§ 38. Raymond Lully.
Raymond Lully, the son of a noble Spanish family, was born at
Palma (in Majorca) about 1235. He was a man of somewhat eccentric
character—in his youth a man of pleasure; in his maturity,
a mystic and ascetic. His career was of a roving and adventurous
character. We are told that, in his younger days, although married, he
became violently infatuated with a lady of the name of Ambrosia de
Castello, who vainly tried to dissuade him from his profane passion. Her
efforts proving futile, she requested Lully to call upon her, and in the
presence of her husband, bared to his sight her breast, which was almost
eaten away by a cancer. This sight—so the story goes—brought about
Lully's conversion. He became actuated by the idea of converting to
Christianity the heathen in Africa, and engaged the services of an
Arabian whereby he might learn the language. The man, however,
discovering his master's object, attempted to assassinate him, and Lully
narrowly escaped with his life. But his enthusiasm for missionary work
never abated—his central idea was the reasonableness and
demonstrability of Christian doctrine—and unhappily he was, at last,
stoned to death by the inhabitants of Bugiah (in Algeria) in 1315.
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A very large number of alchemistic, theological and other
treatises are attributed to Lully, many of which are undoubtedly
spurious; and it is a difficult question to decide exactly which are
genuine. He is supposed to have derived a knowledge of Alchemy from
Roger Bacon and Arnold de Villanova. It appears more probable, however,
either that Lully the alchemist was a personage distinct from the Lully
whose life we have sketched above, or that the alchemistic writings
attributed to him are forgeries of a similar nature to
the works of pseudo-Geber (§ 32). Of these alchemical writings we
may here mention the
Clavicula. This he says is the key to all
his other books on Alchemy, in which books the whole Art is fully
declared, though so obscurely as not to be understandable without its
aid. In this work an alleged method for what may be called the
multiplication of the "noble" metals rather than transmutation is
described in clear language; but it should be noticed that the stone
employed is itself a compound either of silver or gold. According to
Lully, the secret of the Philosopher's Stone is the extraction of the
mercury of silver or gold. He writes: "Metals cannot be transmuted....
in the Minerals, unless they be reduced into their first Matter....
Therefore I counsel you, O my Friends, that you do not work but about
Sol and
Luna, reducing them into the first Matter, our
Sulphur and
Argent vive: therefore, Son, you are to use
this venerable Matter; and I swear unto you and promise, that unless you
take the
Argent vive of these two, you go to the Practick as
blind men without eyes or sense. . . . "
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