The powder of transmutation, the grand means of projection, was to be got at by the following process, in which it was typified as the Green Lion: “In the Green Lion’s bed the sun and moon are born, they are married, and beget a king; the king feeds on the lion’s blood, which is the king’s father and mother, who are, at the same time, his brother and sister. I fear I betray the secret, which I promised my master to conceal in dark speech from every one who does not know how to rule the philosopher’s fire.” One would imagine, in the present day, that there was very little fear of being accused of too rashly divulging the important secret by such explanations. Our ancestors must have had a much greater talent than we have for finding out enigmas, if they were able to elicit a meaning from these mystical, or rather nonsensical, sentences.
Roger Bacon was the first English alchemist. He was born in 1214. Popular belief attributed to him the contrivance of a machine to rise in the air, and convey a chariot more speedily than by horses; and also the art of putting statues in motion, and drawing articulate sounds from brazen heads. From this it appears that he had made considerable progress in the formation of automata. There can be no doubt that he discovered the mode of making gunpowder; in his works the secret may be found, veiled under an anagram. The discovery has, however, on doubtful authority, been ascribed to Berthold Schwartz, a German Benedictine friar, who lived about the middle of the fourteenth century. In an old print, the _merit_ of the invention is ascribed to the devil, who is represented as prompting the friar’s operations, and enjoying their success.
Can we be surprised, that in an age of ignorance, the wonderful doings of Bacon obtained for him the name of a magician, and the friars of his own order refused to admit his works into their library, as though he was a man who ought to be proscribed by society? His persecution increased till 1278, when he was imprisoned, and obliged to own that he repented of the pains he had taken in the arts and sciences; and he was at last constrained to abandon the house of his order.
The credulity and avarice of princes often caused them to arrest alchemists, and, by means of the torture, endeavour to force them to multiply gold, or furnish the powder of projection, that it might be ready for use at any time; but it was generally found that, like poetical composition, perfect freedom of thought and action were necessary to so desirable an end.