating of a physical object, may be extended to the psychic side of the Hermetic art.
FOOTNOTES:
[AA] Ce chevalier, très-révérée des alchimistes, est mentionnée souvent dans la _Trompette Française_, petit volume, contenant une _Prophétic de Bombast sur la Naissance de Louis XIV._ On a, du Chevalier Impérial, le _Miroir des Alchimistes_, avec instructions aux dames pour dorénavant être belles sans plus user de leurs dards venimeux, 1609, 16mo. _Dictionnaire des Sciences Occultes._
ALEXANDER SETHON.
None of the adepts suffered from imprudent exposure of their power more than the subject of this article. He was a native of Scotland, and is supposed to have inhabited a mansion at a village in the vicinity of Edinburgh, and close to the sea-shore.[AB] In the summer of 1601 a Dutch vessel was wrecked upon the coast, and some of the crew were saved through the instrumentality of Sethon, who received them into his house, treated them with great humanity, and provided them with the means to return to Holland. One year later he visited James Haussen, the pilot of the ship, one of the rescued persons, at Erkusen, in that country. The sailor received him with joy, and detained him for several weeks in his house, during which period he beheld with astonishment several transmutations performed by his guest, who confessed that he was an alchemical adept. He was bound in gratitude and friendship to the most inviolable secrecy, but he could not refrain from confiding the wonder which he had witnessed to Venderlinden, the physician of Enkhuysen, who was a man of integrity and prudence, and to whom he presented a piece of gold, which had been transmuted in his presence from lead on the 13th March 1602. This curiosity came into the hands of the doctor’s grandson, who showed it to the celebrated George Morhoff, by whom it was mentioned, with its history, to Langlet du Fresnoy, in an epistle on the transmutation of metals.
From Enkhuysen, Sethon proceeded to Amsterdam and Rotterdam, subsequently embarking for Italy, where, after a short stay, he passed into Switzerland, and so entered Germany, accompanied by Wolfgang Dienheim, an adversary of Hermetic philosophy, whom by ocular demonstration he convinced of his error, in presence of several distinguished persons of Basle.
To this adversary we are indebted for a description of Sethon, whom he declared eminently spiritual in appearance, short in stature, but very stout, having a high colour, and a beard of the French style. He calls him Alexander Sethonius, and states that he was a native of Molier, “in an island of the ocean.”
The lead required for the transmutation was brought by Jacob Zwinger from his own house, a crucible was borrowed from a goldsmith, and common sulphur was purchased on the road to the house where the operation was to be performed. During the whole course of the experiment, Sethon touched nothing, simply supplying the small packet which contained the powder of projection, and which transformed the base metal into gold of the purest quality, equivalent in weight to the original lead.
The experiment was repeated on another occasion with the same brilliant success, and, in addition to the testimony of Dienheim, we have also that of Zwinger, a name highly respected by the Germans in the history of medicine.[AC]
Alexander Sethon departed from Basle, and went under an assumed name to Strasbourg, whence he proceeded to Cologne, and abode with an amateur alchemist named Anton Bordemann, by whom he was brought into acquaintance with the other souffleurs of that city. He began a kind of alchemical crusade among them, imprudently exposing his knowledge to credulous and sceptical alike, and producing on one occasion six ounces of the precious metal by means of a single grain of his great philosophical tincture.[AD]
Leaving Cologne altogether petrified by his marvellous operations, the illustrious hierophant of the art Hermetic betook himself to Hamburg, where his further amazing projections are described by George Morhoff. At Munich, the next stage in his alchemical pilgrimage, he performed no transmutations, suddenly disappearing with the daughter of one of its citizens, whom he appears to have legally married, and to whom he was henceforth most devotedly attached.