From the book
Heinrich Khunrath’s Magnesia Catholica Philosophorum
Heinrich Khunrath · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordThe featherless bird or gold-beetle arrives on p. 170 crying silver- and gold-making.
- In KhunrathThe medical image depends upon abtreiben, driving out, paired with the purging drug wormseed.
- In this editionPreserve both animal names and the “without wormseed” joke.
- A reading distinctionThe medicinal interpretation of wormseed is supplied by the modern note, while the explicit juxtaposition of drug and money is primary.
Meaning
The featherless bird or gold-beetle arrives on p. 170 crying silver- and gold-making. His followers rush towards him without reflection, while he can drive their own silver and gold from them without wormseed. The sequence makes the promise of producing wealth into a satirical means of extracting it.
Use in the book
The medical image depends upon abtreiben, driving out, paired with the purging drug wormseed. The text mocks an effective removal of money where a genuine medicinal agent would remove something from a body. It is a verbal accusation of financial predation, not a recipe involving wormseed.
The next comparisons make the audience as important as the projector: fly in buttermilk, swine at the dish, and birds easily taken by a limer. Their vulnerability arises because they change their proposed matter repeatedly and respond to a new loud claim before weighing natural grounds.
The bird's lack of feathers and the beetle's gold-name remain polemical naming. The page identifies no particular itinerant person whose conduct can independently be established from the caricature.
Places to read
- 1599 p. 169Greed and idleness frame the crowd’s susceptibility
- 1599 p. 170The featherless bird, gold-beetle and money-purge define the new projector
- 1599 p. 171The fowling image completes the account of the readily caught audience
Translation in this edition
Preserve both animal names and the “without wormseed” joke. A plain paraphrase as “fraudster” would lose the inversion between promised gold-making and actual purse-emptying.
Source note
The medicinal interpretation of wormseed is supplied by the modern note, while the explicit juxtaposition of drug and money is primary. It does not authorize present-day medicinal use.