From the book
The Manly Hall Manuscript Collection, Volume I
Attributed to Abraham the Jew · Diotimos Editions · 2026
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At a Glance
- The wordQuenech is an underlined technical name retained from the manuscript. The source qualifies it as green and gives its water a place among several names for an elusive, life-bearing fluid.
- In this bookThe word appears during the garden emblem's explanation. The same water is called serpent's water, water of the Sea, water of Venus and water of the rising dawn before it is associated with green Quenech.
- TranslationThe edition retains ‘Quenech’ and translates its adjective as ‘green’. This preserves an attested name without substituting an uncertain modern mineral or treating greenness as proof of chemical identity.
- A place to readRead manuscript 35r–35v, scans 93–94, from the catalog of water-names through the apostrophe to moist greenness.
Meaning
The manuscript supplies a relation rather than a dictionary definition: this is the water of its green Quenech, and it rises in rivers. The water has already been described as extremely foul-smelling, extracted in the alembic, and capable of concealing other waters within itself. These attributes belong to the passage's changing material subject; they do not securely identify Quenech by itself.
The adjective green carries a further significance because the next words address moist greenness as the watery form of growth and nourishment. The name thus participates in the account of vegetation. It would be premature to turn that association either into a literal plant-name or into a known chemical formula.89
Use in the book
The surrounding comparison is deliberately difficult to grasp. People in a delightful garden pursue waters that escape into abysses, like Tantalus seeking water among waters and fruit that eludes his hands. The water runs through underground channels, appears at the surface, disappears and returns to the earth's center. Elusiveness is part of the explanation, not merely a defect in a modern reader's identification.
The list of names answers this movement by holding several functions together. The water comes from the serpent and from the alembic; it belongs to the author's Sea and Venus; like Achelous it takes several earthy or humoral forms. Quenech joins that sequence near its end. Its occurrence is therefore stronger evidence for the source's habit of naming a changing subject many ways than for one-to-one equivalence with a modern substance.
The sentence runs across the page boundary. The moist greenness is called a seed on scan 93, and scan 94 continues with the claim that everything issues from it and that without it the author's gold or white smoke cannot be obtained. The red and white roses, oak and springs then explain flourishing, multiplication, spirituality, purity and incorruptibility. Reading the name with this continuation preserves the generative force of the passage.
A lexicon entry can consequently say what the name does in the book with greater confidence than what it names outside it. It concentrates the conjunction of water, greenness, hidden circulation and growth. Any further historical identification must be offered separately, with evidence, rather than silently inserted into the translation.
Places to read
- Manuscript 35r · Scan 93The underlined name in the sequence of serpent, Sea, Venus, dawn and green Quenech waters.
- Manuscript 35v · Scan 94Continuation of the moist-greenness apostrophe into seed, gold/white smoke, roses, oak and springs.
Translation
‘Green Quenech’ preserves the qualification vert Quenech. The word is not expanded or translated by conjecture. ‘Moist greenness’ keeps humide verdeur, and ‘growth and nourishment’ renders its paired végétation et nutrition.
The following place-name, provisionally Lerne, belongs to a different comparison and should not be used as though it supplied the identity of Quenech. Its uncertainty is recorded separately in the edition.90
Quenech
Attested: H001-S093. Underlined source name, occurring once in the canonical French text.
vert Quenech
Attested: H001-S093. The name's explicit color qualification.
humide verdeur
Attested: H001-S093. The immediately following apostrophe links moist greenness with growth and nourishment.
Source note
The facing edition's H001-S093 note records the underlined technical name and deliberately leaves its external identification open.
H001-S094 records Lerne as provisional, with Cerne also possible from the written capital. This uncertainty concerns the fountain comparison on the following side.