Heinrich Khunrath’s Magnesia Catholica Philosophorum

Oratorium and Laboratorium

Retained. The praying-place and the working-place, and neither without the other. Khunrath’s two marginal headings, with Mens, Deo cōiuncta, quod cupit assequitur under the first and Theoricè & Practicè under the second. They stand on the recto and the verso of one leaf, back to back and not facing, which is how the Amphitheatrum would engrave them. The words are paired here once only in the whole treatise. pp. 173–174 (and m).

Particularia / Particularismus

particular transmutations; particularism. Always distinguished from the universal work; the margin of p. 6 makes Particularismus a solœcismus, a fault of grammar as well as of art. pp. 6 m, 14, 53, 74, 103–106.

percontiren

to question closely, from percontari. One rung of the ladder percontiren, contempliren, lernen vnd erkennen — whose object is not Nature herself but God’s secrets laid in the due Subject. p. 63.

Pfawenschwantz

peacock’s tail, the cauda pauonis: the play of colours before the whitening. Khunrath denies that it proves anything, and that the scoffers’ peacock’s tail is the Philosophers’. pp. 71, 73.

plusquamperficiert

more-than-perfected. The state beyond ordinary perfection into which the regenerated metal passes, and from which it can multiply its own kind. See Wiedergeberung.

principia / principiata

principles / things principiated. The distinction on which pp. 117–118 turn: what the laboratory draws out of a metal is produced from a principle and is therefore not the principle, and so cannot be the ground of a regeneration. p. 117.

PROGNOSTICON

a prognostication, retained. Khunrath’s marginal heading for his forecast: a time is coming when theology drawn out of the great world-book of Nature will be alleged beside biblical theology as ocular proof, and will count for much, against certain quarrelsome and self-willed hard heads. It is the only place in the treatise where he looks forward rather than back. p. 183 m.

Proiectio / Transmutatio

projection / transmutation, kept distinct and never collapsed. The casting-on of the medicine upon the lower metals, and the change it works into the upper. Khunrath sets the two in one clause at p. 160 and the distinction is not rhetorical: the whole argument of pp. 158–160 is that a matter which has not been prepared can do neither. pp. 89, 100, 160.

Pseudo-Chymicus

pseudo-chymist, retained. The counterfeit practitioner, standing to argChymist as Pseudo-Magnesia stands to Magnesia; at p. 160 it is used of the men who stage a public proof of transmutation. pp. 79 m, 160, 178 m.