Despair and the art’s truth

Meaning

The Way of Truth distinguishes despair about the art from evidence that the art is false. According to its narrator, expensive, disordered labour leaves seekers without comfort and eventually persuades them that alchemy is worthless, invented and fraudulent. His later appeal describes the same movement through the image of a labyrinth: loss and confusion harden into disbelief.

The words nichtig, erdichtet and erlogen report the disappointed conclusion he opposes, not his own verdict on alchemy. By contrast, his insistence that he writes the true truth presents an emphatic personal claim for his corrective teaching. The entry preserves this argumentative distinction without endorsing his claimed certainty or treating the reader’s persistence as proof of eventual success.