OLD AND NEW ALCHEMY 251 



developed, as in a forcing-house, under its influence, appro- 

 priating authority by the forgery of great names, and 

 acquiring popularity through facile appeals to credulity 

 and cupidity. "Populus vult decipi; decipiatur," will 

 always be the mot d'ordre of demagogues and charlatans. 



Hermes Trismegistus, reputed to be the first alchemistic 

 author, was a fit eponym of the "hermetic philosophy." 

 The books attributed to him were numerous, and highly 

 cryptic; but they were held sacred, and from their dicta 

 there was no appeal. His identity, in fact, merged into 

 that of Thoth, the ibis-headed deity of Hermopolis, and the 

 example of pseudonymous authorship set in his case was 

 extensively followed to the bewilderment of posterity. The 

 classics of alchemistic literature are, more often than not, 

 apocryphal ; their alleged authors are simulacra. Thus the 

 Archpriest John, the successor of Hermes, seemed by his 

 evasiveness to prefigure the slippery personality of his 

 Abyssinian namesake. Democritus of Abdera, who came 

 next, although endowed, as a philosopher, with the full 

 Cartesian certainty of his own existence, played a purely 

 fictitious part in hermetic tradition. His supposed sayings 

 proceeded from his mouth by a trick, so to speak, of ventril- 

 oquism. One of them, reported by Julius Firmicus, has 

 a curious Baconian ring. The famous aphorism of the 

 Novum Organum, "Natura non nisi parendo vincitur," 

 was preluded by the (so-called) Democritean maxim, "Na- 

 tura, alia a natura vincitur, ' ' signifying that man can only 

 indirectly control the operations of nature by providing 

 opportunities for their working along the lines of his 

 choice. Bacon's felicitous phrase thus happily rescued 

 from oblivion a derelict sentence of illuminative import. 



Democritus was said to have received instruction in the 

 spagyric art from Ostanes the Mede, classed with Zoroaster 

 by St. Augustine. Under the auspices of this mythical 

 personage, and described by him in an imaginary treatise, 

 the elixir vitae made its entry on the scene. The association 

 is memorable as indicating the Chaldean origin of the 



