I THINK EACH component of each organism enjoys its life, being succeeded by its death, so we meet resurgent orders of death and resurrection prosecuting life. Consequently everything interior that has conducted itself privately will emerge after deterioration to reveal a countenance. Thus, should some infant’s life conclude after five hours we surmise those bodily planets have made their circuit. Hence, the alchymic doctor looks to organic interactions, each having a predestined end and commencement.
EXTRINSIC AND INTRINSIC worlds surely must correspond. Liver, brain, heart, lungs, spleen, bowels and kidneys—all of this implies concord between planets and organs. Hildegard teaches that every matter has been so devised upon exceeding grace that none consents to separation, each will surrender its being, each will quit or cease if prevented by force from mutual association.
I MARVEL AT the vigilance with which nature coordinates dissimilar entities. Why does she situate the lungs near the heart? For refreshment? No. A more important office of these indefatigable bellows is to inhale and to convey to the heart an ethereal spirit. So if we feel agitated we breathe with great passion because of spiritual waste which nature is attempting to restore.
NO SENTIENT CREATURE has been denied a capacity for thought. In the case of animals, we observe their various affections and season of mating, the nourishment and care and defense of their young, their expressions of goodwill or hostility toward human masters, and so forth. All this being evident, it follows that the souls of animals must have been endowed with the ability to reason or with a propensity to meditate, but as this seems restricted to their appetites and desires they do not reflect upon the world’s renovation.
VEGETABLES DISPLAY MENTAL faculties, however subordinate to those of humans, animals and minerals. They reproduce and augment themselves, they perceive changes of weather, they observe and conform to every season, they germinate at the appropriate hour—burying their roots, extending and developing their leaves—proving that they understand and foresee. If a vegetable has been planted in poor soil adjacent to rich soil, why does it lean toward the latter? How does it know? If the female and male are planted apart what directs their inclination? Great sympathies must exist to bring about the preservation of this terraqueous globe. Or like a foolish dog do I elect to bark at shadows?
LET US ASSUME the refulgence of Venus were extinguished, then what attraction should persuade minerals or animals or vegetables or humans to proliferate? I cannot be sure, but men collect knowledge as they pluck fruit from trees, and since we do not deny our counsel overhead it follows that doctors should study the rise of pre-eminent planets if they would resolve uncertainties below.
IT APPEARS THAT celestial embodiments of both sexes converse with each lavishing ideas upon its opposite, so that either will endorse a lascivious invitation. Hence they are subject to conspiracy, plotting together, albeit the forms of women seem more flammable.
AS TO HOW feminine lust contrives to preside over masculine—this is because a fluid element requires a blazing element, which accounts for the wife who succumbs to internal craving while the husband is apt to become obstinate or contentious, suspicious and bewildered by her passion. Latent difficulties belabor him. Still he feels lost without his wife, since then he is but a peripatetic disembodied shade—an anguished voice striving to incorporate itself, because once she was the rib and crooked piece of him. Had she otherwise been created than from his body, how was concupiscence bequeathed to them both? We are told by Saint Augustine of the lamp dedicated to Venus which could not be extinguished, implying that blood and flesh have nothing to impart but relentless desire.
NEITHER THE MASCULINE nor the feminine demands intercourse, merely its essential nature. Why should providence create but half a soul? Or how should Adam feel reconciled to Eve unless she arose within his heart? The woman to whom a man binds himself through intimate congress with declarations of fidelity becomes a part of him, nor can he divorce her by ceremonious pretext or separation, their constituence being one. Nor is it bone or flesh pledging to construct secret attachments so much as carnal intelligence. Even so she remains his best friend, his redeemer—for having lost the key to heaven, unconscious of that light extant in him before he went to sleep in spirit and wakened in the flesh, he would stoop down and lower himself to lower degradation if she did not stand on the threshold offering in exchange for that neglected refuge a vision of terrestrial paradise radiant with the promise of unification.
I SUSPECT MEN are driven to seduce women by an impatience which is enlarged because of their counterpart’s proximity, or by speculation or by contact, as a splinter of dry wood ignites when exposed to the burning overtures of sunlight. Men become absorbed by visceral tendencies to reflection, hence passion inexorably mounts, which is the first cause of masculine fluid accumulating. Within the female corpus expedients further their own resolve much as the lodestone draws mineral by an inward-sucking of private necessity.
TRIPLETS AND GREATER multiples occur if the frantic womb contracts with more than a single breath while gathering semen for itself. Should it accept the liquid of animals a mooncalf will be born, such is uterine strength.
MENSTRUAL BLOOD THAT commixes with male sperm
