Alchymic Journals

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