The Manly Hall Manuscript Collection, Volume I

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