THE PHILOSOPHER, OR THE PHYSICIAN

CONSULTED BY NATURE

...you appear to have been toward the Hermetic family, but also that you clearly recognize and have looked into what we have undertaken to treat regarding the perfect Physician consulted by Nature.

Those previous points are quite extensive and illustrious. However, as much as it seemed a great thing above that the true perfection of Medicine is contained in Chemistry, it will now be even more excellent that the integrity of the Physician Philosopher, complete in every part, depends on that same source. If anything has approached the science of moving nature well, or if anything has ever supplied the most powerful instruments for executing this work, it is certainly ALCHEMY. If a Physician remains a stranger to it, I would say he despises the secrets of nature in his madness. He mocks the miracles of divine omnipotence hidden in things themselves. Those who boastfully lecture in the schools today like they are among the seats of Alcinous original: "inter Alcinoi subsellia"; a reference to the lazy luxury described in Homer’s Odyssey, accustomed to belching up nothing but the spit of Aristotle and Galen, cannot rid themselves of this disgrace. They deserve pity more than refutation. It is as if the rest of the world, especially the Christian world, could not see or experience more than two pagan men who erred enormously in many things. If the more learned world should one day overwhelm these exhibitors of illustrious names, leaving them abandoned and exiled, where I ask will they flee? To whom will they prove their titles? Rejected and loathed, they will wander like coins of an unknown stamp, which only that jurisdiction in which they were minted knows as valid. A dung beetle can watch over the work of rolling its congenial pill referring to a ball of dung until death, but it cannot endure the roses sacred to Venus without torment and destruction. But let us leave these to be trampled and laughed at by the dregs of the common people. The perfect Physician consulted by Nature cannot do without Alchemy. He alone, with this one lamp of Diana a reference to the light of the moon, often signifying alchemical silver or clarity of vision, sees more than common Physicians see in the open Sun.

There is a Hippocratic precept, worthy of cedar original: "cedro"; an idiom for something worthy of being preserved forever in cedar oil and eternal memory. In the preparation of Medicines, says the Old Man of Cos Hippocrates, let the

useless be separated from the useful. Let the useful and effective parts be given as pure and cleansed as possible. But why do you command this, O divine Hippocrates? Why do you instruct that the useless be cast away from the useful? Doubtless you understood well that Nature has given us nothing pure, but all things have been mixed with many, even harmful, impurities. Perhaps you believed this happened due to stubborn matter, in the working of which virtue is exhausted before it reaches the end. Perhaps you decided it happened because of some external impediment. Perhaps you were unaware that this defect was introduced by the fall of our first parents. Whatever the case, you certainly recognized from the manifold use of things and other sciences that every art, by common or daily effort, always removes the rejected parts and corrects errors. It seems as though nature, failing in itself, has uniquely hammered home this science for us to know from infancy. The Magyrica culinary art or cooking, the art of sculpture, and indeed the circle of all manual arts bear witness to this. Furthermore, you had a good insight into the seed-principle. Just as individuals of all species emanate from an innate and analogous principle from the beginning, you firmly established that all essential properties are derived from that same source. This occurs even as the Elements on both sides concur and primordially involve the concrete essence. The generation of all things produced from the beginning warns that the fact something becomes a man or a beast, a vegetable or a mineral, must be ascribed to the seed-principle. That there is something which is nourishment, something which is medicine, something which purges, alters, or strengthens, must be credited to that same principle. For the mere force of the Elements or elementary qualities contributes nothing at all to the constitution or essence of these things. Therefore, you gave a sign in your most elegant writings that the science of healing must be deduced from these same foundations. You did this obscurely perhaps, but with traces not entirely erased. Your successors, taking some light on this matter from the ancients...