Alchymic Journals

by Evan S. Connell

  unearth cities buried in the sand, listen for midnight

  at the wall, what answer do they bring?

  What should the answer be?

  Minotaur. Cockatrice.

  WAX melts on flagstone hearth,

  gold overflows cupel. Chrysopoeia triumphant!

  Trinity transmuted—blistered sand,

  emerald glass. Centaur gallops,

  resurgent. Alembic sings of tomorrow

  and tomorrow and tomorrow.

  EXOLUTION. Extasis.

  Liquefaction.

  Palingenesis invisible, indivisible.

  LIGHT the queen of colors.

  Furies ascendant,

  cunning spirits play across centuries.

  Was the Magisterium to blame

  or those that sought it among false principles?

  THE needle of Das Narrenschiff

  does not waver. Out of each the next.

  NEITHER beginning nor end

  has Ourobouros.

  TRUMPET. Drums.

  Pike. Halberd. Torches

  advance. Knight wearing golden armor

  hesitates, bloody gauntlet lifts golden visor.

  Rumors of a wandering magus conceived in heresy and mistrust that would resurrect us before the gates of Prague . . .

  WE ARE TOLD THAT TIME IS A BRISK WIND bringing forth each hour some fresh proportion, and as our thoughts hourly change and narrow and differ without respite and are kept secret from all, so it happens with Time. Yet who is able to calculate the wind’s edge, fathom such mystery and purpose?

  THERE MUST BE something within us surpassing reason, which goes by several names and is the cause or source of controversy, enabling us to discern spiritual truth. Yet we find shadows cast up from imagination which coalesce, and intersect, and divide so that we cannot rest but lie bewildered.

  ALL THINGS HAVE been provided, they grow and flourish unassisted. Hence each mineral may choose its shape as does each flower. But if a man expects to employ or benefit from natural goods he cannot be complacent. We acknowledge that Iron is Iron, yet not by itself does it change into an axe or a knife or a ploughshare. Similarly, Corn would not choose the shape of bread without human guidance. Thus we assess each product.

  FROM THE PERCEPTIBLE being of a thing, its nature manifest through sensible properties, haply we recognize its intent. Yet high matters arch on Creation’s order, so do they oppose confident exposition. Now whereas the purpose of vegetables, herbs, insects, animals and birds is not difficult to surmise through voice, texture, pigment or shape, humanity’s direction resists exposure. Hubris intervenes.

  THAT THE CORPUS of Man be diversely mathematic, we admit, since when he stands upright with his arms outstretched and his heels together he makes an equilateral triangle, the mediety of which coincides with his genital organ. And if a circuit were to be inscribed from this point touching the apex of the skull with the arms positioned diagonally so that their fingertips meet the perimeter, and if the feet be separated by an interval equivalent to that which separates the head from the fingertips, such a circle might be divided into five equal parts. Now this we comprehend, being prepared to demonstrate, but of innumerable suppositions that we hear professed which bewilder and horrify us, we plead much ignorance. Man is the vas insigne electionis, he incorporates all. Therefore was he meant to be the stronghold of discovery and thus does he become the fittest subject for alchymic labor. He is the alembic supplied with precious material whose superiorities and inferiorities we would segregate. What is he if not a constellation suffused with strength to ignite the evening? Why has he been fenced with grace if not to rule the stars?

  IT IS STATED that Man was compounded out of astral dust since his intelligence refracts light from many sources that furnish him. Still, disparate assemblies reiterate how few have found God, seeing only a distant reflection that reflects some other. Recipes for glory and wealth conspire against him, misadventures and schemes coalesce to debauch his patrimony and make him an unstable thing amid the redolence of moving flesh so that he languishes, bewildered by musical notes, ceremonies and reputations, profit and loss, so that he persists in elementary views of what he thought promised. And all of these dispositions conjoin to agitate his spirit until he appears to be a mute addressing others ignorant of his language who seeks refuge in fearful pantomime—a charade of sighs and grimaces.

  IF WE LOOK upon Man as a little world, or Microcosm, being drawn from planets and stars and earth and other elements, we propose that he must be quintessential. But why? Because four integers constitute the materiate world, accordingly he must be fifth and tends upon what destiny was implanted by nature at his conception.

  WE HEAR THAT as our God undertook to provide excellence and beauty and peace He perceived nothing more liberally endowed than Himself. Therefore, conceiving with His mind a substantive universe, He imagined it to be no different from His own Self. Therefore, humanity occupies a sphere coexisting among a plethora of others which are identical in majesty, harmony and indivisibility.

  NOW, IF WE assume that we are shaped after God’s image we cannot help but ask upon consequences. Were we found rational or irrational, and to what cause? Say we discard logic while genuflecting to assurance, what legacy waits? Which passage leads from a labyrinth of error? Citrinity fails to enlighten us nor how the wind stands in Greece, so we proceed intermediate between heaven and hell. Ours is futile dust made with ravening flesh and soft clothes, a perishable morsel. Thus we decline, recreants ignoring intellect, tumbling into earth’s receptive lap.

  WE HEAR IT claimed for Light that because we cannot exploit through number, measure or weight the tenuity of its elements, and because through chymistry we neither catalogue its form nor trap its essential spirit, Light describes a superiority to rival greatness. We offer this without angust metaphysic, we order no candle for inspection, arguing that the highest realm of ideas and archetypes is but a shadow, a semblance of beatific glory. Then how much more so is our immutable and faeculent world, the meager image of predominance.

  DIVERS INSTANCES OF transcendent things may be observed to succeed out of others while requiring the annexation of nothing extraneous, such as milk coagulated into whey or butter or cheese, or purple grapes becoming red wine, or the determined moth which contrives to manumit its body from the caterpillar. We watch each progression from form to form, each essay at completion through perceptible stages of imperfection.

  CONTEMPLATE THE GALLOPING horse. Never does he change into a lion, although if a lion feasts on a horse the vanquished reappears bearing the likeness and silhouette of the victor. So is each substance ultimately capable of transfiguration. But while we restrict the hand to four necessary fingers, we ascribe to our succession multiple ways.

  HAS NOT EACH herb been offered a profile corresponding to its essence? Certainly. And as these lineaments concur with what that herb is, so must the exterior physiognomy of each man approximate the condition of his interiority and make up a name more fundamental to him than his own, so that one might be called lark, goat, wolf or hedgehog. By stance and by carriage, upon timbre or balance of voice, by the resonance of laughter or from the passion of his stride—whether he walk with redoubled arrogance or timorous with doubt—we may assess his spirit as close as we scale the maturation of an elk by the size and complexity and thrust of its antlers, or as we deduce the private medicinalities of blossoms, nuts and legumes through odor, aspect or taste. Each discloses what he is. Who could label a fox a sheep? Who would take the hovering kestrel for a turtle dove? Each proceeds to his disposition like the creeping crocodile which cannot turn its head.

  NOW IF A Prince elects to build a city he will construct moats and towers and passages and markets and citadels and fountains and everything else to agree with his design. Well, if a man is able to do this, think what marvels nature can accomplish. Is it not true that nature cripples one man, blinds the next, and makes another simple? Yes. But why? Because of a pattern to whi
ch he must contribute, hence no disproportion may ensue. So we understand how nature will create what she anticipates. What was destined for Blackness will be tinged by that color, thus with every hue and countenance, as the nettle’s purpose is to sting, or what is intended to purge will be an equisetum, or that which polishes and smoothes will be made into a smiris. Things are given their signature that we know to what end each was devised.

  IT IS CLEAR how animate or inanimate things subsist with equal dignity, not one reigns supreme. Because our globe is transient and full of darkness must it be decried as inferior to the sun? No. Are sublunar unities less than those fixed in the firmament? Or what of the Spider? Was he not made equivalent to the Perch? Each entity controls an empire of its own.

  LISTEN. WHAT SHOULD the Son obtain from his Mother and Father to make him proud? How does he think himself more than they? Do not his qualities succeed from them? Look to his entirety. What is he save a grumbling stomach led by a grasping brain—troubled, helpless, naked underneath his first cloak—governed by the gnomon’s journey which mocks his passage across a dial. Yet we hear many complain how our God has fabricked the world. Unlike phlegmatic animals, these will be asked before a Throne to render accounts.

  WELL, SINCE OUR Lord comprehends all, humanity inherits His indefectible complement of knowledge, and as nothing might be found in humanity, nor any propension in which there is not a small facet of divinity to be registered, so shall a man complete himself by gazing upon himself. But at length every man must look up toward that image whose likeness he is, whose resemblance he should adore and whose superiority he is expected to recapitulate, just as the lodestone consummates itself among mineral.

  NOW WE HEAR that Saints will not carry out their existence because they disdain idolatry and because of the simulacra that men carve, therefore they do not live adjacent to us. And we contend that our thoughts must supersede our images, which must be our highest ideal. And the higher that we rise to express ourselves, so shall what we have chosen to think. And if we adhere to this we are not apt to be disappointed in spite of vicissitude, but if we would subsist without it then we will hurry off by ourselves on some fatuous search which resembles dreaming. We know how Jacob went to sleep beside the Ladder, which symbolizes divinity within reach. And we are appointed to wake at a propitious hour.

  WE HAVE BEEN instructed by the author of Novum Organum how cosmic structures shall remain inaccessible to apprehension through mortal sensibility, which provides as it does twelve thousand ambiguous paths, similitudes, complex windings or deceptive regressions and knots of nature, while the credulous mind, being unable to distinguish truth from egregious perversion, does but misconstrue to compound and defraud our innocence.

  RABBI BEN JOCHAI asserts that the unequivocal presence of Man affirms the validity of all things apparent in heaven or upon earth, because nothing could exist before the human prototype. Matter subsists by us, within us. And this seems demonstrable, since without us who could imagine a world? Who should inhabit the uncircumscribed court of memory?

  WE ARE TOLD that Man may be likened to an imperfect embryo which grows vulnerable to delusions of sense and phantasy until it has been rectified, neglecting every encumbrance. This we regard as the comprehending whole of alchymic law: to incite or seduce all men from disproportionate sensibles toward immanent coherence. Upon this philosophical premise and by this path we approach Heaven’s Gate.

  SUPPOSE WE GIVE up our tenement, what is morality’s foundation? From the cabbalistic book of Zohar we learn that when a soul undertakes to visit earth but fails to acquire the knowledge for which it descended, so that its signature is obliterated, it occupies a subordinate body until purified by repetitious and cognitive experience. Then this must be our fundament.

  WE PRESUME THE weightiest form to be that of earth—matrix of minerals which keeps secretly to itself while furnishing life to every dependent. So ring the highest bodies overhead where immaculate light collects and stars are roweled about, sending down virtue.

  WELL, IF WE consider how we were bequeathed this universe we think its revolutions ought to be organized for our edification—spiral movements dispersed by that broad parabola of stars which nightly monitors our home and refuge. Now if Utopia be celestial, then Man’s spirit should prove next to God. And therefore, if Man’s wealth be laid apart in ephemeral or fading objects, we propose that the impoverished spirit must labor among lost and fading deities.

  SINCE INITIALLY THE universe was propounded by God, by Him it is meant to be concluded. Divers examples could we cite of mechanical shape or design drawn from unorthodox craft, yet how could a man benefit by exchanging spiritual belief for the joy of weighing aether, for the fugitive pleasure of calculating a pendulum’s arc? What deposition has this? Should the years reverse their flight?

  TO ALL THINGS God offers an appropriate term of existence whether for mischief or good, and the fleshy life of a man compared to the duration of his Creator is miserably quick because God will persist after flames incinerate the world. Man does not last long, his term is narrow, and throughout fitful years he feels oppressed by voices riding the wind, assailed by something that pities lesser beings.

  ANXIOUS FOR CULMINATION, Man arrives turned with many sides and listens for the spinning murmur of creation at the hush of the seventh day. Like the curve of a plate that is tossed on a wheel, or like cast-gold ornaments made in tropic lands, or like a pool of smelted iron, so was his future determined by Providence which takes care neither to shift nor cancel.

  WE PROPOSE THAT holiness was cast apart from the Church by God Himself, since to whom else should we attribute dignities, prebends, curacies, altars and rectorships being staked at dice, lost, won, or offered in exchange for mistresses, for gold? We see with what ease priories, abbeys, readerships and professorships may be purchased by the first wheelwright or chapman or peasant or thief to waggle his bulging purse underneath a bishop’s nose. Does not surpassing conceit adumbrate the midnight hour? Have not men dishonored reason to perpetuate unspeakable absurdities? Yet do we depart from the animal—obtaining no dispensation from the issue of our thought.

  NOW THE HUMBLEST creatures obediently conform to instinct because this tends to the preservation of their existence, which they perceive to be their total happiness and welfare. But it is different with men who feel disposed to preserve whatever is mortal about them, yet feel a higher obligation. And it is to this that they owe their allegiance. Therefore Man rightly has been named Microcosm, formed upon the image of a Creator, and the abrégé of His work. And the universe was completed with Man’s formation because it was necessary that a universe be created in stupendous proportion before reducing it to nominal limits. Now as the cat inevitably is treacherous, the lion bold, the dog compliant, and the lamb gentle, so might we conjecture on the propensities of Man. But at this we are deceived since he is full of excess. And we hear prophecy of a dawn against which every contrivance fails. What do men do except light tapers, pray and copulate until the advent? Is not their reproduction the palmary act of dispassionate nature? What makes it a concern of mortals to become immortal and grasp at futures surmounting this? Philosophers that opine a scalding destruction of the world have not dreamt upon a reduction of mortalities into glass—which is vitrification.

  CENTURIES TESTIFY TO the existence of an Immaculate Teacher by whom all nativities are constituted, yet are we engaged with dubious adventure, blind, troubled by a whistling among the senses, our days mortgaged, arguing externals that yield new burdens and perplexities in proportion as they increase. So we ask upon history’s course: might this be the register of fallacious dispute and mischance, of infamous sophistry? Does an instant arrive when fraud and perversion suffocate the soul? How should we exercise judgment against ourselves? Where is hermetic treasure manifest?

  REFLECT HOW INFIRM faculties of the mind rally to desperate imposture, how the highest subserve the lowest, how deceit and hubris graduate from private into public cir
cumstance, casting a furious heritage across civility. What engenders wisdom’s root? Who shall take the measure of wisdom’s leaf? Which among us has visited the antechamber of understanding?

  SUPPOSE THE CRYPT of Christian Rosenkreutz should fly open, would reformation follow? And what of the Lord Poemander—where does He abide? What covenant approves our dissembling fall and transformation? Or the alchymist at his work-shop, how could he distil incomprehensible matter from its curse? Complexities, enigmas, all that is or is not—all provide their statement and we awaken disgruntled. Disappointments cloud the dawn. We search after the luxuries of intolerable flesh and transient comfort, swift things that cause grief. Ambiguous oracles stupefy us. We become fearful and twisted, persuading ourselves it is good to interpret or prophesy.

  ZOROASTER, COUNSELED BY angels, renounced Heaven’s favorites that he might bequeath alchymic magistery through hieroglyphs, circumscribing the boundaries of rectitude. So did Heliodorus in Thessaly give up a bishopric at Triccia rather than accede to the verdict which condemned his meditations. And therefore we believe superiority must be that which rises out of critical intercourse. And we think Man was constituted from two bodies, one visible, one invisible, and we say the latter defines us.

  WE ASSERT THAT conscience, being unable to err, cannot sin but acts in solitude, approving or disapproving, so it is incorruptible. Thus, if we remark of any man that his conscience was bad, we speak not of a faculty but of some subject, which conscience has disavowed. And should any man persist at what has been rejected it is plain that the unicity of his being will shatter because he has plucked sour fruit and was driven aside, exiled from Paradise, and the frame of his recovery will be in doubt. Consequently he wanders from desert to desert seeking readmission to the triangular garden where he was born, which he considered his own.