Heinrich Khunrath’s Magnesia Catholica Philosophorum

ii. The thesis

The proposition is this. There is exactly one universal subject in alchemy; it is not to be obtained out of the metals by any art whatever; and without it nothing in the work can begin.

That there is only one. Pages 15–24 are one sustained argument that there can be but a single Vniuersale in Alchymia — VNIVERSALE PLVS VNO, in ALCHYMIA, NON DARI (p. 24). Khunrath grants his opponents their premiss at p. 20, that the Spirit of the World is in all things, and denies flatly the inference they draw from it. His answer is one sentence and the whole book turns on it: So ist auch des HERRN vnvergenglicher GEIST … in Allen: IN JEDEM aber IST ER NICHT CATHOLISCH — the Spirit is in all, but in each one he is not catholic. The all-pervading and the universal are not the same claim.

That it is not in the metals. This is the long negative argument, and it is longer and less tidy than a summary would like: it opens at p. 60, is interrupted by a digression on catching the Spirit out of the air (pp. 84–86) and by the book’s constructive centre (pp. 95–103), and is not finished until p. 128. It is where Khunrath is most obviously a man who has stood at a furnace. He sets out, at length and with evident competence, what the laboratory actually does to silver and gold: dissolution in corrosive waters, precipitation, edulcoration, calcination and reverberation, the volatile salt of tartar, the spirit and salt of children’s urine, the sanguine essence of the green stone (pp. 67–68). He grants that the products are excellent medicines (p. 70). He then denies the lot of them. They are Specificata — things already narrowed to a species — and what is wanted is precisely what has not been so narrowed (p. 60). The colours in the glass prove nothing; the peacock’s tail seen there is not the peacock’s tail of the Philosophers (pp. 71–73). The products are not merely useless but premature: Metallische Embryones oder vnzeitige gebürte, metallic embryos or untimely births, already gone a good way off from the pri-material state (p. 78). The reason is structural and he repeats it in every register he has: the reduction of metals into the first matter must happen through the first matter (pp. 73–74). A thing is dissolved by that out of which it is composed — nihil naturalius esse … quàm solui rem aliquam per id, à quo suum habet componi — and by nothing else (p. 118).

That without it nothing begins. The positive claim is the Magnesia Catholica itself. It is the first matter of all metals, lying not in the chymist’s flask but in the great world — id super terra ex quo Natura generat siue producit Metalla in terra, that upon the earth out of which Nature generates metals in the earth (p. 67). It is a Chaos, called by countless names precisely to hide it from the unworthy (p. 64); the Catholic and Crude Mercurius of the Philosophers (p. 53); Mercurius duplex, mercury with its own sulphur (p. 54). Given it, the work is a regeneration: the metal is sown into a watery field, dies, putrefies in its mother’s body, and is born again more-than-perfect (p. 75). Withheld, nothing that follows can follow.