Paracelsus has revealed to us one of the grandest secrets of nature. When the world began to dispute on the very existence of the elementary folk, it was then that he boldly offered to give birth to a fairy, and has sent down to posterity the recipe. He describes the impurity which is to be transmuted into such purity, the gross elements of a delicate fairy, which, fixed in a phial, placed in fuming dung, will in due time settle into a full-grown fairy, bursting through its vitreous prison—on the vivifying principle by which the ancient Egyptians hatched their eggs in ovens. I recollect, at Dr. Farmer’s sale, the leaf which preserved this recipe for making a fairy, forcibly folded down by the learned commentator; from which we must infer the credit he gave to the experiment. There was a greatness of mind in Paracelsus, who, having furnished a recipe to make a fairy, had the delicacy to refrain from its formation. Even Baptista Porta, one of the most enlightened philosophers, does not deny the possibility of engendering creatures which, “at their full growth, shall not exceed the size of a mouse;” but he adds, “they are only pretty little dogs to play with.” Were these akin to the fairies of Paracelsus?[202]
They were well convinced of the existence of such elemental beings; frequent accidents in mines showed the potency of the metallic spirits, which so tormented the workmen in some of the German mines by blindness, giddiness, and sudden sickness, that they have been obliged to abandon mines well known to be rich in silver. A metallic spirit at one sweep annihilated twelve miners, who were all found dead together. The fact was unquestionable; and the safety-lamp was undiscovered.
Never was a philosophical imagination more beautiful than that exquisite Palingenesis, as it has been termed from the Greek, or a regeneration: or rather the apparitions of animals and plants. Schott, Kircher, Gaffarel, Borelli, Digby, and the whole of that admirable school, discovered in the ashes of plants their primitive forms, which were again raised up by the force of heat. Nothing, they say, perishes in nature; all is but a continuation, or a revival. The semina of resurrection are concealed in extinct bodies, as in the blood of man; the ashes of roses will again revive into roses, though smaller and paler than if they had been planted; unsubstantial and unodoriferous, they are not roses which grow on rose-trees, but their delicate apparitions; and, like apparitions, they are seen but for a moment! The process of the Palingenesis, this picture of immortality, is described. These philosophers having burnt a flower, by calcination disengaged the salts from its ashes, and deposited them in a glass phial; a chemical mixture acted on it, till in the fermentation they assumed a bluish and a spectral hue. This dust, thus excited by heat, shoots upwards into its primitive forms; by sympathy the parts unite, and while each is returning to its destined place, we see distinctly the stalk, the leaves, and the flower arise; it is the pale spectre of a flower coming slowly forth from its ashes. The heat passes away, the magical scene declines, till the whole matter again precipitates itself into the chaos at the bottom. This vegetable phoenix lies thus concealed in its cold ashes till the presence of heat produces this resurrection—in its absence it returns to its death. Thus the dead naturally revive; and a corpse may give out its shadowy re-animation when not too deeply buried in the earth. Bodies corrupted in their graves have risen, particularly the murdered; for murderers are apt to bury their victims in a slight and hasty manner. Their salts, exhaled in vapour by means of their fermentation, have arranged themselves on the surface of the earth, and formed those phantoms, which at night have often terrified the passing spectator, as authentic history witnesses. They have opened the graves of the phantom, and discovered the bleeding corpse beneath; hence it is astonishing how many ghosts may be seen at night, after a recent battle, standing over their corpses! On the same principle, my old philosopher Gaffarel conjectures on the raining of frogs; but these frogs, we must conceive, can only be the ghosts of frogs; and Gaffarel himself has modestly opened this fact by a “peradventure.” A more satisfactory origin of ghosts modern philosophy has not afforded.
And who does not believe in the existence of ghosts? for, as Dr. More forcibly says—“That there should be so universal a fame and fear of that which never was, nor is, nor can be ever in the world, is to me the greatest miracle of all. If there had not been, at some time or other, true miracles, it had not been so easy to impose on the people by false. The alchemist would never go about to sophisticate metals to pass them off for true gold and silver, unless that such a thing was acknowledged as true gold and silver in the world.”
The pharmacopœia of those times combined more of morals with medicine than our own. They discovered that the agate rendered a man eloquent and even witty; a laurel leaf placed on the centre of the skull fortified the memory; the brains of fowls and birds of swift wing wonderfully helped the imagination. All such specifics have now disappeared, and have greatly reduced the chances of an invalid recovering that which perhaps he never possessed. Lentils and rape-seed were a certain cure for the small-pox, and very obviously—their grains resembling the spots of this disease. They discovered that those who lived on “fair” plants became fair, those on fruitful ones were never barren: on the principle that Hercules acquired his mighty strength by feeding on the marrow of lions. But their talismans, provided they were genuine, seem to have been wonderfully operative; and had we the same confidence, and melted down the guineas we give physicians, engraving on them talismanic figures, I would answer for the good effects of the experiment. Naudé, indeed, has utterly ridiculed the occult virtues of talismans, in his defence of Virgil, accused of being a magician: the poet, it seems, cast into a well a talisman of a horse-leech, graven on a plate of gold, to drive away the great number of horse-leeches which infested Naples. Naudé positively denies that talismans ever possessed any such occult virtues: Gaffarel regrets that so judicious a man as Naudé should have gone this length, giving the lie to so many authentic authors; and Naudé’s paradox is indeed as strange as his denial; he suspects the thing is not true because it is so generally told! “It leads one to suspect,” says he, “as animals are said to have been driven away from so many places by these talismans, whether they were ever driven from any one place.” Gaffarel, suppressing by his good temper his indignant feelings at such reasoning, turns the paradox on its maker:—“As if, because of the great number of battles that Hannibal is reported to have fought with the Romans, we might not, by the same reason, doubt whether he fought any one with them.” The reader must be aware that the strength of the argument lies entirely with the firm believer in talismans. Gaffarel, indeed, who passed his days in collecting “Curiosités inouïes,” is a most authentic historian of unparalleled events, even in his own times! Such as that heavy rain in Poitou, which showered down “petites bestioles,” little creatures like bishops with their mitres, and monks with their capuchins over their heads; it is true, afterwards they all turned into butterflies!
The museums, the cabinets, and the inventions of our early virtuosi were the baby-houses of philosophers. Baptista Porta, Bishop Wilkins, and old Ashmole, were they now living, had been enrolled among the quiet members of “The Society of Arts,” instead of flying in the air, collecting “a wing of the phœnix, as tradition goes;” or catching the disjointed syllables of an old doting astrologer. But these early dilettanti had not derived the same pleasure from the useful inventions of the aforesaid “Society of Arts” as they received from what Cornelius Agrippa, in a fit of spleen, calls “things vain and superfluous, invented to no other end but for pomp and idle pleasure.” Baptista Porta was more skilful in the mysteries of art and nature than any man in his day. Having founded the Academy degli Oziosi, he held an inferior association in his own house, called di Secreti, where none was admitted but those elect who had communicated some secret; for, in the early period of modern art and science, the slightest novelty became a secret, not to be confided to the uninitiated. Porta was unquestionably a fine genius, as his works still show; but it was his misfortune that he attributed his own penetrating sagacity to his skill in the art of divination. He considered himself a prognosticator; and, what was more unfortunate, some eminent persons really thought he was. Predictions and secrets are harmless, provided they are not believed: but his Holiness finding Porta’s were, warned him that magical sciences were great hindrances to the study of the Bible, and paid him the compliment to forbid his prophesying. Porta’s genius was now limited to astonish, and sometimes to terrify, the more ingenious part of I Secreti. On entering his cabinet, some phantom of an attendant was sure to be hovering in the air, moving as he who entered moved; or he observed in some mirror that his face was twisted on the wrong side of his shoulders, and did not quite think that all was right when he clapped his hand on it; or passing through a darkened apartment a magical landscape burst on him, with human beings in motion, the boughs of trees bending, and the very clouds passing over the sun; or sometimes banquets, battles, and hunting-parties were in the same apartment. “All these spectacles my friends have witnessed!” exclaims the self-delighted Baptista Porta. When his friends drank wine out of the same cup which he had used, they were mortified with wonder; for he drank wine, and they only water! or on a summer’s day, when all complained of the sirocco, he would freeze his guests with cold air in the room; or, on a sudden, let off a flying dragon to sail along with a cracker in its tail, and a cat tied on his back; shrill was the sound, and awful was the concussion; so that it required strong nerves, in an age of apparitions and devils, to meet this great philosopher when in his best humour. Albertus Magnus entertained the Earl of Holland, as that earl passed through Cologne, in a severe winter, with a warm summer scene, luxuriant in fruits and flowers. The fact is related by Trithemius—and this magical scene connected with his vocal head, and his books De Secretis Mulierum, and De Mirabilibus, confirmed the accusations they raised against the great Albert for being a magician. His apologist, Theophilus Raynaud, is driven so hard to defend Albertus, that he at once asserts the winter changed to summer and the speaking head to be two infamous flams! He will not believe these authenticated facts, although he credits a miracle which proves the sanctity of Albertus,—after three centuries, the body of Albert the Great remained as sweet as ever!
“Whether such enchauntments,” as old Mandeville cautiously observeth, two centuries preceding the days of Porta, were “by craft or by nygromancye, I wot nere.” But that they were not unknown to Chaucer, appears in his “Frankelein’s Tale,” where, minutely describing them, he communicates the same pleasure he must himself have received from the ocular illusions of “the Tregetoure,” or “Jogelour.” Chaucer ascribes the miracle to a “naturall magique!” in which, however, it was as unsettled whether the “Prince of Darkness” was a party concerned.
| For I am siker that there be sciences By which men maken divers apparences Swiche as thise subtil tregetoures play. For oft at festes have I wel herd say That tregetoures, within an halle large, Have made come in a water and a barge, And in the halle rowen up and doun. Sometime hath semed come a grim leoun, And sometime floures spring as in a mede, Sometime a vine and grapes white and rede, Sometime a castel al of lime and ston, And whan hem liketh voideth it anon: Thus semeth it to every mannes sight. |
Bishop Wilkins’s museum was visited by Evelyn, who describes the sort of curiosities which occupied and amused the children of science. “Here, too, there was a hollow statue, which gave a voice, and uttered words by a long concealed pipe that went to its mouth, whilst one speaks through it at a good distance:” a circumstance which, perhaps, they were not then aware revealed the whole mystery of the ancient oracles, which they attributed to demons rather than to tubes, pulleys, and wheels. The learned Charles Patin, in his scientific travels, records, among other valuable productions of art, a cherry-stone, on which were engraven about a dozen and a half of portraits! Even the greatest of human geniuses, Leonardo da Vinci, to attract the royal patronage, created a lion which ran before the French monarch, dropping fleurs de lis from its shaggy breast. And another philosopher who had a spinnet which played and stopped at command, might have made a revolution in the arts and sciences, had the half-stifled child that was concealed in it not been forced, unluckily, to crawl into daylight, and thus it was proved that a philosopher might be an impostor!
The arts, as well as the sciences, at the first institution of the Royal Society, were of the most amusing class. The famous Sir Samuel Moreland had turned his house into an enchanted palace. Everything was full of devices, which showed art and mechanism in perfection: his coach carried a travelling kitchen; for it had a fire-place and grate, with which he could make a soup, broil cutlets, and roast an egg; and he dressed his meat by clock-work. Another of these virtuosi, who is described as “a gentleman of superior order, and whose house was a knickknackatory,” valued himself on his multifarious inventions, but most in “sowing salads in the morning, to be cut for dinner.” The house of Winstanley, who afterwards raised the first Eddystone lighthouse, must have been the wonder of the age. If you kicked aside an old slipper, purposely lying in your way, up started a ghost before you; or if you sat down in a certain chair, a couple of gigantic arms would immediately clasp you in. There was an arbour in the garden, by the side of a canal; you had scarcely seated yourself when you were sent out afloat to the middle of the canal—from whence you could not escape till this man of art and science wound you up to the arbour. What was passing at the “Royal Society” was also occurring at the “Académie des Sciences” at Paris. A great and gouty member of that philosophical body, on the departure of a stranger, would point to his legs, to show the impossibility of conducting him to the door; yet the astonished visitor never failed finding the virtuoso waiting for him on the outside, to make his final bow! While the visitor was going down stairs, this inventive genius was descending with great velocity in a machine from the window: so that he proved, that if a man of science cannot force nature to walk down stairs, he may drive her out at the window!