21 What Animal Generation Is, and From Which Principles Animals Consist and Into Which They Resolve Again

Chapter outline

A six-stage tree traces animal seed through bodily formation and hardening.

Animal bodies arise from watery seed and return through putrefaction to vegetable nourishment.

Volatile spirit explains mobility; its balance with fixedness and moisture explains differences in endurance.

The active spirit needs water in a suitable quantity to form and resolve the body.

Rapid animal putrefaction offers the practitioner a model for accelerating dissolution, with vegetable mediation still required.

Tree of the Generation of Animals. 1. Mucilaginous seed, male and female: animal Gur. 2. Formation of the infant: Liginosa Crystallina. 3. Membranous formation of the infant. 4. Tendinous formation of the infant. 5. Cartilaginous formation of the infant. 6. Bony formation of the newborn; hardening of the boy, youth, man and old man.

In this chapter we shall speak only of perfect animals. All perfect animals are generated through movement, which stimulates and draws out the seed as a viscous, watery matter, like mucus or snot. It flows into its appropriate matrix, where the female seed also appears, to bring forth their like. This seed is a thick or coagulated water and may rightly be called animal Gur. Thus the animal kingdom is born from water, or a slimy, watery being, and is nurtured in moist matter through the juicy, watery nourishment of blood. Once born, it consumes mainly moist animal and vegetable foods. Through its own archeus it transforms these into its own nature—flesh, blood, head and bone—and gains its growth from them to maintain its wretched life until its predestined term. Then it dies and putrefies in or upon earth into juice and slime, snot and filth, becoming a slippery, watery being. This moisture enters the earth among the vegetables and becomes like them, just as vegetables were previously the animal’s food and nourishment. Other vegetables grow from it as animal food, to nourish them again. Just as the animal had been wholly transformed into a vegetable through dissolution and putrefaction, what grows from it is transformed into an animal, as already sufficiently shown above.

As soon as male and female seed have coagulated together in the matrix, nature also forms a little skin on the outside, and within it a very clear crystalline moisture, clearer than crystal. In this moisture a little sphere or pearl coagulates, like a fish’s eye. It feeds increasingly upon this crystalline moisture and becomes a dry thing, or formed membranous body. It then acquires flesh, veins and nerves, and afterward begins to harden into cartilage or soft bones. Following this, once born, it hardens that cartilage into hard bones. The child becomes a boy, the boy a youth, the youth a man, then an old man, finally a dead body. This is the brief account of animal birth, destruction, transformation and rebirth into something else. The putrefied animal is reborn as a vegetable, and that becomes an animal, as above. Pyrotechnic anatomy reveals their familiar constitution: they consist of many volatile parts and volatile salt, with only a little alkali or fixed part.

Not only analysis shows this: one sees with one’s eyes that animals are volatile, lively, quick and more mobile than vegetables and minerals. An animal must possess a volatile, quick and mobile spirit; otherwise it could not move all its limbs. This spirit is the volatile, of which animals have much compared with vegetables and minerals, as their agility and rapid motion attest. If animals had more acid, whose property is to constrict and draw together, as seen in vegetables and minerals, an animal could not direct itself in every direction. It would remain in one place, as vegetables and minerals stand motionless. Acid is styptic, obstructing, contracting and drawing together, constricting and coagulating, as seen in people with contracted limbs and animals enclosed in hard coverings, such as snails, tortoises and the crab family. These cannot walk and move in every direction as quickly as other, softer animals. Since animals have volatile spirit in differing degrees, one is more mobile than another. The difference can be observed among birds and among four-footed land animals, crawling and walking. It is likewise seen between covered and uncovered animals, and between large and small bodies.

The more volatile an animal’s spirit, the weaker its life and the less enduring it is, as seen in delicate birds that lose their vital spirit when touched by a slight wind. The more enduring the spirit, the longer the life, as seen in ravens, deer, human beings and elephants. Excess wateriness and moisture also cause a short life. Where there is little moisture but much spirit and substance, life is enduring. Spirit is life and balsam, not water. Movement is therefore advisable: it moves and heats every limb, all of which continually give off vapour, visibly and invisibly, perceptibly and imperceptibly. All vegetables of a dry rather than moist nature also serve long life, as do animals in continual motion, such as all game, especially birds. These have dry, firm-grained flesh because their motions are vigorous. Once life has gone and departed from the animal—life being nothing other than a heavenly, astral light that kindles the vital spirit and drives it to act—animals collapse and die, immediately beginning to putrefy, though with differences. The softer, moister and more watery the animal, the sooner it putrefies compared with a dry, firm-grained one. This is seen in fish and aquatic creatures, which begin putrefying quickly because they have little vital spirit but much moisture. They putrefy quickly and return to first matter.

Let the reader mark this well: spirit acts and works, not water. The stronger and more abundant the spirit in an animal, and the less water, the livelier and more animated the animal. If an animal has much water, it drowns the spirit and the animal becomes sluggish, lazy and sleepy. Yet spirit must have water through which to carry out all its activity; without water it can do nothing. The quantity must be right, neither too much nor too little, or it is excessive. This holds not only in the animal but also in the vegetable and mineral kingdoms. The beginning and origin of all things was only spirit and water. In water the spirit began to work and to create everything visible and invisible in heaven and on earth at its Creator’s command. In an animal this individualized spirit accordingly makes blood, flesh, skin, bone and all the body’s members through water, making it hard and soft according to the Creator’s direction. In resolution the same spirit that made it from water makes it, with and through water, into watery matter, and finally into a water-spirit as it was at the beginning. From this the reader sees the seed and source from which the animal kingdom is born and destroyed, what it becomes again, and in and from what it consists.

The principal point to grasp in this chapter, most necessary for a practitioner to consider and keep continually before his eyes, is the speed and rapidity of putrefaction in the animal kingdom. When an animal dies, especially in warm weather, within a few hours and days it begins to putrefy and stink so violently that no one can remain near it without harm to health. The cause of this putrefaction is the vehement spirit, the abundant volatile salt. If a chymist considers this properly, he will gain a great advantage and head start in accelerating his operations. Every chymist wishes to be an anatomist of all things. O Lord, how many thousands go astray and fail, tormenting themselves to bring their subjects to putrefaction and solution! What thousands of menstrua and solvents they devise, yet nothing succeeds. All errors then arise: expense is wasted, time and matter lost. Head-scratching begins, then wishing, cursing and reviling the art and practitioner as nothing but lies and liars. Whoever wishes to be spared this vexation should therefore study the animal kingdom well. He must prepare and work it not only with his head but with his hands. “Anatomize!” is the imperative; then one thing will teach the next.

It has been said that no natural anatomy can occur without putrefaction. Look, therefore, to the ground and cause of all putrefaction. Here in this kingdom you have the finest opportunity and a wide field for work. Four-footed and land-dwelling animals putrefy quickly; those living in water putrefy quicker still. Land animals stink strongly, but when aquatic animals putrefy no one can endure their sheer stench, as seen with rotten fish and crabs. Many practitioners set their putrefactions to work for months, half years and whole years, only to find that nothing has even begun, especially with minerals. If your work will not putrefy, go to the animal kingdom. You see animals putrefy in a few hours and days; as they putrefy quickly, so, when applied, they make other things putrefy with them. Here take your eyes into your hands. Here is a principal cornerstone and foundation stone of the whole chymical art: a key capable of drawing back nature’s strongest locks and making every stone and metal fly over all the highest mountains of the wise. Reflect from this ground: what formerly took a year is shortened to a month; what cost a month costs a week; the week is shortened to a few days and hours. But note that this kingdom does not act in the mineral kingdom without the vegetable, or acts quite contrarily. The animal kingdom then brings forth no joy or chymical sweetness. With the vegetable kingdom, however, it produces every agreeableness in the mineral kingdom. Enough for now, until we explain further. We turn herewith to the vegetable kingdom.