Secrecy and the Divine Source

For the candid and modest reader I have another reply, which I believe will excuse me sufficiently. Raymond Lull, a man who had been in Nature's centre and undoubtedly understood much of the divine will, lays a terrible charge upon me not to expose these principles indiscriminately. [New translation of the Latin:] “I swear to you upon my soul that if you reveal these things, you are damned. For every good proceeds from God, and is owed to him alone. Therefore you shall preserve and keep secret what it belongs to him to reveal, and declare that you rightly withhold what is owed to his honour. If you were to reveal in a few words what he formed over a long time, on the great day of judgement you would be condemned as an offender against God's injured majesty. The charge of treason would not be forgiven you. For the revelation of such things belongs to God and no other.” [Marginal note: Theory, chapter 6.] [Vaughan’s own English rendering:] “I swear to you upon my soul that you are damned if you reveal these things. Every good thing proceeds from God and is due to him alone. Therefore preserve and keep that secret which God alone should reveal,

and affirm that you rightly withhold those things whose revelation belongs to his honour. If you reveal in a few words what God has been forming over a long time, you will be condemned on the great day of judgement as a traitor to God's majesty, and your treason will not be forgiven. The revelation of such things belongs to God, not man.” So spoke the wise Raymond.

For my part I have always honoured the magicians. Their philosophy is both rational and majestic: it dwells upon effects rather than mere notions, effects confirming the Creator's wisdom and power alike. When I was a mere wanderer in their books and did not understand them, I believed them. Time rewarded my faith and repaid my trust with knowledge. Meanwhile I suffered many bitter slanders from envious opponents who had nothing scholarly about them except their gowns and a little language through which to vent their nonsense. But they could not move me. With Spartan patience I digested my injuries, and finally discovered that Nature was magical, rather than Peripatetic. I have no reason, then, to distrust in spiritual things those I have found so sound and faithful even in natural

mysteries. I do believe Raymond, and in accordance with that faith I make provision for my salvation. I will not disclose the secret, so that I may not be condemned. But if this does not satisfy you, whoever you are, let me whisper a word in your ear, and afterwards you may proclaim it from the rooftops. Do you know from whom, and how, that sperm or seed which people, for want of a better name, call the first matter proceeded? A certain enlightened man, in his day a member of that society which some painted buzzards are accustomed to laugh at, writes as follows: “God, supremely good and great, created something out of nothing; but that something became a single thing in which were all things, heavenly and earthly creatures.” [Vaughan’s accompanying English:] God, he says, incomparably good and great, created something out of nothing; but that something was made one thing, in which all things were contained, both heavenly and earthly creatures. This first something was a kind of cloud or darkness, which condensed into water; and this water is that one thing in which all things were contained. But my question is: what was that nothing out of which the first cloudy chaos, or something, was made? Can you tell me? Perhaps you think it is sheer nothing. It is indeed “nothing in relation to us”: nothing that we know perfectly. It is nothing, as Dionysius says,

See Jacob Böhme’s most excellent and profound discourse on the Three Principles.

“none of the things that are, and none of the things that are not.” It is nothing that was created, or among the things that exist; and nothing among what you call nothing—that is, among things that do not exist, in your empty, destructive sense. Yet, with your permission, it is the true thing of which we can affirm nothing: that transcendent essence whose theology proceeds by negation. This was known to the early Church, but has been lost in our own day. This is Cornelius Agrippa’s nothing; and in this nothing, when he was tired of human things—I mean human sciences—he finally rested. “To know nothing,” he said, “is the happiest life.” To know nothing is indeed the happiest life, for to know this nothing is eternal life. Learn, then, to understand that magical axiom: “The visible was made from the invisible.” All visible things came from the invisible God, the wellspring from which all things flow; and creation was an astonishing metaphysical birth or delivery. This subtle virgin water, or chaos, was the second nature after God himself and, if I may put it so, the child of the blessed Trinity. What doctor’s hands, then, are fit to touch that subject upon which God himself, when he works, lays his own Spirit? For truly we read: “The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the water.” And

See Dionysius the Areopagite, on negative theology.

Genesis, chapter 1.

can I then be expected to expose this mystery to every hand whatsoever, to proclaim it and cry it through the streets as oysters are cried for sale? These considerations, together with others which I would not commit to paper for the whole world, have almost made me displease my dearest friends, to whom I nevertheless owe a better satisfaction. Had my fortune been merely to know this matter, as most people do, perhaps I would have guarded it less carefully; but I have been instructed in all its secret circumstances, which few on earth understand. I do not speak for display: I speak a truth which my conscience knows very well. Reader, let me therefore ask your patience. I shall leave this disclosure to God, who, if it is his blessed will, can call to you and say: “Here it is, and this is how I work upon it.” I would not have said all this in my defence had I not been attacked, as it were, on this very point, and told to my face that I was obliged to disclose everything I knew; for this age expects dreams and revelations as the attendants of its invisible righteousness. I have now discussed the matter sufficiently; and if you are not fortunate enough to find it through what is written here, you nevertheless cannot be deceived by what I have said. I have deliberately avoided every term that might lead you to mistake

any common salts, stones or minerals for it. I also advise you to beware of all plants and animals: avoid them, and every part of them whatsoever. I say this because some ignorant, filthy broilers believe that human blood is the true subject. But is human blood in the bowels of the earth, so that metals could be generated from it? Or were the world and everything in it made from human blood as their first matter? Certainly not. The first matter existed before humanity and every other creature, for she is the mother of them all. They were made from the first matter, rather than the first matter from them. Take care, then: let no one deceive you. It is entirely impossible to reduce any particular thing to the first matter, or to a sperm, without our Mercury. Even when so reduced, it is not universal, but the particular sperm of its own species; and it produces no effects except those suited to that species’ nature, for God has sealed it with a particular Idea.

Leave alone, then, those who work upon human blood in their chemical stoves and athanors—or, as Sendivogius puts it, “in their wonderful little furnaces.” They will lament their error at last, sitting without sackcloth in the ashes of their compounds.