Nicolas Flamel

The teaching

Taught from the Book of Hieroglyphic Figures printed in his name in 1612, beside the house and tombstone he left.

What his own stones teach

What Nicolas Flamel himself left teaches the faith of a Paris burgher. On the house he built for the poor, the carved words ask the working men and women lodged in its porch to say each day a Pater Noster and an Ave Maria, praying God to pardon the poor sinners who have died. His tombstone shows Christ between Saint Peter and Saint Paul above a dead body, a reminder to every reader that he too must die. Charity, prayer for the dead and the hope of resurrection are the whole of it.

The book of Abraham the Jew

The book printed in his name two centuries after him tells another story, and teaches the work through it. Flamel buys for two florins a gilded book, old and large, its leaves not of paper or parchment but of the thin bark of young trees, its cover of copper engraved with strange signs. On its first leaf, in letters of gold, Abraham the Jew, prince, priest, Levite, astrologer and philosopher, greets the people of the Jews scattered in France by the wrath of God. It has twenty-one leaves, three times seven, and every seventh leaf bears pictures and no writing: a rod with serpents swallowing one another, a serpent fastened to a cross, and a desert with fair fountains from which serpents crept out.

Other leaves show Mercury, young and winged at the ankles, and an old man with an hourglass and a scythe coming to cut off his feet; a flower on a high mountain shaken by the north wind, with dragons and griffins about it; a rose tree in a garden beside a hollow oak, and at its foot a spring of white water that blind men dig for and cannot find; and a king whose soldiers kill little children, their blood gathered in a vessel where the Sun and the Moon come to bathe.

The pilgrimage and the projection

For years he cannot read the pictures. He vows himself to Saint James and goes on pilgrimage to Compostela, and at León he meets a physician, Master Canches, a Jew turned Christian, who knows the book and explains its first figures before he dies at Orléans on the road home. Back in Paris he finds the first agent, and with Pernelle, the book says, he makes the projection: on 17 January 1382, at noon, on half a pound of quicksilver, into pure silver, and on 25 April of that year, about five in the evening, with the red stone, into gold. The gold goes to hospitals, churches and chapels, for in this telling the art is for the poor and for God.

The figures read as the work

The second half of the book reads the figures Flamel had carved at the Innocents as the stages of the art. Two dragons stand at the start, one with wings and one without. The wingless one is the sulphur, the fixed, hot and dry; the winged one is the quicksilver, the volatile, cold and moist. Shut in the vessel, they fight and kill each other and rot together into blackness, and from that death the work begins.

The man and the woman are the two natures again, to be joined; the bodies rising from their graves are the matter coming back to life after its rotting; and the colours follow in their order, black, then white, then a citrine yellow, and last the red of the finished stone. The slain children's blood is the mineral spirit of the metals, in which the Sun and the Moon, gold and silver, are bathed and dissolved. The carvings themselves were ordinary religious images; the reading of them belongs to the book.