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23.5 Degrees: Interlude: And Always Be Silent
By Stella Maris
October 25, 2008
A kind of exalted philosophical coniunctio between
the real and imaginary worlds via the agency of my flu-addled brain.
© Memory Map
This week's column isn't going to be very exciting, I'm afraid, because I'm grounded with the flu. As I type this, I’m propped up in bed with a one hundred and one degree fever, the heating turned up full blast, consoled by my faithful laptop Diogenes... surrounded by piles of snotty tissues, arcane bottles of assorted cough mixtures, and scummy half-drunk cups of tea. Ugh.
On the other hand, one of the advantages of being reluctantly bed-ridden is the rare opportunity to catch up on the stacks of books that I normally wouldn't get around to reading until Christmas vacation...
So, the theme of this autumn's annual quarantine is set by Lindsay Clarke's Whitbread Prize winning book, The Chymical Wedding.
Based on a fictional account of the "true story" of the Victorian lady alchemist, Mary Anne Atwood, Clarke's novel is an easy and painless introduction to Alchemy 101.
The story goes that Mary Anne worked closely with her father as his soror mystica and then, in an effort to impress him, innocently detailed all the alchemical secrets he had taught her in a book elaborately entitled A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery with a Dissertation on the Most Celebrated of the Alchemical Philosophers Being an Attempt Towards the Recovery of the Ancient Experiment of Nature.
Having no idea, until it was too late, that his daughter had earnestly broken the ultimate rule that an alchemist should "say little, do much, and always be silent", Mary Anne's father frantically had all of her books recalled and unceremoniously burned them in a bonfire in their front yard... except for one stray that ended up in Ireland which, of course, was clandestinely reproduced as soon as both of them died.
Fortuitously, I managed to track down a hardback copy of Atwood's own masterpiece just before my lurgy struck, which I'm reading in tandem with Clarke's novel, thereby generating a kind of exalted philosophical coniunctio between the real and imaginary worlds via the agency of my flu-addled brain.
I just have one question, though. If the alchemists could attain eternal life with the Philosopher's Stone, then why couldn't any of them manage to conjure a cure for the bloody flu?
I bet Nicolas Flamel never had to go through this...
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