The man who defecates coins is a famous leitmotif of many alchemical texts of the twentieth century. In Art profane et religion populaire au Moyen Age, by Claude Gaignebet et Jean-Dominique Lajoux, we can see how iconology is not an isolated case in the imaginary of the French late Middle Ages.
Canseliet dedicates a planche to him and underlines how an operational hint is hidden under the deplorable physiological event. Orthelius, in his comment to Sendivogius, suggests not to use excrements only for their tenuous and natural heat developed. A sal alkali can be extracted from horse manure. The old Phantom Play website also teaches you how to make an Extractor from graveyard soil and manure. So why use human excrement? Because, after all, they clothe in our Microcosm. Testamentum Fraternitatis speaks of urine and blood, but when it comes to alkali salts, the excrements (ours, in this case) give a voluminous support of matter to work on.
The images below are extracted from Art profane et religion populaire au Moyen Age. The authors did not intend to use them for an esoteric-alchemical disclosure. So let’s not expect clues of any kind, but they are an exhaustive search in the popular French imaginary of an ancient era. The fact that all these art pieces are attached to facades of churches, cathedrals, or aristocratic palaces explains how pre-Christian beliefs and knowledge were still alive in the French countryside.
Walcourt, Sainte-Materne church, stable, 1531.
Cambrai, collection of profane and sacred airs, manuscript, 1543. «When a pig dreams, it dreams of turd»
Walcourt, church Sainte-Materne, Despite appearances, the ibis is the purest of animals according to the bestiaries. No matter if he eats a corpse or excrement, he has the art of administering himself, with his beak, an enema.
Saint-Claude, Saint-Pierre Cathedral, separation under the armrest, 1459. The one who shits.
Bordeaux, Saint-Seurin church, inside face of the stables, XVth century.
Crazy man shitting on the earth’s globe. He doesn’t care about the world and pisses it off, but when the world is Christian, and upside down, it is in the game of a whole series of inversions that Bruegel, in his proverbs, for example, invites us to engage.
Goslar, Kaiser’s palace, façade sculpture, 1449.
Excrements or Sacraments? The man who shits coins. Theologians thunder against the devil of the Sabbaths, who turns their excrement into sacraments. The image of coins-wafers has something to do with it, and Jerome Bosch remembers it, showing us the damned under the devil’s commode, eagerly stretching out his tongue towards these golden wafers.
The same item, photographed from another perspective, is instead extracted from Eugène Canseliet’s Alchimie – Etudes diverses de Symbolisme hermétique et de Pratique Philosophale, planche XXIII. The caption reads “Hotel Kaiserworth (the little ducat-man). The miserable incarnation of the disinherited subject who, alone, remains capable of supplying, in profusion, the enigmatic gold of the wise.”
Orthelius Commentary on Sendivogius. Chapter 1 ; Orthelius Commentary on Sendivogius. Chapter 11 ; Phantom Play’s Earth Salt Self Extractor ; Testamentum Fraternitatis Roseae et Aureae Crucis. Part 1 .