16 Putrefaction: Nature’s Principal Point, Gate and Key, the Author of the Generation and Destruction of Natural Things

Chapter outline

Putrefaction is necessary for natural generation, destruction and true analysis.

The kingdoms differ in the speed and odour of their decay.

Their vapours return to a universal nature beyond particular kingdoms.

Putrefaction continually turns the elemental ladder upward and downward.

Because of its delicacy and subtle purity, heaven is less changeable than the lower elements. But when it enters air and from there passes into water and earth, it too putrefies with the others, to generate its like in the lower elements. By God’s particular ordinance, nothing will generate or destroy without such putrefaction. Without putrefaction, or a preceding maceration, digestion or fermentation—whether the fermenting happens quickly or slowly—no true analysis can therefore be hoped for, in universal materials as well as specific and individual things. Dew, rain, snow, hail and frost all putrefy without distinction, separating the subtle from the coarse. Their sign is the emission of a smell, however faint. Animals putrefy sooner and more readily than the upper things and stink unbearably because of their abundant, highly volatile saltpeter. Plants also putrefy readily because of their superfluous moisture, but not as quickly as animals, nor do they stink so badly. Minerals putrefy, ferment or seethe, though most of them do not give as bad a smell as the foregoing. Yet if iron enters maceration and obtains a homogeneous counterpart, it stinks worse than a sewer. We shall leave that to its proper place, and so forth.

The benefit and alteration we obtain through putrefaction is that minerals become plants again, and conversely plants become minerals. Nature thus moves around in a ring, making the highest lowest and the lowest highest. She turns all three kingdoms into a universal, undifferentiated nature. As said above, she drives vapours into the air from the centre of the sphere of earth and water, the mineral kingdom; from earth’s surface, the vegetable kingdom; from exhaling and putrefied animals; and also from all three living and flourishing kingdoms. There she makes them chaotic and brings them to universality, which is then neither animal, vegetable nor mineral, but is “obignarisch” [unresolved expression], everything in everything. Few novice philosophers, and fewer still of the ordinary sort of laboratory workers, will believe this before its explanation. After the explanation, every peasant sees it before his eyes at his door, before he even steps outside, as we have partly discussed above. Putrefaction is therefore the wondrous smith that makes earth into water, water into air, air into fire or heaven, and heaven into air again, then water, then earth. It makes this change continually, without ceasing, at every moment, until heaven and earth melt together into a glassy mass.