Agent and patient

Use in the book

The first agents of nature appear at scan 43 as the keys and doorway to natural magic and Christian religion. Knowledge of them requires trials and preparation rather than the unaided reading of a secret vocabulary. The passage places alchemy first on a royal road leading through nature toward higher knowledge. It gives no universal list at that point. The agents are identified through the acts and materials explained in subsequent figures, which is why a lexicon should preserve the openness of the phrase instead of replacing it with a formula.³⁵

The mythological exposition at scan 111 illustrates an acting power through destructive animals. Serpents, the boar, and the bull signify mercurial water whose dissolving virtue meets no resistance. The active role is understood from what the water does to its subject. This same mercurial medium may elsewhere be water, seed, spirit, or a participant in marriage. The identity of a named material does not by itself settle which role it occupies in a specific operation.

At scan 237 the author states that every metal contains both sexes and has a hermaphroditic nature. The sun performs the woman’s function in darkness and the male’s in daylight; the moon acts secretly as the agent and openly as the patient. The contrast between hidden and manifest action is more important than a fixed equivalence of sun with man and moon with woman. The writer criticizes indiscriminate marriages of different seeds, requiring the artist to recognize and separate natures before making the legitimate conjunction. Agency depends upon such discrimination, not upon the multiplication of ingredients.³⁶

The discussion of suffering makes the relation more severe. Scan 168 describes a patient subject capable of receiving qualities, while the impressions of elements or agents become strong through subtlety and penetrability. Scan 169 extends the result to simultaneous cold, burning, disease, and other torments affecting the smallest bodily parts. Incorruptibility does not necessarily protect the patient: joined with passibility, it makes suffering continuous because the afflicted body cannot die. The argument is the author’s explanation of eternal torment by analogy with natural action, rather than an ordinary account of an experimental subject.

At scan 245 the agents of transformation are released when corrupted metals emerge from confinement, and the artist confronts monsters standing for heterogeneous matter. The same operative setting gives a positive reason to distinguish agent from patient: one must know which power dissolves, which substance receives its action, and which impurities oppose the intended change. In the sacramental passages the vocabulary of power reaches divine action, but the text also distinguishes the finite created agent from the Creator. The ability of an alchemical medium to communicate its virtue serves an argument about possibility; it does not give the artist the divine agent’s unlimited authority.

Places to read

1. Manuscript 13r · Scan 43The first agents of nature open the royal road of alchemy and higher study.
2. Manuscript 42r · Scan 111Mercurial water represented by ravaging animals through its dissolving power.
3. Manuscript 70v · Scan 168The receptive subject and the strength of elemental impressions.
4. Manuscript 71r · Scan 169Numerous agents imagined as producing simultaneous torments.
5. Manuscript 102r · Scan 237Solar and lunar principles exchange agent and patient roles.
6. Manuscript 106r · Scan 245Corruption releases metallic powers while the artist overcomes heterogeneous matter.

Translation

Patient is retained when the French uses the technical noun or qualifies a principle. In explanatory prose receptive can clarify its meaning, but the translation does not replace it with victim, which would impose suffering on every occurrence. Likewise agent need not designate a person. It may name an element, a natural power, a prepared medium, or something treated as capable of altering a subject.

The translation distinguishes a passive element from a passible body. Passive describes a role or elemental classification; passible identifies susceptibility to suffering or impression. Their connection is part of the manuscript’s reasoning, but they are not interchangeable words. The reciprocal metallic example at scan 237 is the best safeguard against turning the entire vocabulary into a rigid opposition between powerful and powerless substances.

agents

Attested: H001-S043; H001-S168; H001-S169. Plural acting powers; the objects range from first natural agents to individual sources of alteration.

principe agent

Attested: H001-S237. The moon’s concealed active function in the account of metallic sexes.

principe patient

Attested: H001-S237. The moon’s manifest receptive function in the same passage.

sujet patient

Attested: H001-S168. The subject capable of receiving qualities and impressions, here in the account of suffering.