PICUS DE MIRANDOLA.
John Picus, Earl of Mirandola, was born on the 24th February 1463. He is equally celebrated for his precocity, the extent of his learning, his prodigious memory, and his penetrating intellect. As the pupil of Jochanum, a Jew, he became early initiated in the Kabbalistic interpretation of Scripture, and at the age of twenty-four years he published nine hundred propositions in logic, mathematics, physics, divinity, and Kabbalism, collected from Greek, Latin, Jewish, and Arabian writers. In his treatise De Auro, he records his conviction of the success of Hermetic operations, and gives us the following narrations:—
“I come now to declare that which I have beheld of this prodigy, without veil or obscurity. One of my friends, who is still living, has made gold and silver over sixty times in my presence. I have seen it performed in divers manners, but the expense of making the silver with a metallic water exceeded the produce.”
In another place he tells us that “a good man who had not a sufficiency to support his family, was reduced to the last extremity of distress; with an agitated mind he went one night to sleep, and in a dream he beheld a blessed angel, who, by means of enigmas, instructed him in the method of making gold, and indicated to him, at the same time, the water he should use to ensure success. At his awaking he proceeded to work with this water, and made gold, truly in small quantity, yet sufficient to support his family. Twice he made gold of iron and four times of orpiment. He convinced me by the evidence of my own eyes that the art of transmutation is no fiction.”