Hyleal, Pri-material, Catholic, or Universal Natural Chaos

Hyleal, Pri-material, Catholic, or Universal Natural Chaos: Excerpts from the Companion Volume to Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom by Henricus Khunrath, selected and translated by Russell Yoder, from Salamander and Sons, scheduled to be published already, but coming soon, will be available via Weiser Antiquarian Books.

Henricus Khunrath Russell Yoder Hyleal, Pri-material, Catholic, or Universal Natural Chaos from Salamander and Sons

“Hyleal, Pri-material, Catholic, or Universal Natural Chaos consists of excerpts from the companion volume to Henricus Khunrath’s alchemical classic, Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae (or, Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom).

Englished for the first time by Russell Yoder, Hyleal, Pri-material, Catholic, or Universal Natural Chaos is initially concerned with Magnesia (the “Magnet of the Lord” and “universal raw Stone of the Wise that is to be found in Nature”), the Green Lion of Nature (the “fiery spark or ray of the World’s Soul, or Light of Nature” that is “the naturally, conceivably catholic All”) and Our Chaos or Hyle (“the World’s First Water … [the] Fountain [from which] all material things have their first origin” which is the “Fundament or Foundation, the Basis of the World that God Himself put in place … [which] the edifice of the entire earth is set upon …”).

Embodying a kind of Christianised natural magic influenced as much by kabbalah, natural philosophy and the works of Paracelsus as by Lutheran pietism and devotion, the Divinely inspired and particular revelations of Hyleal, Pri-material, Catholic, or Universal Natural Chaos extend to include heavenly influences and the timing of the work, Azoth or Living Mercury (“not quicksilver, nor something taken out of or from him, but Mercurius – that which the Philosophers speak of!”), Salt of Magnesia (“often called Sal Petra or Sal Peter, Sal Alkali, Sal Gemma or the Noble Rock-salt … from the radical Humidity of the whole World”), and the artful and natural elevation of plants, animals and minerals “to the highest Natural Perfection” towards “true Regeneration and more than perfect Multiplication of Metals [and] an exceedingly powerful Universal Medicine …”

Includes a brief but highly insightful tract in verse ‘from F.R.C.’ on the subject of Our Chaos – Hyle – published as part of The Golden Rose (1704), almost 100 years after the publication of Khunrath’s Amphitheatrum, and exactly 90 years after the appearance of the Rosicrucian manifesto Fama Fraternitatis R.C. (1614).”

Consider also:

  1. “Below lay the tomb world, the immutable cause-and-effect world of the demonic. At median extended the layer of the human, but at any instant a man could plunge—descend as if sinking—into the hell-layer beneath. Or: he could ascend to the ethereal world above, which constituted the third of the trinary layers. Always, in his middle level of the human, a man risked the sinking. And yet the possibility of ascent lay before him”
  2. Omnium Gatherum: March 5th, 2014
  3. “When you have magic powers and know it, it can be a fine feeling, like a pleasant tingling inside. But in order to enjoy that tingling, you have to know just how much magic you have and what the rules are for using it.”
  4. “It is a parable of the dual paths of life open to each one of us; on the one hand the path of selfishness, material desires and sensual indulgence, of intellectual blindness and moral stagnation; on the other the path of moral and spiritual progress, in pursuing which one may decorate and adorn the Lodge within him with the ornaments and jewels of grace and with the invaluable furniture of true knowledge, and which he may dedicate, in all his actions, to the service of God and of his fellow men.”
  5. Key 23