Counterfeits, forgeries, and illusions
I was perusing John French’s 1650 English translation of a text by Michael Sendivogius and found a tale of a poor alchemist who was visited once in a dream by an old man, and then spends his days trying to initiate another visit. He, the poor alchemist, returns to the place where he had the vision of the old man where he “counterfeited a sleep, and lay with his eyes shut expecting the old man.” In the context of the text, caunterfeit means to feign, but it also means to forge by striking false coin, to pass metal off as gold. He tries to counterfeit his way back into an encounter as a forger would metal into gold.
Fittingly, his feigned sleep is answered in kind. Maddened “by alwaies thinking of the old man,” the alchemist receives “a false vision, in the likenesse of the old man.” Falsehood met with falsehood. Elsewhere the book gives likeness its greatest weight by stating the reader is “created after the likenesse of the great world, yea after the image of God.” One word names both our making and the bedside forgery. The text traces the false old man to the alchemist’s wanting, but never says what in a likeness would confirm or betray it, only that the false old mad mirrors the falsehood performed by the alchemist.
The text hides as much as it reveals by never really telling us the ways of knowing a true encounter from illusion, or madness. But it does hint at the consequences for those who try forcing or faking their way into spaces that open only by invitation.
By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.