17 What Putrefaction Properly Is

Chapter outline

God implants an unceasing active spirit within primordial vapour.

This spirit generates, preserves, dissolves and re-forms every individual body.

Its fiery and restraining aspects are represented through conflict, marriage and Venus.

Movement opens pores and lets the spirit penetrate and alter matter.

One water contains the four elements, three principles and two generative roles.

Names distinguish states and actions of the one underlying spirit.

When God sent forth the universal vapour, he freely implanted in it an active being which we call a spirit. From the beginning this spirit is restless, never standing still: continually mobile, acting and working without interruption. Whether fixed or volatile, it must always have more to do, bringing about one alteration after another in every creature. Even when it ceases to be in one thing or withdraws from a thing that has died, it begins again in another at that same instant, never resting for a moment. This spirit is the author, cause and originator of every change. It begins through putrefaction. After brooding over that for a time, or separating the pure from the impure, it conjoins, coagulates and fixes until each individual has attained its appointed end. Once that end is reached, it begins again to putrefy, dissolve and separate the coagulated body, until it perfects something else from it. This spirit is the generator, preserver, destroyer and generator of all things in the world. We cannot see it in its first beginning, in its vapour-form: it is then entirely hidden in vapour or water, and so spiritual that a little heat makes it fly away into the air. But when it descends from above into our coarser bodily elements, it is partly retained and must, willingly or unwillingly, take on a visible, tangible body.

It then appears in a white, ice-cold, crystal-transparent form, nitre, yet inwardly so fiery that, if heated and gathered in abundance at earth’s centre with its enemy coming to meet it, it would become so angry as to blast not only rocks, stones, houses and buildings but the whole globe into the air. Earthquakes often give us, to our harm, a demonstration of its powers. Had it not its brother, or cold counterpart—salt, its Venus, with whom it falls in love and binds itself, and who alone can subdue and tame it—it would long ago have harmed the whole world. For its brother or wife does not permit this when they embrace in the fiery, infernal palace, but falls around its neck and grasps its middle, cooling and extinguishing its anger in love so it cannot expend that anger harmfully elsewhere. As soon as its Venus embraces it and binds it with love’s cords, it so completely forgets itself that even if its enemies approach, it does them no harm. It draws them into its love, associates with them and establishes, as it were, an eternal alliance. This spirit is distributed in and through all creatures, as stated above; none can live, move or be without it. It carries generation, destruction and regeneration throughout every creature. Putrefaction is therefore the first key and gate by which this doubled spirit opens nature’s palace to us, then closes it again through the succeeding degree.

Because this spirit never rests, it moves. As stated above, its movement produces a lukewarming or warming property. That warmth opens the pores of every thing, allowing the implanted spirit to pass and penetrate everywhere, either to generate or to corrupt. Having penetrated the members, it begins to dissolve or coagulate and continues until it has penetrated the whole body. The subtle volatile parts then begin to give off vapour, according to whether the warmth is weak or strong, and emit their smell. From this we can clearly perceive that the spirit is working and acting: through digestion or putrefaction it opens the body, rots it, softens it like earth and carries it onward degree by degree until it reaches its proposed end. This spirit was vapour and water at its beginning. As it was itself originally water and vapour, so it makes everything from vapour and water, and makes nothing without water. It must have water for its operation, mixture and dissolution, because all the things it makes readily mix with water. It makes animals from water, and they visibly consist almost entirely of soft, watery parts. When the vital vapour has exhaled and been extinguished, it makes them mud, slime and water again through water. Plants likewise consist of watery, juicy and moist parts, though less entirely than animals, and are dissolved and reduced into water with and through water. Nature and this spirit likewise make minerals from water and resolve them again into water through water, as will be explained further below.

Do not understand this water—or the creatures reduced into water and coagulated from it—as powerless water or mere well water from which spirit generates animals, plants and minerals. It is a water in which all four elements stand in concord: four parts, heaven or fire, air, water and earth; three principles, body, spirit and soul; salt, mercury and sulphur; acid, alkali and the volatile. Within it are man and woman, agent and patient, nitre and salt, from which everything is born, destroyed and regenerated: a water in which spirit acts as one and does everything. Although distinguished by its fixation and volatility and called twofold, threefold, fourfold and fivefold, it is only one spirit, differing only according to its different actions. If volatile and vaporous, it is called heaven and air, the volatile, agent, male, and so forth, soul. If half-fixed and bodily, it is called water, acid, spirit, sulphur, nitre. If fixed, it is called earth, the fixed, patient, alkali, female, magnet, body, salt, as stated above. This is the whole understanding of things: whenever something appears to us in a particular form and shape, we give it a name accordingly to distinguish it from other things. If everything had one name, we would take one thing for another without distinction, as in the confusion of Babylon. In the beginning there was only one simple water, which divided in time. In the division each part received its particular name, although all were in one single root.

I have thus explained the cause of putrefaction and what it is: the implanted, moving spirit that makes lukewarm, warms, heats and kindles—the one simple spirit; or, in a doubled yet simple form, acid and alkali contending with one another; mercury, sulphur and salt; spirit, soul and body.