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 man 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.

#Philology #Anomalology

By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

“Crimson with raking Rubies from the Hill, And clattering his Spurs—'Wherewith the Ground I stab,' said he, 'for Rubies, that, when found I swallow; which, as soon as swallow'd, turn To Sparks which though my beak and eyes do burn. Gold, as you say, is but dull Metal dead, And hanging on the Hoarder's Soul like Lead: But Rubies that have Blood within, and grown And nourisht in the Mountain Heart of Stone, Burn with an inward Light, which they inspire,

And make their Owners Lords of their Desire.'“ ¹

— Farid Ud-Din Attar

The bird’s reasoning is quite clever, sophisticated even. It distinguishes between gold, calling it a “dull Metal dead” that weighs on the soul “like Lead,” and rubies, which carry blood, which grew in living stone, and which burn with inward light. The bird sees that what matters is the vitality of substance rather than its material value. The ruby has blood — life — and it was nourished, so much so that it burns. This is the excuse he gives for not making the journey.

Mulling this over, I wonder which is more harmful? The bird who hoards gold, or the bird who chases rubies, given that both are clearly lost, but the bird who chases gold pursues but dead weight, and the bird who chases rubies has mistaken genuine perception of vitality for the thing itself, falsely thinking that one can become something else — achieve transcendence — through consumption and absorption. This gives the illusion of transformation with consumption dressed as illumination. The bird then calls itself “Lord of its Desire,” an irony when you consider that a lord of desire cannot also be a servant of truth. Thus, not a pilgrim, but a Lord.

On the first few readings of this passage, I can make out that the world is full of gold-chasers, people whose heartlessness — through selfishness, self-centeredness, and willful ignorance — is weighed down by dead metal, whose souls have turned to lead. But what I find interesting is that, though that is more commonly true, it isn’t the primary concern here, and it's quickly dismissed in two lines. But the ruby bird gets a full speech, my full attention, filled with genuine beauty and insight despite a fatal flaw via a seductive conflation of outer and inner truth, and the bird’s self-deception haplessly follows.

The ruby bird’s mistake is truly profound for it illustrates a more frightening version of heartlessness, one where people who have correctly identified that accumulation is dead, who speak passionately about vitality and meaning and authenticity, whose mouths and eyes burn with borrowed — no, stolen — fire, and have thus, fatally, made the perception of aliveness into an outcome in itself. They swallow the living, falsely believing they can convert it into personal radiance — inner light. They have weaponized the language of soul, heart, and authenticity into another form of consumption, not as transcendence but as theft. The ruby bird may be very different from the gold bird, but neither is making the necessary journey. Both have traded truth and wisdom for its illusion.

And when I stop to consider that the rubies are “nourisht in the Mountain Heart of Stone,” I can see that they grew in stone that has a heart, in a mountain that is inert, geological, and inhuman, and has a heart that nourishes a vitality of blood-red fire. And despite the implication that even the inanimate world carries a profound interiority, the heartlessness isn’t in the stone. It’s in the bird that thoughtlessly tears the ruby out of the mountain’s very heart and swallows it whole.

#Philology #Excultio

Notes:

1. A passage from my copy of The Conference of The Birds by Farid Ud-Din Attar, translated by Edward FItzgerald (1889).

By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

A short dialogue buried in an 18th-century German alchemical anthology, Wasserstein der Weisen ('The Water-Stone of the Wise'), reprinted in 1743 and traditionally attributed to Johann Siebmacher, begins like a domestic quarrel. Nature appears as a central female power figure, speaking through a name other than the author's, and she arrives on scene with quite the temper. She calls the seeker a fantastical fool and a coarse ass who breaks glassware and burns coal until the fumes cloud his head (p. 118). Every other creature does its office faithfully, she complains, and only man, presuming to take up hers, strays from it (p. 120). For a text about sacred secrets, the opening is strangely familiar — not the voice of an oracle, but of someone who has been misunderstood one too many times.

But the tone soon turns. Around p. 128 the scold becomes a plea: have mercy on yourself, I beg you... I will lie to you in nothing. There is something revealing in that twist — she asks for acquaintance rather than worship. “Learn to know me first, before you call yourself a master” (p. 135). The art does not lie in the skill of his hands but in knowing hers (p. 129). What she offers goes to the one who trusts her, to the good-hearted who followed with patience “at the time I ordain,” not to the merely learned (pp. 132, 136). Then, unexpectedly, something like a covenant appears: Help me, and I will help you; as you do for me, so I will do (p. 134). The alchemist echoes it late in his reply: the stone comes from Nature alone, yet not without her instrument, nor without the help of a wise person who understands the work (p. 150). Neither party is sufficient alone. Transformation is something done with, not something received or achieved. Anyone who has learned this the hard way will recognize the terms and conditions.

At another point in the narrative, the alchemist stops arguing. Not an hour passes before he says he does not think on what she told him, and whether he lies, walks, or stands, her words are there right before his eyes. It is the only place where the tract gives way to testimony — where the evidence becomes less about the interaction and more about how the one addressed has changed in thought, word, and action. That shift matters. The witness no longer describes the encounter; he describes what remains of it.

There is also a lesson in restraint. Once the seed is sealed in its vessel, he says, it needs no opening, no closing, no touching (p. 144). The work is to prepare the conditions and then take one's hands away. That may be the hardest part of any participatory practice, knowing the difference between tending, participating, interfering, and exploiting — helping versus hurting.

But the text is not without its contradictions, and I am no longer sure which side of the narrative is truth and which is stagecraft. The author's talk of reciprocity is incongruent with the book's language of hierarchy: nature is God's handmaid (p. 121); the alchemist thanks the power figure with “honor and praise” (p. 139). She contradicts her own claims about the secrets she may or may not possess or share (pp. 121–138). The author tells us out of both sides of his mouth that we are expected to be a partner, yet keeps writing as patron. He argues for partnership and participation while actively performing deference. Furthermore, all of this is a personified nature, staged as a debate, with a long history in theology and mythology. The overall narrative feels borrowed, with no indication of actual phenomenology, whether original or imported.

What I missed on first reading is that these are not small errors on the part of the author or the cosmology of Western alchemy. My own transformation has come through commitment and cooperation, not dramatic conflict or deliberate misdirection wrapped in hierarchical worship. What I have lived and learned through my own inner experiences has been attention, patience, thoughtfulness, and trust extended and tested — through learning the conditions of another's way of being before presuming to discern anything of or for myself. The book grasps that knowing comes by the company one keeps. What it fails to discover is that true reciprocity in partnership is wholly unexpected and unconditional, without rank or privilege.

The pleading, the afterimage, and the sealed vessel are the things I remember most. The text feels its most authentic when it momentarily forgets its theology and simply describes the relationship, the need, and the connection. Learn to know another fully, first. I believe this is a better rule for the actual inner metamorphosis than any of its prescriptions or borrowed concoctions.

#Philology #Intermundia

Notes:

1. My copy is a 1743 German edition in Fraktur, which I cannot read unaided. The quoted lines are working translations and may differ from published English versions of this dialogue, which appears to descend from an earlier French original. This affects my accuracy for quotes and citations from the book.

2. Via Veritatis makes the same claim in this volume, that the old books mislead and the seeker must go to the source. Because they are compiled by teh same person, I count them as one witness. The admission of misdirection, though not uncommon, challenges credibility.

3. If a given work borrows its conceptual and lexical DNA from another, can we tell from the text alone which is which? Value is not always in being first, however. (See What we tell of the teller's telling.)

4. Can a relationship be both instructive and mutual? Nature claims to need the pupil's help, yet demands his obedience. This is not equality, partnership, or symbiosis. This draws my ire and skepticism based on my own lived experiences. But then, perhaps such a position was necessary given the witness’s mind and circumstances. As with most relationships, that question is best left to the two people involved.

5. The alchemist mentioned around p. 141 has already changed before he takes any action, which usually forms the basis for transmutation, and it feels unearned, or at least inconsistent. Though the physics of causality is not universal across orders or reality, the example given is immediately suspect. Perhaps the opus should’ve begun elsewhere? (See Truth as surrender, transit, and transformation.)

6. Alchemic texts have a problem of clarity in the way they are written to conceal as much as reveal.  Beweis der Natur and Via Veritatis both claim that the old books were written darkly on purpose, and that the reader must therefore go elsewhere. The question I once asked was why write a book only to tell people to look elsewhere? I suppose it reflects the truth that true wisdom is forged person by person and event by event rather than gifted from sage to student. I suppose it also reflects the fact that some witnesses must propagate their experience rather than suppress it.

7. An aside for the curious, the last stretch of this volume is a small comedy of attribution. The Nature dialogue is credited to “Johann von Mesung,” a borrowed name for who I believe to be the medieval poet Jean de Meun. Right after it comes the Summarium philosophicum (the French Sommaire philosophique), credited to Nicolas Flamel, who died in 1418 and very likely never wrote it. Flamel isn't even listed on the title page. He simply turns up as an uninvited guest as if on cue. Last comes the Via Veritatis, which names no author at all and spends most of its length warning the reader, rather oddly, not to trust books. That makes one borrowed name, one dead man's name, and one missing name. Two of the three agree that the old books mislead, and the third, Flamel's, is mostly a recipe involving dragons and a hen. Perhaps this was the way some people could only explain the unexplainable, for magic remains magic until it can be named, explained, and understood otherwise. As always, readers must draw their own conclusions, especially where the corridors are remote and the intersections are mislabeled.

By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

Bivious, adj. Having two ways; leading two ways. — Webster's, (1891).

Older writers warned that bivious demurs breed devious resolutions. I contend they were at least half right. Yet the other half has proven stranger than I anticipated.

I pray for sleep, to dream of home.

#Philology #Intermundio

By D. Bowman Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

The treatise opens with Pythagoras. Not Pythagoras directly — no one has Pythagoras directly — but Pythagoras as received through tradition, “held to have made more profound search, and with less incertainty penetrated into the secrets as well of Divinity, as of Nature.” Already the syntax demonstrates the author’s argument: Vigenère is reading Pythagoras, who is reading the Mosaic tradition, who is reading — what? The mind of God, presumably, but even Moses received the law on tablets, which is to say, in written form, which is to say, as a text that was already a mediation, rather than a direct link to the mind of God — a shared consciousness. The chain has no first link.

This raises the question: are there other links in this chain lost to time? Or, better still, how do we trust any source of knowledge when its origins are so obfuscated or enigmatic?

Vigenère builds an elaborate scheme of attribution: Pythagoras borrowed from the Hebrews. The Egyptians and Chaldeans borrowed from both. Scripture conceals philosophy within ritual. Every source, when you press it, reveals a prior source beneath. Vigenère moves through these layers with the confidence of a man who has spent decades in the archives of other people's reading — which he had, literally: before writing on alchemy, he spent years translating and annotating classical texts, and before that, a foundational cipher of modern cryptography. He was a man professionally devoted to the idea that every surface meaning conceals a deeper one, and that the concealment is both method and feature rather than flaw.

This is the treatise's subtle radicalism. Vigenère never claims to have discovered anything himself. He does not position his text as a source but as a commentary — on Pythagoras, on Moses, on Mark 9:49 (“every man shall be salted with fire”), on a chain of prior readings stretching backward into a darkness he treats as generative rather than empty. And the remarkable thing is that his commentary feels enriched rather than diminished by its secondariness. Each layer of mediation adds a new context and texture. Vigenère reading Pythagoras is not a degraded copy of Pythagoras reading Moses. It is a new act of understanding that could not have existed without the distance spanned.

There’s also a serious epistemological claim, not just a historical curiosity. What Vigenère demonstrates — almost against his own intentions, since he would probably have said he was simply recovering ancient wisdom — is that knowledge does not degrade as it passes through commentary. It transforms. It acquires texture, context, contradiction—and, yes, flavor, the way fire and salt season food. This suggests that scholarly annotation in this method comes from within rather than passively from outside, the way a river that continues the rain that feeds it without becoming the rain itself.

We still seek originals. We distrust commentary. But this is precisely what Vigenère's chain of attribution makes impossible to sustain. There is no moment in his treatise where a source appears without already being a reading of something else. Moses is already interpreting. Pythagoras is already annotating. The “darke sentences” in which ancient knowledge arrives are not failures of transmission but the very form that deep knowledge takes — because what matters is not the content in isolation but the relationship between reader and text, the transformation that occurs when one mind meets another across the distance of centuries and tradition and language.

This is, I think, the secret argument of the Traicté du Feu et du Sel, hidden inside its alchemical metaphors the way Vigenère says philosophy is hidden inside scripture. Fire transmutes rather than destroys. Salt seasons the object, changing its nature through contact rather than merely preserving it. Some of these passages — on preservation, on the spaces between — I recognize all too well.

Commentary is the fire that transmits, not destroys. And what emerges from that intersection is not a diminished copy of some lost original but something new: knowledge that has transited a human mind, becoming something new but not altogether different from what had entered.

Perhaps there are no original texts. Perhaps all we have across the whole of human history are the ongoing commentaries of others past — some survived, some lost. Provenance falls away when meaning lives in interpretation alone. All of which would otherwise be impossible without someone first having named the unnamable, the sacred unmentionable somehow spoken. And once spoken, renders the anomalous more familiar.

#Philology

Notes:

1. My copy of Vigenère’s Traicté du Feu et du Sel is an English translation from roughly 1649. Though I find his ideas intriguing, I cannot speak to his traditions, nor the potential differences between the English and French versions of the text.

2. The alchemical opus transforms the practitioner alongside the substance in the vessel. The lapis is not just produced but undergone, meaning the text is already a record of anomalous experience: knowledge inseparable from the encounter that produced it.

3. Can anomalous experience even be articulated in the raw moment, becoming meaningful only through layers of interpretation and introspection afterward? Could mediation be the process by which the darke sentence reveals what was latent beneath the letter, rather than a distortion of it?

4. Might some knowledge require encryption to survive transmission, as Vigenère's cipher requires a key and his alchemy requires a veil? Is it possible that indirection serves not to obscure but to protect what cannot be stated directly?

5. Both alchemy and anomalous experience are relational: the alchemist needed the soror mystica, the student needed the master, the work could not be done alone or in full daylight; and the witness exists, not to verify the event empirically, but to receive the account and become the next link in the chain of knowing.

6. Alchemical transformation is irreversible: one does not un-calcine, nor reverse the nigredo. Could anomalous experience operate similarly, reorganizing the knower so permanently that the distinction between encounter and ordinary learning dissolves? Where does ordinary dream end and extraordinary vision begin?

By D. Bowman Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

Dreams are forgettable. Visions are indelible.

Upon returning home, I thought I’d browse an old copy (1911) of the Encyclopedia Britannica — a practice I’ve enjoyed since I was young. And, after some time searching, found under the word Apparition, emerged an interesting and rather detailed breakdown of related things, including ghosts, phantoms, phantasms, etc.

The article is quick to dismiss such things as illusions and pathology, despite the detailed inventory of terms. As evidence, it further recounts the story of Sir Walter Scott's ghost of Byron, diagnosing it as hanging cloaks. So, by conventional standards my experience was imagination, unusual dream, a pathological mental state, or the result of drugs since no fever was present.

I beg to differ.

I suppose if the authors had experienced what I had, their expedient dismissiveness might have taken a different turn. But then, by their logic, that supposition is just my imagination. Delusion, even. I'd counter that it takes a vivid imagination indeed to write off the greater part of human experience as pathology, and then dare to call the remainder reality.

#Intermundia #Philology

By D. Bowman Nomina Numina is a journal of reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

But I am compelled, for reasons I myself do not entirely understand, to share my thoughts and opinions here on things that probably should not be shared.

Does writing this go against my better judgment? That depends. What constitutes ‘better’ judgment? Is it the act, the process, the substance, or the consequence of such writings? Writings that would certainly be labeled as strange at least, insane at most. Or, worse perhaps, as I have a limited imagination.

As a writer, I’m a mere amateur. This means I have something to say but lack the language to make it truly compelling and memorable. But after five decades on this earth, the prose I offer here is likely the fullest and best version of my written capabilities.

But that doesn’t really answer the question of why I’m doing this. And after much soul-searching and back-and-forth in my mind, the best answer I can offer is this: Because to keep what burns inside me has begun to devour me from within.

Speaking my truth to the world is better than letting my inner world consume me whole.

I recognize the risks.

Our world has tidy boxes for what it considers untidy things, no matter how wrong the world’s boxes may be.

Human societies and civilizations have a long history of misunderstanding, preservation bias, and erasure when it comes to the weird, anomalous, or uncanny — the atopic. The system is efficient and expedient with its assigning of labels: episode, delusions, possession, psychosis, blasphemy, mania, hallucination. Pick your favorite. The thesaurus has plenty more. And modern medicine has an endless array of chemicals they’re happy to pump into you at cost, while religion has an endless array of dogmatic corrections they’re happy to also pump into you at cost.

To both I say, “I’d rather not.”

I suppose it's safer and easier to stay silent. After all, there’s no real benefit for me here other than some hope of processing, integration, and, if I’m lucky, a bit of solace. I thought I’d say peace of mind, but that seems impossible at this point. At least, not in this lifetime. Silence would certainly keep me out of the vile filing systems of this world. But.

Silence also corrodes.

If left unmanaged, some unspoken words and thoughts become toxic. They rush the mind, body, and soul like a firestorm, leaving nothing but ash and cinder in their wake.

And there’s a naive part of me that clings to the old-fashioned notion that the sort of thing that happens to one person and is never shared has no resistance against the onslaught of preservation bias and erasure the world never seems to get enough of.

No.

It folds inward. It becomes indistinguishable from reverie, invention, and madness. Writing it down, even into the void of the internet where no one listens, and no one cares, gives it the one thing silence can’t: continued existence outside the tiny vessel of the mind that now contains it.

This is all I have to offer the world.

#Intermundia #Philology #Anomalology

By D. Bowman Nomina Numina is a journal of reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

Clinical language wants to diagnose me. It hears “experience” and answers: pathology. It reduces the living to objectified processes it can quantify and name externally, or pretend to.

Literary language wants to aestheticize me. It wraps lived truth in soft prose, diluting what overwhelms into what entertains, seeking clever metaphors for things that aren’t metaphorical.

Philosophical language wants to parse me. It embeds ontology, epistemology, phenomenology. Frameworks that map the unknown to the known, assuming the coordinates always correlate.

They don’t.

And no amount of mental or linguistic gymnastics can impose a Kantian architectonic on lived experience without mistaking the unassimilated for the unreal.

Every vocabulary has its uses. None of them are adequate for the blessings and burdens I now bear.

I’ve tried using the language of others: Jung, Corbin, Grof, Ferrer, Hillman, Nasr, Arabi, Bhārgava.

They all have their place. But here they are misplaced.

My search for meaning requires finding the right words.

Part of my journey is finding those words.

Another part is speaking them.

The rest is just life, however uncanny.

And uncertain.

#Anomalology #Philology

By D. Bowman

Nomina Numina is a journal of reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

#Philology

Philology concerns the reading, transmission, interpretation, and afterlife of texts. It gathers notes on words, names, translations, fragments, documents, variant readings, inherited traditions, and the unstable histories through which meaning survives or changes, including mythic or cryptic texts.

#Anomalology

Anomalology is the careful study of anomalous experience: experiences that resist easy explanation, and the evidence, language, memory, cultural context, and competing interpretations through which they are understood.

#Intermundia

Intermundia is testimony from a life between worlds: reflections on liminality as it is lived rather than solved. It gathers accounts of estrangement, grief, memory, wonder, spiritual dislocation, ordinary endurance, and the persistent work of making meaning in an unresolved place.

#Excultio

Excultio is commentary on the world and its affairs: reflections on things in and of the world — culture, currents, customs, institutions, the day's matters — examined in my own way. It is critique and observation of the ordinary order of things: its spectacles and scripts, its appetites and ideals, its manners and markets, its functions and failures, and whatever else under the sun, or within, invites weighing.