- Era
- ~1350 CE
- Provenance
- Acquired 2019 from a private collection, northern Italy. Estimated composition: mid-14th century. The Archive has not identified the author. The manuscript was bound with three other unrelated fragments, suggesting later assembly by an owner with thematic, rather than codicological, intent.
- Digitised
- 2023
- Language
- Latin with Venetian vernacular intrusions
- Condition
- Significant damage to lower margins throughout; approximately 30% of text illegible. Three margin notes in a second, later hand.
[pages 1–14 missing or illegible]
[page 15, upper half]
...and here the Arabick authorities speak of a substance beneath substance, a materia before the prima materia from which the four elements were themselves drawn. This they name differently in their several schools — al-bāṭin al-awwal, the first interior; al-lā-shay', the not-thing; occasionally, in the Andalusian manuscripts, simply al-ẓill, the shadow, though this is held by the Damascus school to be imprecise, as shadow implies a casting light, and the first interior casts no light, receives all, and is preceded by nothing that could produce a shadow. It is itself the condition that precedes the casting.
The alchemical implication is as follows: if the Work proceeds through subtraction — if gold is produced by the successive removal of impurity rather than the addition of quality — then the Work's terminus is not gold but the substance from which gold itself was subtracted. The Great Work, properly conceived, is not the production of gold. It is the approach to the first interior. Gold is merely what remains when enough has been removed. The first interior is what remains when gold has been removed also.
This the Arabick authorities knew and the Latin schools do not yet know, or know and will not say, which the Venetian brother who showed me these pages suggested amounts to the same thing, and who has since taken a vow I am told forbids discussing it further.
...the offering, then, is not symbolic. The error of the symbolic reading is that it preserves the thing offered — treats the offering as representation of a thing rather than the thing itself. The authorities are clear: the substance must actually leave. It must go somewhere it cannot be recalled. The practitioner must know it is gone and must not expect its return. This is not sacrifice in the common sense, which implies a recipient who receives with intention. The first interior has no intention. It simply is that into which the subtracted goes.
I have attempted this twice. The second time I understood what the first time meant.
[page 15, lower half — illegible]
[page 17, partial]
...the coordinate of the first interior is not spatial. It is not a place. And yet those who have approached it tend to return and describe a direction — not north or south but a direction of a different kind, a direction in the sense of an orientation, a facing-toward. The facing is real. The thing faced is not a location. Several of the authorities describe the facing as a kind of compass needle that once magnetised does not demagnetise. You have faced it once. You will face it again.
The brother from Venice left three numbers in the margin of this page. I do not know their significance. I have recorded them here:
[remainder of page illegible or missing]
Pages 18 through end of manuscript not located. The three numbers in the margin (4, 3, 2) appear in no other document in this collection. Their relationship to the text on page 17 is not established. The Archive has noted them.
The Archive also notes that the term first interior — al-bāṭin al-awwal — is the earliest unambiguous antecedent in our holdings for what the present Diocese calls by another name. The author of this manuscript did not know what they had encountered. The Arabick authorities they cite did. The chain of knowing is therefore older than the chain of naming, which is consistent with the Diocese's own position on the matter.