The premise of this small book is among the strangest in seventeenth-century medicine. Draw blood from a living person, work it up by distillation into a liquor fit for burning, and feed it to a lamp. The flame that rises is that person’s flame. It burns as long as they live, wherever in the world they happen to be; it falters when they sicken; the title page promises that it will disclose “all their graver passions” (omnesque affectus graviores prodens); and at the moment of their death it goes out. Burggrav named the device a biolychnium, a life-lamp, and he offered it in earnest, as working technology. It promised news of an absent person without letters or messengers.
The theory behind it is pure Paracelsus. Blood carries the mumia, the vital spirit of the body, and that spirit does not expire merely because the blood has left the vein. The part remembers the whole, and sympathy holds the two together across any distance. This is the same doctrine that produced the weapon salve, the celebrated cure applied to the blade rather than the wound. Johann Ernst Burggrav, a Paracelsian physician from Neustadt in the Palatinate, first published his life-lamp around 1610, and bibliographers have been circling it ever since. Duveen files it as “a curious booklet”; Rosenthal admired a work “remarkable for the bizarrerie of the ideas expounded in it.”
The imprint deserves a moment of its own. This second edition was published at Frankfurt in 1630 at the expense of William Fitzer, the English-born bookseller whose name is otherwise attached to one immortal book: Harvey’s De motu cordis of 1628, the first announcement of the circulation of the blood. Two years after issuing the founding text of modern physiology, Fitzer issued a lamp that runs on blood. The two publications offer very different accounts of blood and its relation to life.
Burggrav travels in good company here. Printed with the Biolychnium, as issued, is Paracelsus’s Cura morborum magnetica, on the magnetic cure of disease through mumia, along with an Alexipharmacum against all poisons. And this edition is the first to carry the tract that closes the volume: a “secret treatise” by Petrus Ribola, Benedictine monk and, the title page assures us, a most excellent chymist, on the germinating faculty of metals according to the Hermetics. Metals, on this teaching, grow. They germinate from their proper seeds in the womb of the earth and ripen by degrees toward gold, exactly as the Hermetic philosophers held. Fifteen pages, separately numbered, printed here for the first time.
The book is rare in any edition, and this augmented second edition seldom appears in commerce; copies are recorded at Munich, Dresden, and Prague. Our copy came down to the present in plain paper wrappers that had long since worn past the point of protecting it, so we had it rebound, and the binder has done right by it: full dark calf in period style, with marbled endpapers in slate, crimson, and gold. The old wrappers travel with the book. The text block retains its old red edges, the outer margin untrimmed. It lacks only a blank leaf, absent as well from the copies at Munich and Prague.
BURGGRAV, Johann Ernst (fl. 1600–1629). Biolychnium seu Lucerna, cum vita eius, cui accensa est mystice vivens iugiter; cum morte eiusdem expirans; omnesque affectus graviores prodens. Huic accessit Cura morborum magnetica ex Theophrasti Paracelsi Mumia: itemque omnium venenorum Alexipharmacum. Porro adiunctus est Petri Ribolae Ordinis Benedicti Monachi, chymici praestantissimi, tractatus secretus de facultate metallorum germinatrice secundum Hermeticos. Frankfurt: Kaspar Rötel for William Fitzer, 1630. Second edition, the first to include Ribola’s tract.
Physical Description: Small octavo. 144, (3)–15 pp., the Ribola tract separately paginated. Woodcut headpiece ornaments and decorated initials. All edges red; outer margin untrimmed. Without the blank leaf, as in the copies at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and in Prague.
Binding: Recent full dark brown calf in period style, marbled endpapers. The original plain paper wrappers, worn beyond service, are preserved with the volume.
Condition: Light worming to the lower corner of some leaves, light browning, a few small early ink marks to the title page. Internally fresh and sound.
The premise of this small book is among the strangest in seventeenth-century medicine. Draw blood from a living person, work it up by distillation into a liquor fit for burning, and feed it to a lamp. The flame that rises is that person’s flame. It burns as long as they live, wherever in the world they happen to be; it falters when they sicken; the title page promises that it will disclose “all their graver passions” (omnesque affectus graviores prodens); and at the moment of their death it goes out. Burggrav named the device a biolychnium, a life-lamp, and he offered it in earnest, as working technology. It promised news of an absent person without letters or messengers.
The theory behind it is pure Paracelsus. Blood carries the mumia, the vital spirit of the body, and that spirit does not expire merely because the blood has left the vein. The part remembers the whole, and sympathy holds the two together across any distance. This is the same doctrine that produced the weapon salve, the celebrated cure applied to the blade rather than the wound. Johann Ernst Burggrav, a Paracelsian physician from Neustadt in the Palatinate, first published his life-lamp around 1610, and bibliographers have been circling it ever since. Duveen files it as “a curious booklet”; Rosenthal admired a work “remarkable for the bizarrerie of the ideas expounded in it.”
The imprint deserves a moment of its own. This second edition was published at Frankfurt in 1630 at the expense of William Fitzer, the English-born bookseller whose name is otherwise attached to one immortal book: Harvey’s De motu cordis of 1628, the first announcement of the circulation of the blood. Two years after issuing the founding text of modern physiology, Fitzer issued a lamp that runs on blood. The two publications offer very different accounts of blood and its relation to life.
Burggrav travels in good company here. Printed with the Biolychnium, as issued, is Paracelsus’s Cura morborum magnetica, on the magnetic cure of disease through mumia, along with an Alexipharmacum against all poisons. And this edition is the first to carry the tract that closes the volume: a “secret treatise” by Petrus Ribola, Benedictine monk and, the title page assures us, a most excellent chymist, on the germinating faculty of metals according to the Hermetics. Metals, on this teaching, grow. They germinate from their proper seeds in the womb of the earth and ripen by degrees toward gold, exactly as the Hermetic philosophers held. Fifteen pages, separately numbered, printed here for the first time.
The book is rare in any edition, and this augmented second edition seldom appears in commerce; copies are recorded at Munich, Dresden, and Prague. Our copy came down to the present in plain paper wrappers that had long since worn past the point of protecting it, so we had it rebound, and the binder has done right by it: full dark calf in period style, with marbled endpapers in slate, crimson, and gold. The old wrappers travel with the book. The text block retains its old red edges, the outer margin untrimmed. It lacks only a blank leaf, absent as well from the copies at Munich and Prague.
BURGGRAV, Johann Ernst (fl. 1600–1629). Biolychnium seu Lucerna, cum vita eius, cui accensa est mystice vivens iugiter; cum morte eiusdem expirans; omnesque affectus graviores prodens. Huic accessit Cura morborum magnetica ex Theophrasti Paracelsi Mumia: itemque omnium venenorum Alexipharmacum. Porro adiunctus est Petri Ribolae Ordinis Benedicti Monachi, chymici praestantissimi, tractatus secretus de facultate metallorum germinatrice secundum Hermeticos. Frankfurt: Kaspar Rötel for William Fitzer, 1630. Second edition, the first to include Ribola’s tract.
Physical Description: Small octavo. 144, (3)–15 pp., the Ribola tract separately paginated. Woodcut headpiece ornaments and decorated initials. All edges red; outer margin untrimmed. Without the blank leaf, as in the copies at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and in Prague.
Binding: Recent full dark brown calf in period style, marbled endpapers. The original plain paper wrappers, worn beyond service, are preserved with the volume.
Condition: Light worming to the lower corner of some leaves, light browning, a few small early ink marks to the title page. Internally fresh and sound.
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