From the book
Heinrich Khunrath’s Magnesia Catholica Philosophorum
Heinrich Khunrath · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The word“One thing for another, dung for balsam” is the substitution that Khunrath means to prevent by teaching readers how to distinguish true Magnesia from false candidates.
- In KhunrathIts context is the promised redirection from a wrong road to recognition of a secure beginning.
- In this editionTranslate the coarse contrast without sanitizing it into “inferior material.”
- A reading distinctionThe phrase is applied to what may be foisted on seekers.
Meaning
“One thing for another, dung for balsam” is the substitution that Khunrath means to prevent by teaching readers how to distinguish true Magnesia from false candidates. The coarse Latin phrase begins at the end of p. 179 and receives its English sense through the continuation onto p. 180.
Use in the book
Its context is the promised redirection from a wrong road to recognition of a secure beginning. Natural light and the Christological analogy are the stated aids to discrimination. The threat is therefore not merely paying too much for a remedy: it is accepting an inadequate subject under the name and expectation of the right one.
The dung here must be distinguished from fimus Philosophorum, the positive philosophical dung named elsewhere as a regenerative medium. The shared coarse noun does not make the two figures equivalent. One passage rejects a worthless substitution; the other describes an agent within the approved account of the work.
Places to read
- 1599 p. 179The substitution warning follows the stated purpose of discriminating true and false Magnesias
- 1599 p. 180The sentence completes the warning before blessing those who build on true Magnesia
Translation in this edition
Translate the coarse contrast without sanitizing it into “inferior material.” The literal nouns carry the sense of a radically false exchange; they do not identify either substance in a recipe.
Source note
The phrase is applied to what may be foisted on seekers. It is not the withheld common name of Magnesia or a clue that the true subject is ordinary balsam.