Alchemists and Philosophers
History of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries - The General Uniformity of Their Opinions - The Celebrated Gilles De Laval and His Infamous Practices.
It would be impossible in a work of this limited nature to cite all the names, much less the opinions, of that numerous class distinguished either as Alchemists, Rosicruicians, Astrologers, or Philosophers, who formed the ranks of Mysticism during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Amongst the most distinguished of these ill-understood classes, were Nostradamus, a celebrated astronomer, and an expert Astrologer; Paracelsus, an excellent Physician and a scholar, who either accidentally, or as the result of research, discovered those truths concerning mineral and animal magnetism which Mesmer subsequently reduced to a system; Van Helmont, a truly prophetic person, but one who cultivated his gifts of Seership by the study and practice of magical arts; Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Artephius, Arnold de Villeneuve, Raymond Lulli, Roger Bacon, Nicholas Flammel, George Ripley, and many other practical chemists, who perceived the possibilities of Alchemy, and who distinguished themselves from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries in writing on this subject and awakening the terror of the ignorant, and the denunciations of the bigoted.
In the early part of the fifteenth century, the study of Alchemy and the practices of Magic became at once famous and infamous, through the influence of the celebrated Gilles de Laval, a marshal of France, whose wealth, unbridled luxury and shameless debaucheries led him to the practices of magical art, for the sake of administering to the vilest of passions, and the replenishment of his exhausted coffers, drained by his unparalleled extravagance. As this monster in human form supplied to the fiction mongers of later times the original of the famous drama of "Blue Beard," some idea may be formed of the vast notoriety to which his crimes attained.