Is Bacstrom’s apparatus to draw lunar humidity an eighteenth-century naivety? From Moon really descends humidity? Does Secret Fire dwell in humidity condensation?
In Manly Palmer’s manuscripts collection, Sigismund Bacstrom introduces an astonishing, and too much complicated, apparatus to attract lunar humidity. As you can see from the image, it is a typical late eighteenth-century vessel, recipients, cooker, and coolers equipment to collect condensations. Is this equipment technically sound? And sound for what?
This Bacstrom’s drawing, which is without a written description, apart from the notes accompanying the outline, has been scarcely mentioned in alchemical environments. I’m not amazed by that, since modern alchemists scarcely own the knowledge and the experience to make a point on the topic. Here, this goes without saying, I don’t mean to state to possess such learning and wide experience. But, perhaps naively, I think this article deserves a place in the alchemical search for Secret Fire/Mercurius history.
We have already seen that our Secret Fire, in addition, to dwelling in terrestrial raw matter, comes daily to the ground from the sky (1). We have also seen that collecting it directly from the sun is extremely difficult (2). Also, we know that raw matter has often to be “magnetized” for a certain period under outdoor sun-moon conditions (3) before undergoing laboratory operations. Of course, to magnetize is here a synonym for” increasing the amount of Secret Fire we can find inside our raw matter. Nevertheless the verb “to increase” is not entirely correct in this case, because I was always told that very hardly Secret Fire shows a “chemical” behavior, being not chemical at all but physical.
If you put salts in outdoor conditions, we can notice chemical variations like oxidation, acidification, deliquescence, and so on. Sometimes inexperienced alchemists take this appearance ( since it is only appearance) as a sign of alchemical magnetization. In fact, these exterior signs are totally useless if certain conditions go unobserved. A deliquescence per-se means nothing.
Very know is little about Secret Fire’s behavior and even less about its composition. Although a sub-atomic consistency is supposed (an electronic cloud), there is a long alchemical tradition of mirrors-like operations. Such as in Mercurius Duplicatus (4), for instance. A Secret Fire always needs another Secret Fire to mirror upon, and vice versa.
But let’s start observing Bacstrom’s ( since he doesn’t provide any different author) apparatus. An orifice in a wall, a glass funnel, a series of communicating glass bowls. The first heated up, and the others chilled out in cold water. In ancient roman public latrines, an ingenious ventilation system was provided, consisting of an oven with an overlying cylinder: the hot air is less dense than the surrounding cold air, and therefore floats as the cold air drops underneath it and pushes it up out-of-the-way, this causes ventilation. In addition, the rising hot air currents were shrunk by the upper cylinder and consequently further speeded, causing the surrounding air to move away from the oven.
In Backstrom’s drawing under each chilled-out vessel, an ending container is provided. It is easy to suppose that a kind of humidity is certainly gathered. Condensation of water molecules, I guess. Could Bacstrom conjecture this condensation actually was “lunar humidity”?
In nature, the common sinkholes formed on the earth’s crust by the collapse of the vault of karst cavities were defined as “swallows of lunar substance”, as you can see in Busa di Manna, the sinkhole.
We have already seen, in articles such as Nuisement and the Sun Resisting Capture and Pietro Perugino and the Lady of the Wind, that the Secret Fire coming from the Sun is sent to earth through the Moon during the night. What we haven’t seen yet is that ancient alchemists defined the Secret Fire/Mercurius, necessarily coming from the Moon, as a “lunar dropping”. In the seventeenth century military surgeon John French, in his ” Art of Distillation” hazardously presented a method to gather this supposed humidity with a sponge. In the twenty-first century Fulcanelli, more wisely, said that the closest representation of our Secret Fire/Mercurius could be the lunar beams. Bacstrom did probably take these words as real. And we have no evidence he failed to understand.
I want to add a technical detail: orifices. Being them either slits or holes. We know that when an air flow is forced through a narrow opening it is also speeded up. Although I’m not sure this is the theory intended to explain the Secret Fire increase phenomenon, a large space after a hole and/or a slit seems to collect humidity and sounds. And we know that they both can be involved in Secret Fire.
To end, surely precipitation of droplets of the common air humidity could take place in the condensation vessels. Has this product something to do with a supposed lunar humidity? I don’t know, but orifices do miracles in Alchemy.
- See also Thesaurus Hermeticum & Dry Pythagorean River ;
- See also Busa di Manna, the sinkhole ; The Cloud Chamber ;
- See also Voynich Manuscript and the Unknown Part of the Rhythm , San Miniato Sun Path or the Sky as Seen from Earth , Two Stars in a Venetian Geocentric Sky ;
- See also Archarion and an Opus Magnum Scheme ;
- See also Nuisement and the Sun Resisting Capture , Pietro Perugino and the lady of the Wind ;
- See also Atalanta Fugiens and Mercurius Duplicatus , Ostanes and One Nature etc