Leaven

Use in the book

The first warning accompanies a technical exclusion. Metallic embryonic products and their derived liquors are not the true mother or regenerative field of silver and gold, and sowing the metals into them will not attain the desired end. The marginal leaven warns that false instruction about such subjects can communicate error to the reader. It is not an instruction to remove ordinary bread leaven from a preparation.

The second warning appears after the promise that a good man, joined to the reader by God, may teach something profitable. The reader can then forsake sophistical byways and leave the labyrinth of the erring, notwithstanding a vast crowd of blind laborants that cleaves to false Magnesias. The repetition turns the earlier local warning into a summary of the treatise's guiding purpose: avoid being absorbed into an erroneous practical tradition merely because it has numerous and confident followers.

The positive term has another object and operation. The universal Stone, as ferment, can enter unions with differently characterized materials and work according to the joined kind. Khunrath's shared vocabulary therefore depends upon the source of the transforming influence. The right agent gives legitimate transformation; the pseudo-chymists' teaching propagates false work. That interpretive parallel helps a reader hear the repeated word, but the book does not explicitly set out a theory comparing both fermentations side by side.

The warnings echo scriptural speech about leaven. The supplied apparatus identifies gospel and Pauline parallels. In the primary margins, however, Khunrath changes the named object to the pseudo-chymists and supplies no chapter or verse. A lexicon should not quietly turn the allusion into an exact quotation.

Places to read

1. 1599 p. 79 · marginThe first bilingual leaven warning accompanies the rejection of false regenerative fields
2. 1599 p. 101 · marginThe Stone is positively named the universal ferment, a separate application
3. 1599 p. 178The reader is urged to escape the crowd’s labyrinth and seductive byways
4. 1599 p. 178 · marginThe leaven warning is repeated as a summary of protective instruction

Translation in this edition

Translate Sawrteig concretely as “sourdough” or “leaven” rather than the abstract “corrupt influence” alone. Keep the positive fermentum Vniuersale distinct in both index and discussion. The entry records a scriptural allusion whose precise source references are editorially identified.