who turned the conversation to chiromancy, a topic in which 

 Dee was also proficient. 



At the hint from the Vice Chancellor Dee withdrew, first 

 promising the Emperor a second visit, and returned to his 

 house in Gold Alley ; soon after he received through the 

 Emperor's private almoner a royal gift of coins, representing 

 more gold than his crucibles and retorts had ever yielded. 



Though passionately devoted to the sciences, Rudolph was 

 not a profound scholar; lie hired skilled men to work in his 

 laboratories and observatories and hoped to reap the benefit 

 of their success in the creation of gold and in penetration of 

 the future. He had no book-learning aside from the ad- 

 'vantages gained by linguistic ability, and he had no dis- 

 position to work hard at the literature of the past. His 

 courtiers and salaried scientists were chiefly parasites, and a 

 great contrast to the profound, well-read English philosopher 

 who had settled in Prague. Consequently at the next and 

 many subsequent visits paid by Dee to the Emperor, the 

 Englishman discoursed on the mysteries of spiritualism, and 

 the arcana of hermetic philosophy ; they exchanged views on 

 the true sources of the prima materia, knowledge of which 

 is indispensable to transmutation; they discussed the best 

 form of Alcahest, the Azoth of Paracelsus, and methods of 

 preparing Aurum Potabile. Then, penetrating more deeply 

 into the mysteries of spagyrical secrets, they conferred on the 

 doctrine of palingenesis, the operation of reconstructing from 

 its ashes a plant or a flower; this phenomenon consists in 

 the evocation of the primitive form of the being, its astral 

 body, by the will-power of the Spagyrist, under the influence 

 of heat and of the spiritum universalem. The marvels of 

 homunculi also engaged their attention; Dee maintained that 

 these artificial manifestations of the microcosm were merely 

 elemental gnomes, sylphs and undines endowed with bodies 



33 



