From the book
A New Light of Alchemy
Michael Sendivogius · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordStercus means dung, sterquilinium a dunghill, and merdam is the blunt word preserved in the wife’s reply.
- In the workThe worker reaches dung after exhausting an extraordinary inventory of substances.
- In this editionThe source’s coarse diction is intentional; note 49 explains why the English does not euphemise merdam.
- A place to readQuod in sterquilinio invenitur: A compressed saying initiates literal dung treatment.
Meaning
Stercus means dung, sterquilinium a dunghill, and merdam is the blunt word preserved in the wife’s reply. The cluster moves between a literal ingredient, a quoted saying, a harvest joke, an insult and a comparison of enduring value.
Use in the book
The worker reaches dung after exhausting an extraordinary inventory of substances. The saying that matter is found in a dunghill becomes a literal programme, first involving varied dung and then animal, children’s and his own. The wife’s early coarse prediction anticipates the worthless product without giving her a technical recipe. Pig dung later becomes the renewed threat whenever Mercury’s answers disappoint him.
In the interpretive dispute the alchemist says that he sows seed in its proper earth; Mercury replies that he is sown in dung and disappears at harvest, leaving dung as the crop. The joke preserves the general agricultural analogy while rejecting the particular identification. Mercury explicitly grants the philosophers’ saying to be true and faults the reader’s grasp of syllables rather than intention. The satire thus does not simply ban all dung imagery.
Nature finally calls the proud alchemist “philosophers’ dung,” reversing his search for the valuable material. Her subsequent gem comparison makes a different point: dung does not destroy a gem’s worth, and washing reveals what it already was. Keeping these uses separate prevents a literal material, an insult and an analogy from being mistaken for one definition.
Places to read
- Dialogue of Mercury, the Alchemist and Nature · Passage 2LatinQuod in sterquilinio invenitur: A compressed saying initiates literal dung treatment.
- Dialogue of Mercury, the Alchemist and Nature · Passage 9Latintu vero stercus metere soles: Mercury’s harvest joke exposes the failed application.
- Dialogue of Mercury, the Alchemist and Nature · Passage 13Latinplenum superbia stercus Philosophorum: Nature directs the material-name back at the proud practitioner.
- Dialogue of Mercury, the Alchemist and Nature · Passage 14Latingemma semper bona est: The gem comparison concerns persistence of value.
Translation in this edition
The source’s coarse diction is intentional; note 49 explains why the English does not euphemise merdam. The dunghill saying is quoted by the character without a securely identified source work in this passage.