Dwellings IV THE LEGENDARY LABORATORY With its following of mystery and the unknown, behind its veil of illuminism and marvel, alchemy evokes a past full of distant stories, wonderful tales, and surprising testimonies. Its singular theories, its strange recipes, the time-honored reputation of its great masters, the passionate arguments it aroused, the favor it enjoyed in the Middle Ages, its obscure, enigmatic and paradoxical literature, seem to give off today the smell of mustiness, of rarified air acquired over long years by empty tombs, dead flowers, abandoned dwellings, yellowed parchments. The Alchemist? --- A meditative elderly man, with a grave forehead, crowned with white hair, a pale and wasted silhouette, an original character from a long gone humanity and a forgotten world, an obstinate recluse, stooped by years of study, late nights, persevering research and unscrambling of the enigmas of the high science. Such is the philosopher that the poet’s imagination or the painter’s brush like to depict for us. His laboratory --- cave, cell, or ancient crypt --- is dimly lit by gloomy daylight diffused through the myriad dusty spider webs. Yet, it is there, amidst the silence, that the prodigy is slowly accomplished. Untiring nature works --- better than in the rocky abysses --- under the prudent attention of man, with the help of the stars and the grace of God. Occult labor, Cyclopean and thankless task, as vast as a nightmare! At the center of this in pace --- in peace, a being, a scholar for whom nothing else exists any more, watches, attentive and patient, over the successive stages of the Great Work... As our eyes become accustomed to the darkness, thousands of things emerge from the shadow, are revealed, and take on a precise shape. Good Lord, where are we? Could it be Polyphemus’ den or Vulcan’s cave? Near us, an extinguished forge, covered with dust and metal scales; the anvil, hammer, tongs, shears, clamp irons; rusted ingot molds; the rough and powerful tools of the metallurgist ended up there. In a corner, thick books heavily bound with iron --- such as antiphonals --- with signets sealed with antiquated leads; ashy manuscripts, mysterious books piled up; yellowed volumes filled with notes and formulas, stained from the incipit to the text. Flasks, bulging like good monks, filled with opalescent emulsions, pale green, blue-green, or flesh-colored liquids, exhale these stale acid odors whose sharpness contradicts the throat and stings the nose. On the hood of the furnace strange oblong vessels are aligned, with short pipes, caulked and covered with wax; mattresses, with spheres, rainbowed by metallic deposits, extend their necks, sometimes cylindrical and slender, sometimes widened or inflated; greenish horned vessels, retorts, and pottery dishes sit next to crucibles made of red and flame-like earth. In the far corner, placed on their straw baskets all along a stone cornice, philosophical eggs, in transparent and elegant contrast to the massive and rounded cucurbit --- praegnans cucurbita. Damnation! Here are now some anatomical specimens, skeletal fragments: blackened, toothless skulls, repugnant with their beyond-the-grave grin; suspended human fetuses, desiccated and shriveled, miserable remnants showing their minute bodies, their parchment heads, sneering and pitiful. These round, vitreous and golden eyes are those of an owl with dull feathers, which stands next to the alligator, giant salamander, another important symbol of the practice. The fearsome reptile emerges from an obscure recess, stretches the chain of his vertebrae on his stout legs and directs the bony abyss of his frightful jaws towards the arched ceiling. Placed randomly, in case of need, on the bed-plate of the furnace, notice these vitrified pots, aludels, and sublimatories; these pelicans with thick walls; these infernal vessels similar to large eggs whose chalazas are visible, these olive-colored bottles buried in the middle of the sand against the athanor, with its light fumes climbing over the ribbed vault. Here is the copper alembic --- homo galeatus (1) --- stained with green smudges; there the descensories, the cucurbits and their antenos, the two brothers or twins of the cohobation; coiled receivers; heavy cast-iron and marble mortars; a large bellows with its wrinkled leather sides, near a pile of muffles, tiles, cupels, and evaporators... A chaotic conglomeration of archaic instruments, bizarre materials and out-of-date utensils; a confusion of all sciences, a tangle of impressive faunas! And, looking down upon this disorder, affixed to the keystone of the vault, a pendant with spread wings, the great raven, hieroglyph of material death and its decompositions, the mysterious emblem of the mysterious operations. Curious a well is the wall, or at least what is left of it. Some inscriptions of mystical meaning fill the voids: Hic lapis est subtus te, supra te, erga te et circa te (2), mnemonic verses entangle themselves, whimsically engraved with a stiletto on soft stone; one of them dominates, carved in Gothic cursive writing: Azoth et ignis tibi sufficient(3), Hebrew characters; circles intersected with triangles, interspersed with quadrilateral figures in the manner of Gnostic signatures. Here, a thought based on the dogma of unity summarizes all of philosophy: Omnia ab uno et in unum omnia (4). Elsewhere, the image of the scythe, emblem of the 13th Arcanum and the house of Saturn; the Star of Solomon; the symbol of Cancer, supplication of the evil spirit; a few passages from Zoroaster, witness to the great antiquity of the accursed sciences. Finally, bathing in the light field of the basement window and more legible in this labyrinth of imprecisions, the hermetic ternary: Salt, Sulphur, Mercury... Such is the legendary painting of the alchemist and his laboratory. Fantastic vision, lacking truth, sprung from popular imagination and reproduced in the old almanacs, treasures of the peddler’s trade. Puffers, magicians, sorcerers, astrologers, necromancers? Anathema and malediction!
Posted on: Fri, 21 Nov 2014 00:46:45 +0000
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