246 Symbola Aiirm Mensa, ^c. [Oct. 



remembered too that the learned of Maier's age almost univer- 

 sally agreed in attributing to the varied and absurd fables of 

 classical superstition an allegorical meaning of one kind or 

 other ; much of it had long since been regarded as shadowing 

 out the phsenomena and constitution of the material universe.* 

 Fictions which were, or were held to be, thus symbolical of the 

 great and universal operations of nature, might easily, either by 

 transfer or misconstruction, be applied to the more restrictea 

 but yet analogous processes of the laboratory. Generation, 

 mixture, separation, dissolution, and reproduction, formed 

 equally the study, and were equally in the mouth, of the philoso- 

 pher who speculated on generals, and of the artist whose labours 

 were confined to the detail of experiment. 



Nor does it appear altogether an absurd or untenable hypo- 

 thesis, that the whole fabric of alchemical delusion had. its 

 origin in the misinterpretation of those cosmological works 

 which were popular in the declining age of classical literamre. 

 The Alexandrian and other schools which mingled much of 

 oriental philosophy with the systems, real or pretended, of Pytha- 

 goras and Plato, seem to have abounded in this lore, and to 

 have expressed it not unfrequently in a figurative or symbolical 

 manner. They produced also many forgeries attributed usually 

 to authors of a high antiquity, and occasionally designed, 

 perhaps, to prop the failing cause of heathenism. These, in 

 process of time, would become unintelligible, and a new set of 

 impostors or fanaticsf would intentionally or credulously distort 

 their enigmatical contents, to the illustration of theories equally 

 visionary, but better calculated to attract and dazzle an ignorant 

 and barbarous age. We know at least that the Sealed or Herme- 

 tic Vase was of old considered as the symbol of the material 

 universe, ever full, but never overflowing. The Mundane Egg 

 was the same; and the serpent with the tail in his mouth figured 

 the eternity of that universe (a well-known dogma of the pseudo- 

 Pythagorean school), while fire was the type of the vivifying 

 principle which pervades and preserves the whole. These are 

 all common to the schools both of cosmogony and of alchemy,J 



• Thus in the well-known lines of Virgil . — 



Quum Pater omnipotens facundis imbribus aether, 

 (onjugis in laetae greniium descendit. 



There are traces of this mode of interpretation in the remains of a much earlier poet, 

 the philosophic Empedocles ; the Stoics and the Platonists (at least tlie later Platonists) 

 vere also much given to it. 



f There is in truth little to choose between such writers as Philostratus or lambli- 

 chus, and R. Lully or Ripley. 



J For the former, I would refer tlie scholar to the learned though sometimes fanci- 

 ful essays of Creuzer, entitled, " Dionysius, &c." (Heidelberg, 1 809) ; for the latter, 

 to the alchemical hieroglyphics engraved in JJarchusen's Chemia (Leydcn, 1718). It 

 may be added that Beckman and Bergman both quote from Origen against Celsus, an 

 account of a Persian temple, in which the different planetary spheres were represented 

 by different metals. It seems probable that the metals were employed in talismans, &c. 

 as symbolical of the planets, long before the names of the planets were used to dcsignatQ 

 the metals. 



