DAME NATURE ADOPTS strange children. Look upon Petrus d’Abano questioned in his eightieth year by suspicious ecclesiarchs. That Petrus did immerse or replenish his soul with oracular science, that he could summon spent coins back to his pocket and did hold hostage within a Crystal wicked spirits—so much was alleged. And being adjudged guilty by reason of circuitous answers our aged recusant expired before his auto-da-fé! Is not Satan a master of versatility? Thus at Padua, close by the village of his birth, was a likeness in straw substituted for our departed apostate and set afire. Ah well, we suspect pointed shoes fit the fisherman no better than mortar boards balance the brains of zealots.
POPE JOHN XXII having ascended to heaven by way of Avignon, Anno Domini 1334, we think his estate might be worth mention. We count eighteen million Florins with jewelry to the value of seven, plus innumerable consecrated goblets he acquired through hermetic craft, since we know this worldly pontiff each night submitted to anagogic indoctrination from Brother Arnold, meanwhile interdicting divinatory art. Distribution of transfigured bread and wine, a magic laying-on of hands—by such shameless investiture does Christian ceremony proclaim its merit. Who can measure humanity’s divagation?
PRAISE WE HEAR for the shrewdness of a British ecclesiastic that purchased a flourishing brothel with sacerdotal funds. And is he subject to blame? We know how men in their hearts hide one thing while from their mouths comes another. Do we therefore extend as a terror to malfeasance the reprobation of posterity? Did not Jehovah pour the truth into blemished vessels? Aye, he did. Besides, such unscrupulous enterprise seems much less apt to fail than prosper, and on this logic we observe salvation recede from us, not we from it.
WELL, WE HAVE watched men flying toward fulfillment like bees frantic for honey. We have watched others crouch like spiders taut with poison. Some attribute sibylline power to the mole—at which Pliny scoffs—while others would eat the palpitating heart of a weasel. So do men pour liquids up and down, or one into this, another into that, all brewing mixtures from sunrise onward. Avicenna teaches that where any matter rests upon salt it becomes salt and what stands on a stinking place will stink. Natures move indissolubly toward their own.
NOW WE HAVE heard men offering contraries as principles until Proteus himself could not differ so much. Still, did this not hold true for Hippocrates? And we ourselves submit to deeper discrepancies and quarrels within than ever we met on the cobbled streets of Ingolstadt. Divers indeed is the mind’s apparel! How queer. Fustian sleeves, tattered lining. See us step forth adorned with intricate riddles and figures. But have lines fallen down about us at pleasant places? Do we feel pinched with straightness?
ARE MEN LESS apt to lose their reason than be lost to it? Let us contemplate the labor of Meister Alexander Sethon with his difficult progress toward a coagulation of gold, fluttering from province to province across the Continent, squawking like a rooster that would escape its monarch’s table, stripped of amity and denied the magisterial fruit, imprisoned by Christian, Elector of Saxony, for refusing to express the Inexpressible—until the bloody wreckage of our recalcitrant chymist was rewarded with molten lead. Such a spectacle! Does iniquity adhere to suffering flesh? Could it be true of God that He lives with careless ease? Being totally good, does He love none but Himself?
WHAT OF THOMAS Aquinas objecting that every yellow mineral must qualify as gold? How is this? We listen to him declare in Thesaurus Alchymiae how the purpose of mystic experiment should be transference of metals from imperfect to perfect, avowing that he believes in such a possibility! O, paradox upon paradox! Next, in tractates addressed to Frater Regnauld he discourses upon his search for an essence to tinge mercury that would pierce any known substance while overcoming fire! Under which meridian do we live?
NEXT, OF ROGER Bacon we hear that he would study the furious multiplicities of light while simultaneously projecting gold through revelation of natural ligatures. We suspect Providence does award small things to the small, so do large minds reach out toward nimble motions, fortified against divisible shapes like scattered mercury seeking to collect and reunite itself. Is not a man’s thought marvelous at its operation?
PIETISTS LOOK TO colonies of God. Others go walking in Corsica. Jakob Böhme fixedly gazing toward the burnished pewter dish embarks upon his celebrated trance
