THE ALCHYMISTS

Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions — Volume III by Charles Mackay, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. THE ALCHYMISTS

BOOK I.—THE ALCHYMISTS

OR, SEARCHERS FOR THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE AND THE WATER OF LIFE.

"Mercury (loquitur).—The mischief a secret any of them know, above the consuming of coals and drawing of usquebaugh! Howsoever they may pretend, under the specious names of Geber, Arnold, Lulli, or bombast of Hohenheim, to commit miracles in art, and treason against nature! As if the title of philosopher, that creature of glory, were to be fetched out of a furnace! I am their crude, and their sublimate, their precipitate, and their unctions; their male and their female, sometimes their hermaphrodite—what they list to style me! They will calcine you a grave matron, as it might be a mother of the maids, and spring up a young virgin out of her ashes, as fresh as a phoenix; lay you an old courtier on the coals, like a sausage or a bloat-herring, and, after they have broiled him enough, blow a soul into him, with a pair of bellows! See! they begin to muster again, and draw their forces out against me! The genius of the place defend me!"—Ben Jonson's Masque "Mercury vindicated from the Alchymists."

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This book is part of the public domain. Charles Mackay (1996). Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions — Volume III. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/884/pg884-images.html

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