Page 7 - Compound of Compounds

naturally bring to pass.

De Coelo et Mundo.

Albertus was a contemporary of the Franciscan Roger Bacon (1214-94). Both were
students of Nature, and applied themselves to the experimental sciences with such
remarkable success that they were accused of neglecting the sacred theological
sciences. Legends began to grow which attributed to both of these monks who dared to
explore Nature the image of a magician or sorcerer. Bacon was perhaps more
outspoken and willing to attack the established ideas of the church, but Albertus
remained within the establishment and worked his influence from inside.

Of course, such a major intellectual figure as Albertus has had many books falsely
attributed to his name, an obvious example being the early sixteenth century Liber
secretorum Alberti Magni, 1502, (Book of the Secrets of Albertus Magnus) which
deals with the virtues and properties of vegetable, minerals, and animal substances as
well as the powers of the celestial planets to work in the earthly realm. Despite such
later invented works, there remains a small corpus of writings on alchemy which
scholars are sure were written by Albertus.

De mineralibus et rebis metallicis is accepted as being genuinely written by
Albertus, and for this book he draws strongly from Avicenna’s De anima in arte
alchemiae ‘On the soul in the art of alchemy’. Book III of De mineralibus ‘on metals’
discusses alchemy and transmutations.

Those who whiten with white tinctures and yellow with yellow tinctures,
without changing the metallic species, are deceivers and do not make true
gold and true silver, and all of them work partly or wholly like this, since I
have had alchemical gold or silver tested, when it stood six or seven
ignitions, but was at length consumed and turned, as it were, into dross.
Yet, just as physicians by medicines first purge away corrupt matter and
afterwards restore to health, so skilful alchemists work with a great mass of
the matter of mercury and sulphur, which are the constituents of metals,
and then combine them in due proportions of elementary and celestial
virtues for the metals they wish to obtain; for what can be done in Nature’s
vessel can perhaps be done in the vase of art, and what Nature does by the
heat of the sun and stars, can be done by the fire of art.

Thus we see that Albertus, although able to be critical of the supposed

2