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Reading language

2 From Whom or What Everything Was Born

Chapter outline

God’s creative word becomes vapour and then chaotic water.

Water is the receptive body; the world spirit is the active power within it.

Evaporation, rain, sweat and distillation illustrate the exchange between vapour and water.

The same originating matter circulates through all things and permits their transformation.

The practitioner must select a substance in which the universal spirit is readily concentrated.

The incomprehensible God created everything from the great Nothing by his own free will. He resolved and willed, and sent forth from his divine mouth his holy, powerful word: Fiat—“Let it be!” This became an immeasurable vapour, mist and smoke. Through its continual increase, this vapour and so forth resolved or concentrated itself, thickening into the familiar, universal chaotic water. This water is what this great world and all its inhabitants were made from. It is the water from which God made all supernatural and natural things, and it is the first beginning and primordial origin of all things that were to come before and after us. But the origin of this water, as we have explained, is the eternal God and the word he sent forth. The word is a spirit full of power, and this spirit became visible as vapour and mist. The latter became tangible as water. Here we have two things contained in one: a visible thing, water, and an invisible thing, the spirit hidden within the water.

Water without the spirit is recolaceum: that is, powerless. Spirit without water is nothing, or has no subsistence, because the spirit must have a body if it is to bring about bodily or substantial things. God willed the spirit to work all things in all things through water. Water readily mixes with everything, and through it the spirit can soften, penetrate and generate everything, and destroy it again. Water is the subject or body, the dwelling, the instrument. The spirit is the worker: the renowned world spirit, the soul and spirit of the world, the all-working spirit and power of God; the universal seed, the seed of the universe, the true agent, the smith of all natural things. Initially, at its origin, this water and spirit was entirely volatile and unstable, as can readily be understood: a vapour, mist and smoke-water. From this anyone can infer what nature is, what its origin is, and from what beginning it proceeds. This can and will be clearly set out and demonstrated below.

That the world arose from vapour, and that vapour becomes water and water becomes vapour, is surely evident to the eye. Between heaven and earth we see nothing but vapour, smoke, mist and water, which, driven by the central heat, sublimes upward from the sphere of earth and water into the region of air. If we were permitted to see the subtle outflows or vapours of the heavens, we could also see their influence descending from above, entering and joining these vapours sublimed upward from below, from us. Since our dim eyes cannot see this, we must grasp it with our understanding and then make it tangible through chymical practice: what occurs in the macrocosm occurs also in the microcosm, and what is above is also below. We see that these vapours come from water, especially in summer, when the sun heats the waters, turns them into vapour and draws them up into the air. Again, when it has rained and the sun then shines on it, we see roofs wet with rain smoking and steaming afterward, and this vapour flying back into the air. The peasant sees it at his hearth when he boils water in a pot, kettle or cooking vessel: the water steams and smokes, and if he wishes he can turn it wholly into vapour. We see vapour become water when mist and smoke have thickened into clouds. These clouds then resolve into rain, snow and water, and fall back to their origin. The peasant in the field feels and experiences it to his great discomfort when he must work in the heat: his whole body exhales and gives off vapour. That vapour settles in his clothes and resolves into water there, running down his back in little streams—what we commonly call sweat. All distillers see the same thing: liquids rise as vapour into the distilling heads, thicken there, and flow down through the spouts in little streams and drops. In this way the vapours become water.

From what has been said we can conclude and be assured that the first matter of this great world, after God, is chaotic water, or vapour resolved into water. To our eyes it is still one and simple, but in number it is twofold: water and spirit, visible and invisible. Water is the patient; spirit is the agent. From these two, each and every thing is continually born, preserved, destroyed again and born anew, until the end of the world. Whoever strives to reach the fountain of secret wisdom should hold this firmly in mind. Let him proceed with this central point toward the circumference in the following chapters, and he will discover that everything is in everything: this spirit and its power are distributed through the substances of the whole world. Just as all things consist of this one thing, so, in their outward dissolution, they return to it again. That is, through successive changes the circumference returns to the centre. Whoever understands this has no doubt or scruple in the analysis of nature. He makes the volatile fixed, and conversely; the sweet sour, and conversely; the foul-smelling fragrant; poison into theriac, and theriac into poison. He knows that all have sprung from a single root and can become that root again, which is so earnestly desired. They differ only in their accidental properties, not in their matter, according to a greater or lesser degree of digestion.

For this reason all the better-disposed philosophers cry out: Our matter is in all the things of this world, all around us, wherever one looks. We touch it with our hands at every moment, tread it underfoot; it flies around before our noses and often flows onto them. But this is said in passing. The philosophers have nevertheless found a means of choosing their substances and have directed us to where this spirit is found most abundantly, most readily and most quickly in concentrated form. Although it is in every substance, it is more abundant, more powerful and purer in one than in another. Otherwise, it is everything in everything.

42.Fiat is the Latin imperative “Let it be,” familiar from the Vulgate account of creation. The author turns divine speech into the starting point of a material cosmogony.

43.The German pairs “resolvirte” with “concentrirte” and then “verdickte.” Its vocabulary is less mechanically fixed than modern usage; the action here produces water by thickening vapour.

44.Recolaceum denotes an exhausted or ineffective watery remainder. The author immediately supplies his own definition, “without power”; no modern chemical identification is imposed.

45.Subjectum names the material substrate on which an operation acts. Agens and patiens, used below, distinguish the active and receptive roles within the author’s account.

46.Anima mundi and spiritus mundi mean “soul of the world” and “spirit of the world.” The author binds these inherited cosmological terms to his Christian language of divine power.

47.The observation of evaporation is used to warrant a further claim about invisible celestial influx. The second claim is an inference within the author’s cosmology rather than something demonstrated by the visible examples.

48.The Latin analogy links macrocosm and microcosm and echoes the Emerald Tablet’s relation of above and below. Here it also supplies a reason for studying cosmic processes at the distilling apparatus.

49.A “helm” is the head fitted over a distilling vessel; its spout carries condensed liquid to a receiver. “Sublime” here describes upward movement broadly, without the restricted meaning of modern sublimation.

50.The printed syntax of “daß diese grosse Welt … Prima Materia sey” is compressed and awkward. The translation construes chaotic water as the first matter of the created world, in continuity with the chapter’s preceding account.

51.Theriac was a compound medicinal preparation associated particularly with antidotal powers. The example concerns the conversion of harmful and beneficial qualities rather than an identification of theriac as a single substance.

52.“Digestion” can mean a material’s maturation or alteration under sustained warmth. The distinction between matter and accidents allows one underlying matter to bear changing qualities.

53.The ubiquity of the matter does not make every starting material equally useful. The closing distinction introduces the practical question of selecting a substance in which the common power can be concentrated.