Glossary

Accident

French: accident

A quality or condition of a subject. The source expressly includes purity, light, fixity, subtlety, and penetrability among the accidents discussed in the account of glorification. The term belongs to the philosophical vocabulary of properties and their bearer.

Passages: H001-S272

Agent and patient

French: agent; patient

The acting and receiving principles within a transformation. Their relation gives the work an account of what effects a change and what undergoes it. The manuscript’s first exposition explicitly distinguishes first and second agents.

Passages: H001-S031b; H001-S111; H001-S169; H001-S237; H001-S295

Agility

French: agilité

One of the gifts attributed to a blessed or perfected body, together with subtlety, brightness, and impassibility. The discussion asks how a body freed from ordinary impediments can move and act.

Passages: H001-S160; H001-S166; H001-S221; H001-S297; H001-S298

Alchemical art

French: art chimique; art hermétique

The knowledge and practice of transforming and perfecting matter, presented here through operations, figures, fables, and religious comparisons. Its practitioners are artists, chemists, or philosophers. The opening makes moral preparation and guarded disclosure conditions of its transmission.

Passages: H001-S015

Anathema

French: anathème

A solemn curse or condemnation. The opening adapts biblical maledictions to threaten a reader who discloses or mishandles the book’s secrets. Repeated threats against household, health, possessions, and community give secrecy a religious sanction.

Passages: H001-S015

Andromeda

French: Andromède

In the interpretation of the fable, the white sulfur of nature sublimed to the alembic’s head. Its stone-like figure is bound to the rock, while remaining mercurial water below is represented by the threatening dragon.

Passages: H001-S065

Aquilon

French: aquilon

The north wind. The flower commentary interprets it as cold mercurial water that dissolves the compact body of gold, reduces it to a raw condition, and raises or spiritualizes it through rarefaction.

Passages: H001-S052; H001-S053

Armoniac

French: armoniac

The retained heading of a section on moist natural spirits associated with the salts of Mercury and the Moon. The discussion emphasizes their power to dissolve or alter what other elemental agencies cannot corrupt.

Passages: H001-S156

Balm

French: baume

The life-bearing principle remaining in a corpse in the account of mortification. It contains powers of generation, nutrition, and increase. Its presence is said both to preserve against corruption and to supply a principle of alteration.

Passages: H001-S269

Body

French: corps

A material or embodied subject, frequently contrasted with soul and spirit. The manuscript describes bodies being dissolved, made spiritual, purified, and reunited with their souls. In its account of final perfection, bodily luminosity and incorruptibility connect the alchemical work to the resurrection of the blessed.

Passages: H001-S083; H001-S159; H001-S170; H001-S177; H001-S268

Brightness

French: clarté; clarification; lucidité

The luminous condition developed in the account of purified spirits and perfected bodies. Clarification can combine purification with the acquisition of radiance. This use supports the manuscript’s comparisons between natural perfection and beatification.

Passages: H001-S167; H001-S174; H001-S175

Cabalistic

French: cabalistique

The opening’s adjective for a guarded art and its mysteries. It joins the authority attributed to Abraham with restrictions on access and disclosure. The manuscript’s use of the word belongs to its own account of sacred knowledge; a historical lineage would require evidence beyond that attribution.

Passages: H001-S015; H001-S043; H001-S182

Caduceus

French: caducée

Mercury’s staff entwined with serpents. The source interprets the serpents through the reciprocal action of sulfur and quicksilver: sulfur arrests the volatile spirit, while mercury separates sulfur from its body. Their attachment to the wand gives an image of conjunction and fixity.

Passages: H001-S026b; H001-S032; H001-S036; H001-S042; H001-S088

Chaos

French: chaos

The confused condition from which forms are distinguished and brought into created things. The angelic hierarchy distributes this formative work among different orders. In the account of adverse spirits, the first chaos also supplies an image of confusion, darkness, and destructive conflict.

Passages: H001-S133; H001-S137; H001-S155

Chemistry

French: chimie; chymie

The manuscript’s name for an art of material transformation. One later passage defines it through the separation of pure from impure by fire. The book also gives this art a hermetic, mythological, and Christian interpretation, so its historical scope extends well beyond the modern laboratory discipline.

Passages: H001-S009; H001-S058; H001-S174

Coction

French: coction

The cooking or digestion of the subject under heat. The source treats the degree and duration of fire as consequential: excessive intensity can master and destroy the subject, while insufficient action fails to perfect the work.

Passages: H001-S239

Corruption

French: corruption

The dissolution or loss of a former material condition, treated as a prerequisite of new generation. The work distinguishes corruption that prepares renewed life from the destructive activity of adverse spirits. Its later theological comparisons place corruption beside death and regeneration.

Passages: H001-S071; H001-S083; H001-S156; H001-S249; H001-S250

Dealbation

French: dealbation

Whitening, a stage of the work’s purification. The source sets it within the preparation and changing condition of its material subject.

Passages: H001-S116; H001-S245

Dragon

French: dragon

An emblematic creature given several local functions. The dragon nailed to a cross participates in an explanation of venom, medicine, sulfur, and the vessel; other serpents represent active and volatile powers. Each figure’s explanation supplies its particular operative sense.

Passages: H001-S071; H001-S072

Element

French: élément

A constituent or principle within the historical account of nature, especially earth, water, air, and fire. The reduction of elements concerns their transformation and relation within the work. The later account of perfected bodies asks how elemental qualities can be purified into luminosity and permanence.

Passages: H001-S097b; H001-S167

Elixir

French: élixir

The bearer of active glorious qualities, able to communicate them to other bodies. The manuscript distinguishes these active powers from the passive qualities of a body already glorified.

Passages: H001-S273

Emblem

French: emblême; emblème

A pictured scene whose details bear an explanation. The manuscript moves from descriptions of colors, positions, creatures, and implements to their meanings in the work. The garden, the crucified dragon, and the massacre scene are major examples.

Passages: H001-S038; H001-S073; H001-S109b; H001-S189b; H001-S288

Eucharist

French: Eucharistie

The Christian sacrament treated in the manuscript’s closing comparison with multiplication. Its place belongs to an extended argument relating natural operations to the mysteries of faith. The outline and notes retain the author’s particular language of figure, comparison, and proof.

Passages: H001-S290; H001-S305; H001-S307

Figure

French: figure

An image or represented scene; also a thing that expresses another through an attributed resemblance. The manuscript calls quicksilver a figure both of Christ and of the Demon, using contrary properties of one material to develop different comparisons.

Passages: H001-S009; H001-S071; H001-S178; H001-S226; H001-S309

Fixation

French: fixation

The making of a volatile subject fixed or stable. The wilderness with serpents and four rivers introduces a section explicitly headed Fixation. Elsewhere the wand and the action of sulfur give images of arresting volatility, while permanence becomes a property of the perfected body.

Passages: H001-S109b

Fusibility

French: fusibilité

The power or capacity of fusion used in the closing comparison between perfected metals and glorified bodies. Since a metal is denied local movement, fusibility takes the place of agility, while penetrability, fixity, and tincture remain necessary to the stone’s claimed action.

Passages: H001-S297; H001-S298

Genius

French: génie

A spirit or power operating in nature. The manuscript distinguishes good and evil genii and asks how their activity produces happiness or torment. This is the historical sense of a spiritual being, distinct from exceptional intellectual talent.

Passages: H001-S159

Germinative spirit

French: esprit germinatif

The enduring principle of generation, nutrition, growth, and sensation. Material impurities may imprison or obstruct its action. It is distinguished from the rational soul and follows the essential form when a compound dissolves.

Passages: H001-S255; H001-S256

Gold

French: or

The metal, a fruit of the garden’s metallic tree, and a recurrent measure of perfection. The text also speaks of volatile gold before maturation and fixation. Its physical and figurative uses can overlap: the degree of preparation is part of what the name means locally.

Passages: H001-S041; H001-S085; H001-S170

Hermetic

French: hermétique

Pertaining to the art associated by the manuscript with Hermes or Mercury. A heading calls for the hermetic philosophical meaning of Hercules’ labors. A later etymological passage derives Hermetic science from the name of Hermes and sets it within the purification of matter.

Passages: H001-S120b; H001-S174

Imbibition

French: imbibition

A successive moistening or soaking used to whiten laton. Repetition develops the material through renewed contact with the work’s liquid and belongs to the account of preparation and purification.

Passages: H001-S074; H001-S101; H001-S204; H001-S236; H001-S286

Impassibility

French: impassibilité

Freedom from suffering, one of the gifts of the blessed body. The manuscript considers its opposite, passibility, when asking how a body can remain incorruptible yet endure punishment.

Passages: H001-S160; H001-S168; H001-S213

Incarnation

French: Incarnation

The Christian mystery brought into relation with the work’s first operation and the birth of the stone. It belongs to the manuscript’s sustained effort to make transformations of matter disclose the mysteries of Christianity.

Passages: H001-S189b; H001-S190; H001-S211; H001-S219; H001-S282

King

French: roi