OR WHAT OF one that sprinkles the Paschal Lamb with sour herbs? John Wierus comments on a villainous magistrate assisted by princes, dukes, demons mistitled marquis, counts and accursed presidents congregating for heinous intercourse—frightful spirits who negotiate apartments in temples while praising obscenities. And we are rolled up with obedience and no viceroy shall exist above that dominating a man’s mind. Or do things freely combine through submission to one regent?
WE ASK IF humanity’s requirement be some fabric or synthesis—a morality it cannot live without. Much discourse have we heard of Albert von Bollstaedt who beckoned white magic to his side, constructing an automaton imbued with the authority of speech, which he named the Android and that like an augur fastidiously served him by responding to every question. Now, this we call perilous because the distinctions between good and evil belie their intent, nor was a man meant to compete against divinity. That is why his pupil, Aquinas, picked up the hammer.
THIS MONK WE have titled Doctor Universalis since he has taught the quality of common plants in Liber secretorum Alberti Magni de vertutibus herbarum and has instructed us with De Secretis mulierum et virorum on the aspects of male and female mystery. And with his ultimate labor—Compendium theologicae veritatis—that was printed at Nuremberg, Frater Albertus unveils a world of metals and minerals, of mechanics, of compounds, of physics and of chymistry, not to mention eight hundred lesser subjects, by such industry preserving the marvels of Arabic scholarship. Nevertheless that diabolic grimoire embellished with talismans extolling the Ring of Invisibility which was flaunted at Lyons—Alberti Parvi Lucii Liber de Mirabilibus Naturae Arcanis—this is a wicked misleading book quite untouched by a masterful hand, hence it must be considered spurious. Thus would we compare him to our Stone replete with beauty, both inimitable and worthless, disguising what is evident. His corpse we are told was exhibited at the central quire of the Dominican convent where it resisted corruption. His entrails we believe were carted off to Ratisbon where once he served as Bishop. Now, all this we think merciful so we entreat our Lord on behalf of a learned servant.
SKEPTICS DEMAND TO know what mortal is qualified to serve God. We answer without hesitation that because He deplores impurity nothing might exist in His presence which is vile or blemished or compounded. They ask what of Agrippa, who expired face-down. We would not deny that he ordered ducats out of slate, nor that the obedient poodle trotting at his side was meant to advise him of distant occurrences among foreign people. Further, we do admit he died with his face to the floor at the house of the Receiver General, which is on Clerk’s Street in Grenoble, in the province of Dauphiné, and that his black accomplice drowned in the Isère—ending an illegitimate search for knowledge. Yet, like the blind that gaze wrong directions we feel reluctant to decide. Ignoring Satan’s rhetoric, we believe that a compassionate God looks down with indulgence upon troubled scholars. And we demand to know if there be not numerous doors to the temple of knowledge.
MEISTER HEINRICH CORNELIUS Agrippa with wondrous felicity and limitless eloquence could translate or dictate eight languages while conversing upon every subject. With admirable integrity he has explored in his gigantic work, De Occulta philosophia, how the impassioned commitment of but a single soul directed through imagination may benefit and guide our faint majority. So we ask of skeptics what rate seems usurious?
FROM THE GREAT canon of Jean d’Espagnet, Enchiridion physicae restitutae, we learn that God was a book rowled up in Himself that enlightened only Himself before the universe was created, but unfolded Himself during travail with the birth of a world and brought light to the womb of His own mind by extending it to mortal view, so the world was framed with immortal extreams. And in the sun was the center of the world. And in the center of the whole was the sun, as the considerations of nature and equity seem to require, since the body of our light should have equidistance from the dark fabric of the world and the genesis of its fountain that it might receive an abundance of strength from its chief source and upon like distance convey this wealth to a universe below. Are there not many kinds or forms of unity? These are good and licit and commodious things which we hold up toward the looking-glass of reflection.
ANDREAS LIBAVIUS EXPLAINS with his masterwork how spagyric art shall consist of perfecting magistery by extricating essences from a coalition of bodies through exceptional multiplications of imperious matter. But say we are descendants of Adam born wretchedly to ashes and dirt, how shall we persist in seeking that which we lack the wisdom to hold, or vouchsafe ourselves a constellation of faculties that we fail to exhibit?
WE HAVE HEARD Meister Eirenaeus Philopones Philalethes contend in The Marrow of Alchymy how our subject is mercury associated with gold, both decocted until neither forsakes its opposite, so that both rot and putrefy—giving up themselves to glorious regeneration. Now, this finest of seven substances we identify as Monarch which septic fluid does not contaminate or necrotic soil corrode, since it was regulated by nature. Hence the King embodies nothing superfluous. Therefore, we grant this mineral supremacy and propose that it dominates lesser metals, flaring like Sol among weak planets, and by the production of mercuric gold from miserable atoms our Lord completed His majestic work. Thus, if man is the noblest creature it follows that he manifest some divinity which cannot be corrupted.
ACCORDING TO THE Dutchman, Meister Isaac, if our Regal Infant transmutes one million times its weight into meritorious gold
