[213] We now come to the end of the treatise De vita longa. Paracelsus here sums up the whole operation in an extremely condensed way which makes interpretation even more hazardous than usual. As with so many other passages in the Vita longa, we must ask ourselves: Is the author being intentionally obscure, or can’t he help it? Or should we ascribe the confusion to his editor, Adam von Bodenstein? The obscurities of this last chapter have no parallel in all Paracelsus’s writings. One would be inclined to let the whole treatise go hang did it not contain things which seem to belong to the most modern psychological insights.
[214] I now give the original text of Paracelsus together with Dorn’s commentary for the benefit of readers who wish to form their own judgment:
Paracelsus: De vita longa (1562), Lib. V, cap. V, pp. 94f.
Atque ad hunc modum abiit e nymphididica natura intervenientibus Scaiolis in aliam transmutationem permansura Melosyne, si difficilis ille Adech annuisset, qui utrunque existit, cum mors tum vita Scaiolarum. Annuit praeterea prima tempora, sed ad finem seipsum immutat. Ex quibus colligo supermonica1 figmenta in cyphantis aperire fenestram. Sed ut ea figantur, recusant gesta Melosynes, quae cuiusmodi sunt, missa facimus. Sed ad naturam nymphididicam. Ea ut in animis nostris concipiatur, atque ita ad annum aniadin2 immortales perveniamus arripimus characteres Veneris, quos et si vos una cum aliis cognoscitis, minime tamen usurpatis. Idipsum autem absolvimus eo quod in prioribus capitibus indicavimus, ut hanc vitam secure tandem adsequamur, in qua aniadus dominatur ac regnat, et cum eo, cui sine fine assistimus, permanet. Haec atque alia arcana, nulla re prorsus indigent.3 Et in hunc modum vitam longam conclusam relinquimus. |
And in this manner, through the intervention of the Scaiolae, Melusina departs from her nymphididic nature, to remain in another transmutation if that difficult Adech permit, who rules over both the death and life of the Scaiolae. Moreover, he permits the first times, but at the end he changes himself. From which I conclude that the supermonic1 figments in the Cyphanta open a window. But in order to become fixed, they have to oppose the acts of Melusina, which, of whatever kind they may be, we dismiss to the nymphididic realm. But in order that [she] may be conceived in our minds, and we arrive immortal at the year Aniadin,2 we take the characters of Venus, which, even if you know yourselves one with others, you have nevertheless put to little use. With this we conclude what we treated of in the earlier chapters, that we may safely attain that life over which Aniadus dominates and reigns, and which endures for ever with him, in whom we are present without end. This and other mysteries are in need of nothing whatever.3 And herewith we end our discourse on longevity. |
Dorn: De vita longa (1583), p. 178
[Paracelsus] ait Melosinam, i.e. apparentem in mente visionem . . . e nymphididica natura, in aliam transmutationem abire, in qua permansura[m] esse, si modo difficilis ille Adech, interior homo vdl. annuerit, hoc est, faveret: qui quidem utrunque efficit, videlicet mortem, et vitam Scaiolarum, i.e. mentalium operationum. Harum tempora prima, i.e. initia annuit, i.e. admittit, sed ad finem seipsum immutat, intellige propter intervenientes ac impedientes distractiones, quo minus consequantur effectum inchoatae, scl. operationes. Ex quibus [Paracelsus] colligit supermonica1 figmenta, hoc est, speculationes aenigmaticas, in cyphantis [vas stillatorium], i.e. separationum vel praeparationum operationibus, aperire fenestram, hoc est, intellectum, sed ut figantur, i.e. ad finem perducantur, recusant gesta Melosines, hoc est, visionum varietates, et observationes, quae cuius modi sunt (ait) missa facimus. |
[Paracelsus] says that Melusina, i.e., the vision appearing in the mind, departs from her nymphididic nature into another transmutation, in which she will remain if only that difficult Adech, that is, the inner man, permit, that is, approve: who brings about both, that is, death and life, of the Scaiolae, that is, the mental operations. The first times, that is, the beginnings, of these he permits, that is, favours; but at the end he changes himself, namely because of the distractions that intervene and impede, so that the things begun, that is, the operations, do not obtain their effect. |
Ad naturam nymphididicam rediens, ut in animis nostris concipiatur, inquit atque hac via ad annum aniadin2 perveniamus, hoc est, ad vitam longam per imaginationem, arripimus characteres Veneris, i.e. amoris scutum et loricam ad viriliter adversis resistendum obstaculis: amor enim omnem difficultatem superat: quos et si vos una cum aliis cognoscitis, putato characteres, minime tamen usurpatis. Absolvit itaque iam Paracelsus ea, quae prioribus capitibus indicavit in vitam hanc secure consequendam, in qua dominatur et regnat aniadus, i.e. rerum efficicia et cum ea is, cui sine fine assistimus, permanet, aniadus nempe coelestis: Haec atque alia arcana nulla re prorsus indigent.3 |
From which [Paracelsus] concludes that the supermonic1 figments, that is, enigmatical speculations, in the Cyphanta [distilling vessel], open a window, that is, the understanding, by means of the operations of separation or preparation; but in order to become fixed, that is, brought to an end, they have to oppose the acts of Melusina, that is, divers visions and observations, which of whatever kind they may be, he says, we dismiss. Returning to the nymphididic realm, in order that [she] may be conceived in our minds, and that in this way we may attain to the year Aniadin,2 that is, to a long life by imagination, we take the characters, of Venus, that is, the shield and buckler of love, to resist manfully the obstacles that confront us, for love overcomes all difficulties; which characters, even if you know yourselves one with others, you have nevertheless put to little use. And thus Paracelsus brings to an end those things which he treated of in the earlier chapters, that we may safely obtain that life over which Aniadus, that is, the efficacity of things, dominates and reigns, and which endures for ever with him, namely the heavenly Aniadus, in whom we are present without end: this and other mysteries are in need of nothing whatever.3 |
[215] The text certainly needs a commentary! The Scaiolae, as the four parts, limbs, or emanations of the Anthropos,4 are the organs with which he actively intervenes in the world of appearances or by which he is connected with it, just as the invisible quinta essentia, or aether, appears in this world as the four elements or, conversely, is composed out of them. Since the Scaiolae, as we have seen, are also psychic functions, these must be understood as manifestations or effluences of the One, the invisible Anthropos. As functions of consciousness, and particularly as imaginatio, speculatio, phantasia, and fides, they “intervene” and stimulate Melusina, the water-nixie, to change herself into human form. Dorn thinks of this as a “vision appearing in the mind” and not as a projection on a real woman. So far as our biographical knowledge extends, this latter possibility does not seem to have occurred to Paracelsus either. In Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili the Lady Polia attains a high degree of reality (far more so than Dante’s ethereal Beatrice but still not as much as Helen in Faust II), yet even she dissolves into a lovely dream as the sun rises on the first day of May:
… tears shone in her eyes like clear crystals, like round pearls, like the dew which Aurora strews on the clouds of dawn. Sighing like a heavenly image, like incense of musk and amber rising to give delight to the spirits of heaven, she dissolved into thin air, leaving nought behind her but a breath of heavenly fragrance. So, with my happy dream, she vanished from my sight, saying as she went: Poliphilo, most dear beloved, farewell!5
[216] Polia dissolves just before the long-desired union with her lover. Helen, on the other hand, vanishes only with the dissolution of her son Euphorion. Though Paracelsus gives clear indications of the nuptial mood with his “exaltation” in May and his allusion to the stinging nettle and the little flame, he disregards entirely the projection on a real person or a concretely visualized, personified image, but chooses instead the legendary figure of Melusina. Now this figure is certainly not an allegorical chimera or a mere metaphor: she has her particular psychic reality in the sense that she is a glamorous apparition who, by her very nature, is on one side a psychic vision but also, on account of the psyche’s capacity for imaginative realization (which Paracelsus calls Ares), is a distinct objective entity, like a dream which temporarily becomes reality. The figure of Melusina is eminently suited to this purpose. The anima belongs to those borderline phenomena which chiefly occur in special psychic situations. They are characterized by the more or less sudden collapse of a form or style of life which till then seemed the indispensable foundation of the individual’s whole career. When such a catastrophe occurs, not only are all bridges back into the past broken, but there seems to be no way forward into the future. One is confronted with a hopeless and impenetrable darkness, an abysmal void that is now suddenly filled with an alluring vision, the palpably real presence of a strange yet helpful being, in the same way that, when one lives for a long time in great solitude, the silence or the darkness becomes visibly, audibly, and tangibly alive, and the unknown in oneself steps up in an unknown guise.
[217] This peculiarity of the anima is found also in the Melusina legend: Emmerich, Count of Poitiers, had adopted Raymond, the son of a poor kinsman. The relation between adoptive father and son was harmonious. But once, on the hunt, when pursuing a wild boar, they got separated from the rest and went astray in the forest. Night fell and they lit a fire to warm themselves. Suddenly the Count was attacked by the boar, and Raymond struck at it with his sword. But by an unlucky accident the blade rebounded and dealt the Count a mortal blow. Raymond was inconsolable, and in despair mounted his horse to flee he knew not where. After a time he came to a meadow with a bubbling spring. There he found three beautiful women. One of them was Melusina, who by her clever counsel saved him from dishonour and a homeless fate.
[218] According to the legend, Raymond found himself in the catastrophic situation we have described, when his whole way of life had collapsed and he faced ruin. That is the moment when the harbinger of fate, the anima, an archetype of the collective unconscious, appears. In the legend Melusina sometimes has the tail of a fish and sometimes that of a snake; she is half human, half animal. Occasionally she appears only in snake form. The legend apparently has Celtic roots,6 but the motif is found practically everywhere. It was not only extraordinarily popular in Europe during the Middle Ages, but occurs also in India, in the legend of Urvashi and Pururavas, which is mentioned in the Shatapatha-Brāhmana.7 It also occurs among the North American Indians.8 The motif of half-man, half-fish is universally disseminated. Special mention should be made of Conrad Vecerius,9 according to whom Melusina, or Melyssina, comes from an island in the sea where nine sirens dwell, who can change into any shape they want. This is of particular interest as Paracelsus mentions Melusina along with “Syrena.”10 The tradition probably goes back to Pomponius Mela,11 who calls the island “Sena” and the beings who dwell there “Senae.” They cause storms, can change their shape, cure incurable diseases, and know the future.12 Since the mercurial serpent of the alchemists is not infrequently called virgo and, even before Paracelsus, was represented in the form of a Melusina, the latter’s capacity to change her shape and to cure diseases is of importance in that these peculiarities were also predicated of Mercurius, and with special emphasis. On the other hand, Mercurius was also depicted as the grey-bearded Mercurius senex or Hermes Trismegistus, from which it is evident that two empirically very common archetypes, namely the anima and the Wise Old Man,13 flow together in the symbolic phenomenology of Mercurius. Both are daemons of revelation and, in the form of Mercurius, represent the panacea. Again and again Mercurius is called versatilis, versipellis, mutabilis, servus or cervus fugitivus, Proteus, etc.
[219] The alchemists, and Paracelsus too, were no doubt confronted often enough with the dark abyss of not-knowing, and, unable to go forward, were on their own admission dependent on revelation or illumination or a helpful dream. For this reason they needed a “ministering spirit,” a familiar or πάρεδρος, to whose invocation the Greek Magic Papyri bear witness. The snake form of the god of revelation, and of spirits in general, is a universal type.
[220] Paracelsus seems to have known nothing of any psychological premises. He attributes the appearance and transformation of Melusina to the effect of the “intervening” Scaiolae, the driving spiritual forces emanating from the homo maximus. The opus was subordinated to them, for its aim was to raise man to the sphere of the Anthropos. There is no doubt that the goal of the philosophical alchemist was higher self-development, or the production of what Paracelsus calls the homo maior, or what I would call individuation. This goal confronts the alchemist at the start with the loneliness which all of them feared, when one has “only” oneself for company. The alchemist, on principle, worked alone. He formed no school. This rigorous solitude, together with his preoccupation with the endless obscurities of the work, was sufficient to activate the unconscious and, through the power of imagination, to bring into being things that apparently were not there before. Under these circumstances “enigmatical speculations” arise in which the unconscious is visually experienced as a “vision appearing in the mind.” Melusina emerges from the watery realm and assumes human form—sometimes quite concretely, as in Faust I, where Faust’s hopelessness leads him straight into the arms of Gretchen, in which form Melusina would doubtless remain were it not for the catastrophe which drives Faust still deeper into magic: Melusina changes into Helen. But she does not remain even there, for all attempts at concretization are shattered like the retort of the homunculus against the throne of Galatea. Another power takes over, “that difficult Adech,” who “at the end changes himself.” The greater man “hinders our purpose,” for Faust has to change himself at death into a boy, the puer aeternus, to whom the true world will be shown only after all desirousness has fallen away from him. “Miserable mortals, to whom Nature has denied her first and best treasure, the lumen naturae!”
[221] It is Adech, the inner man, who with his Scaiolae guides the purpose of the adept and causes him to behold fantasy images from which he will draw false conclusions, devising out of them situations of whose provisional and fragile nature he is unaware. Nor is he aware that by knocking on the door of the unknown he is obeying the law of the inner, future man, and that he is disobedient to this law whenever he seeks to secure a permanent advantage or possession from his work. Not his ego, that fragment of a personality, is meant; it is rather that a wholeness, of which he is a part, wants to be transformed from a latent state of unconsciousness into an approximate consciousness of itself.
[222] The “acts of Melusina” are deceptive phantasms compounded of supreme sense and the most pernicious nonsense, a veritable veil of Maya which lures and leads every mortal astray. From these phantasms the wise man will extract the “supermonic” elements, that is, the higher inspirations; he extracts everything meaningful and valuable as in a process of distillation,14 and catches the precious drops of the liquor Sophiae in the ready beaker of his soul, where they “open a window” for his understanding. Paracelsus is here alluding to a discriminative process of critical judgment which separates the chaff from the wheat—an indispensable part of any rapprochement with the unconscious. It requires no art to become stupid; the whole art lies in extracting wisdom from stupidity. Stupidity is the mother of the wise, but cleverness never. The “fixation” refers alchemically to the lapis but psychologically to the consolidation of feeling. The distillate must be fixed and held fast, must become a firm conviction and a permanent content.
[223] Melusina, the deceptive Shakti, must return to the watery realm if the work is to reach its goal. She should no longer dance before the adept with alluring gestures, but must become what she was from the beginning: a part of his wholeness.15 As such she must be “conceived in the mind.” This leads to a union of conscious and unconscious that was always present unconsciously but was always denied by the one-sidedness of the conscious attitude. From this union arises that wholeness which the introspective philosophy of all times and climes has characterized with an inexhaustible variety of symbols, names, and concepts. The “mille nomina” disguise the fact that this coniunctio is not concerned with anything tangible or discursively apprehensible; it is an experience that simply cannot be reproduced in words, but whose very nature carries with it an unassailable feeling of eternity or timelessness.
[224] I will not repeat here what I have said elsewhere on this subject. It makes no difference anyway what one says about it. Paracelsus does, however, give one more hint which I cannot pass over in silence: this concerns the “characters of Venus.”16
[225] Melusina, being a water-nixie, is closely connected with Morgana, the “sea-born,” whose classical counterpart is Aphrodite, the “foam-born.” Union with the feminine personification of the unconscious is, as we have seen, a well-nigh eschatological experience, a reflection of which is to be found in the Apocalyptic Marriage of the Lamb, the Christian form of the hierosgamos. The passage runs (Revelation 19 : 6–10):
And I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying, Alleluia; for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.
Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready.
And to her was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints.
And he saith unto me: Write, Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb. And he saith unto me, These are the true sayings of God.
And I fell at his feet to worship him. And he said unto me, See thou do it not: I am thy fellowservant, and of thy brethren . . .
[226] The “he” of the text is the angel that speaks to John; in the language of Paracelsus, he is the homo maior, Adech. I need hardly point out that Venus is closely related to the love-goddess Astarte, whose sacred marriage-festivals were known to everyone. The experience of union underlying these festivals is, psychologically, the embrace and coming together again of two souls in the exaltation of spring, in the “true May”; it is the successful reuniting of an apparently hopelessly divided duality in the wholeness of a single being. This unity embraces the multiplicity of all beings. Hence Paracelsus says: “If you know yourselves one with others.” Adech is not my self, he is also that of my brothers: “I am thy fellowservant, and of thy brethren.” That is the specific definition of this experience of the coniunctio: the self which includes me includes many others also, for the unconscious that is “conceived in our mind” does not belong to me and is not peculiar to me, but is everywhere. It is the quintessence of the individual and at the same time the collective.
[227] The participants in the marriage of the Lamb enter into eternal blessedness; they are “virgins, which were not defiled with women” and are “redeemed from among men” (Rev. 14 : 4). In Paracelsus the goal of redemption is “the year Aniadin,” or time of perfection, when the One Man reigns for ever.
[228] Why did Paracelsus not avail himself of the Christian imagery, when it expresses the same thought so very clearly? Why does Venus appear in the place of Melusina, and why is it not the marriage of the Lamb, but a hierosgamos of Venus and Mars, as the text itself hints? The reason is probably the same as that which compelled Francesco Colonna to make Poliphilo seek his beloved Polia not with the Mother of God but with Venus. For the same reason the boy in Christian Rosencreutz’s Chymical Wedding17 led the hero down to an underground chamber, on the door of which was a secret inscription graven in copper characters. Copper (cuprum) is correlated with the Cyprian (Aphrodite, Venus). In the chamber they found a three-cornered tomb containing a copper cauldron, and in it was an angel holding a tree that dripped continually into the cauldron. The tomb was supported by three animals: an eagle, an ox, and a lion.18 The boy explained that in this tomb Venus lay buried, who had destroyed many an upright man. Continuing their descent, they came to the bedchamber of Venus and found the goddess asleep on a couch. Indiscreetly, the boy twitched the coverlet away and revealed her in all her naked beauty.19
[229] The ancient world contained a large slice of nature and a number of questionable things which Christianity was bound to overlook if the security of a spiritual standpoint was not to be hopelessly compromised. No penal code and no moral code, not even the sublimest casuistry, will ever be able to codify and pronounce just judgment upon the confusions, the conflicts of duty, and the invisible tragedies of the natural man in collision with the exigencies of culture. “Spirit” is one aspect, “Nature” another. “You may pitch Nature out with a fork, yet she’ll always come back again,” says the poet.20 Nature must not win the game, but she cannot lose. And whenever the conscious mind clings to hard and fast concepts and gets caught in its own rules and regulations—as is unavoidable and of the essence of civilized consciousness—nature pops up with her inescapable demands. Nature is not matter only, she is also spirit. Were that not so, the only source of spirit would be human reason. It is the great achievement of Paracelsus to have elevated the “light of nature” to a principle and to have emphasized it in a far more fundamental way than his predecessor Agrippa. The lumen naturae is the natural spirit, whose strange and significant workings we can observe in the manifestations of the unconscious now that psychological research has come to realize that the unconscious is not just a “subconscious” appendage or the dustbin of consciousness, but is a largely autonomous psychic system for compensating the biases and aberrations of the conscious attitude, for the most part functionally, though it sometimes corrects them by force. Consciousness can, as we know, be led astray by naturalness as easily as by spirituality, this being the logical consequence of its freedom of choice. The unconscious is not limited only to the instinctual and reflex processes of the cortical centres; it also extends beyond consciousness and, with its symbols, anticipates future conscious processes. It is therefore quite as much a “supra-consciousness.”
[230] Convictions and moral values would have no meaning if they were not believed and did not possess exclusive validity. And yet they are man-made and time-conditioned assertions or explanations which we know very well are capable of all sorts of modifications, as has happened in the past and will happen again in the future. All that has happened during the last two thousand years shows that they are reliable signposts for certain stretches of the way, then comes a painful upheaval, which is felt as subversive and immoral, until a new conviction takes root. So far as the essential traits of human nature remain the same, certain moral values enjoy permanent validity. The most meticulous observance of the Ten Commandments, however, is no obstacle to the more refined forms of turpitude, and the far loftier principle of Christian love of one’s neighbour can lead to such tangled conflicts of duty that sometimes the Gordian knot can only be cut with a very unchristian sword.
[231] Paracelsus, like many others, was unable to make use of the Christian symbolism because the Christian formula inevitably suggested the Christian solution and would thus have conduced to the very thing that had to be avoided. It was nature and her particular “light” that had to be acknowledged and lived with in the face of an attitude that assiduously overlooked them. This could only be done under the protective aegis of the arcanum. But one should not imagine Paracelsus or any other alchemist settling down to invent an arcane terminology that would make the new doctrine a kind of private code. Such an undertaking would presuppose the existence of definite views and clearly defined concepts. But there is no question of that: none of the alchemists ever had any clear idea of what his philosophy was really about. The best proof of this is the fact that everyone with any originality at all coined his own terminology, with the result that no one fully understood anybody else. For one alchemist, Lully was an obscurantist and a charlatan and Geber the great authority; while for another, Geber was a Sphinx and Lully the source of all enlightenment. So with Paracelsus: we have no reason to suppose that behind his neologisms there was a clear, consciously disguised concept. It is on the contrary probable that he was trying to grasp the ungraspable with his countless esotericisms, and snatched at any symbolic hint that the unconscious offered. The new world of scientific knowledge was still in a nascent dream-state, a mist heavy with the future, in which shadowy figures groped about for the right words. Paracelsus was not reaching back into the past; rather, for lack of anything suitable in the present, he was using the old remnants to give new form to a renewed archetypal experience. Had the alchemists felt any serious need to revive the past, their erudition would have enabled them to draw on the inexhaustible storehouse of the heresiologists. But except for the “Aquarium sapientum,”21 which likewise treats of heresies, I have found only one alchemist (of the sixteenth century) who shudderingly admits to having read the Panarium of Epiphanius. Nor are any secret traces of Gnostic usages to be found, despite the fact that the texts swarm with unconscious parallels.
[232] To return to our text: it is clear that it describes a procedure for attaining nothing less than immortality (“that we may arrive immortal at the year Aniadin”). There is, however, only one way to this goal, and that is through the sacraments of the Church. These are here replaced by the “sacrament” of the opus alchymicum, less by word than by deed, and without the least sign of any conflict with the orthodox Christian standpoint.
[233] Which way did Paracelsus hold to be the true one? Or were both of them true for him? Presumably the latter, and the rest he “leaves to the theoreticians to discuss.”
[234] What is meant by the “characters of Venus” remains obscure. The “sapphire”22 which Paracelsus prized so much, the cheyri, ladanum, muscus, and ambra belong, according to Agrippa,23 to Venus. The goddess undoubtedly appears in our text on a higher level, in keeping with her classical cognomens: docta, sublimis, magistra rerum humanarum divinarumque, etc24 One of her characters is certainly love in the widest sense, so Dorn is not wrong when he interprets them as the “shield and buckler of love.” Shield and buckler are martial attributes, but there is also a Venus armata.25 Mythologically, the personified Amor is a son of Venus and Mars, whose cohabitation in alchemy is a typical coniunctio.26 Dorn, despite being a Paracelsist, had a decidedly polemical attitude towards certain fundamental tenets of alchemy,27 so that a Christian love of one’s neighbour, well armed against evil, suited him very well. But so far as Paracelsus is concerned this interpretation is doubtful. The word Venus points in quite another direction, and since the Christian gifts of grace were included in his Catholic faith he had in any case no need of a christianized Amor. On the contrary, a Venus Magistra or Aphrodite Urania, or even a Sophia, would have seemed to him more appropriate to the mystery of the lumen naturae. The words “minime tamen usurpatis” might also be a hint at discretion.28 Hence the Venus episode in the Chymical Wedding may have more bearing on the interpretation of this cryptic passage than Dorn’s well-meant circumlocution.
[235] The concluding reference to a “life without end” under the dominion of Aniadus is very reminiscent of Rev. 20 : 4: “… and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.” The year Aniadin would thus correspond to the thousand-year reign in the Apocalypse.
[236] In conclusion I would remark that the survey of the secret doctrine which I have attempted to sketch here makes it seem likely that besides the physician and Christian in Paracelsus there was also an alchemical philosopher at work who, pushing every analogy to the very limit, strove to penetrate the divine mysteries. The parallel with the mysteries of the Christian faith, which we can only feel as a most dangerous conflict, was no Gnostic heresy for him, despite the most disconcerting resemblances; for him as for every other alchemist, man had been entrusted with the task of bringing to perfection the divine will implanted in nature, and this was a truly sacramental work. To the question “Are you, as it would seem, an Hermetic?” he could have replied with Lazarello: “I am a Christian, O King, and it is no disgrace to be that and an Hermetic at the same time.”29