Literatures of Alchemy in Medieval and Early Modern England by Eoin Bentick;

Author:Eoin Bentick;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Published: 2022-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Gnomic Poems

The brevity of the gnomic poems allows for their reproduction in full. The following is the text of ‘On Mercury’ as it appears in Harley 2407:

And thou wedde mercury to mercury wyth hyr wyfe,

Than schalle mercury and mercury be mery wythowtten stryf.

Ffor mercury’s wyfe to mercury makyth grete stryfe,

But mercury’s wyfe hys wyfe to mercurys makyth no stryfe. (folio 2v)

The poem exists in two other manuscripts, both descendants of Harley 2407: BL, MS Egerton 845 (fifteenth century) and BodL, MS Ashmole 1445 (seventeenth century).29 In these two manuscripts the poem appears as follows:

Take ☿ [mercury] frome ☿ whiche is his wyfe,

For ☿ wyfe to ☿ makythe great stryfe;

But ☿ wyfes wyfe,

To ☿ makythe no stryfe.30

This poem in both of its forms looks like nonsense, repeating as it does the words ‘mercury’ and ‘wyfe’ ad absurdum. Traditionally, sulphur and mercury, the fundamental building blocks of metals, are depicted as husband and wife respectively.31 The sexual union of the two might bring about the philosophers’ stone, or gold, or the elixir, or whatever it might be that a particular alchemist wishes to obtain. ‘On Mercury’, however, complicates this concept by getting rid of sulphur and confusing the marriage relations of mercury and his/her wife. In the Harley 2407 version, the poem tells its reader to wed mercury with mercury, who is already ‘hyr wyfe’. The poem does not cohere, even on its own terms: it suggests that mercury and mercury (mercury’s wife) will be ‘wythowtten stryf’ because mercury and mercury’s wife make ‘grete stryfe’. Despite the fact that the Egerton 845/Ashmole 1445 version of the poem occludes meaning by hiding the word ‘mercury’ behind the ‘☿’ symbol, it does gesture towards a semblance of coherence by entreating its reader to separate (‘take’) mercury from mercury, who is mercury’s wife. The separation of mercury from mercury ceases the strife, which mercury and mercury’s wife’s wife do not have. There are two different chemical procedures being described across these variants of the same poem. The wedding of mercury to mercury suggests a combination of two substances; taking mercury from mercury suggests an extraction. If these gnomic poems were written as mnemonic devices, they did not do their job very well. Someone, somewhere, seems to have forgotten the connubial relationships of mercury.

Reinforcing the centrality of ‘The Virtue of Our Stone’ to the poems of Harley 2407, ‘On Mercury’ is a pithy summary of one of the prose tract’s more confusing statements. Criticising those who peddle false theories about how to create the philosophers’ stone, the anonymous author of ‘The Virtue of Our Stone’ dismisses a theory that he attributes to Arnold of Villanova which argues that one must ‘menge [mix] mercury with mercury tyl on clene watur flowe owte of the 2 mercurys’ (folio 19r). The only true way to obtain the elixir, our author states, is to ‘draw mercury fro mercury’ (folio 19v). In other words, according to the author of ‘The Virtue of Our Stone’ and not pseudo-Arnold, the process is one of extraction rather than reaction.

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