[697] Wolfenbüttel 3338, 17th century, 43 fols.
[698] Vienna 11267, 17-18th century, fols. 2-31.
CHAPTER XLVI
KIRANIDES
Question of the origin of the work—Its prefaces—Arrangement of the text—Virtues of a tree—Feats of magic—An incantation to an eagle—Alchiranus—Treatises on seven, twelve, and nineteen herbs—Belenus.
Question of the origin of the work.
The virtues, especially medicinal, of plants and animals comprise the contents of a work in Latin of uncertain date and authorship, usually called the Kiranides of Kiranus, King of Persia.[699] Thomas Browne, in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Inquiry into Vulgar Errors, included in his list of “authors who have most promoted popular conceits, ... Kiranides, which is a collection out of Harpocration the Greek and sundry Arabick writers delivering not only the Naturall but Magicall propriety of things, a work as full of vanity as variety, containing many relations, whose invention is as difficult as their beliefs, and their experiments sometime as hard as either.”[700] The work purports to be a translation from the Greek version which in its turn was from the Arabic,[701] and Berthelot affirms[702] that in antiquity Kiranides was cited by Galen and by Olympiodorus, the historian and alchemist of the early fifth century, while Kroll cites a Greek manuscript at Paris as ascribing the third book of Kiranides to Hermes Trismegistus.[703]
Its prefaces.
The preface of the medieval Latin translator is by “a lowly cleric” who addresses some ecclesiastical or scholastic superior, possibly the Chancellor at Paris.[704] He marvels that the mind of his patron, which has penetrated beyond the seven heavens to contemplate supernatural things above our sphere, should nevertheless not disdain an interest in the most lowly of terrene “experiments.” The master has asked him to translate this medical book from Greek into Latin, a task easier to ask than to execute. There are several Greek versions of it, all professedly translations from some oriental original, but the volume which his patron gave him to translate into Latin is that translated into Greek at Constantinople in 1168[705] or 1169[706] by order of the Byzantine emperor, Manuel Comnenus, whom we shall also find associated with the Letter of Prester John of which we shall treat in the next chapter. The translator speaks of the work as The Book of Natural Virtues, Complaints, and Cures, but adds that it is a compilation from two other books, namely, The Experience of the Kiranides of Kiranus, King of Persia, and The Book of Harpocration[707] of Alexandria to his Daughter. There then follows the preface of Harpocration to his daughter, which tells of a certain city and of encountering an aged sage there, of great towers and of precious writing on a column which Harpocration proceeds to transcribe. We are given to understand that the original was written in “antique archaic Syriac” and was as old as the Euphrates.
Arrangement of the text.