Muzeum Alchymie v Kutne Hore
E. and I made a day trip to Kutna Hora to visit an Alchemy Museum run by an acquaintance from my Prague days, Michal Pober. A mutual friend, Dan Kenney, had introduced us back in ’97 in a quiet teahouse on a secluded street in Old Town. It had been one of those Prague conversations: a long meandering chat about everything esoteric — alchemy, the astrological layout of Prague, the Battle of White Mountain (and how Descartes may have been involved), Frances Yates, and myriad other subjects.
I don’t think Michal recognized me when he found E and I quietly poking among the dusty displays (which include lots of equipment, retorts, ovens, and giant bellows) in his museum 12 years later. But he gave us the grand tour of the building anyway, and talked at length about his discoveries regarding alchemical and related activities that once transpired in the region during its golden age (well, silver age — it had been a center of silver mining in the Middle Ages).
We went up to a tower room with still-surviving Renaissance frescoes and now outfitted to look like an oratory, and our guide discoursed on a number of subjects, including the alchemical activities of one of the house’s former owners, the illegal metallurgy that had gone on in the basement during the Middle Ages, and the hermetic interests of Casanova, who had lived out his last years as a librarian in the North Bohemian town of Duchcov. (Although obviously a follower of Casanova’s teachings, I had overlooked the occult side of the famous lover’s interests.)
Michal also told us of his discovery of the location of the original house where John Dee and Edward Kelly stayed when they first arrived in Prague. When our guide had himself first returned to Bohemia, he said, he repeatedly found himself eating fish soup at a particular table in a pub next to Bethlehem Chapel, a beautiful church in a still-mostly-quiet square just slightly off the main tourist drag in Prague’s Old Town (just up the street from the tea room where we had met for tea 12 years ago). Only later, he said, did study of old maps reveal that his favorite seat in this pub, U Betlemske Kaple, had been just adjacent to what (the maps revealed) was the no-longer-existing house of Emperor Rudolf II’s courtier Dr. Hageck. It was here, “at Bethlem,” that Dee and Kelly stayed temporarily; a previous occupant of their room had been an “A –” who had covered the walls with alchemical symbols and a Latin inscription.
Now, curiously, Michal then asked if I knew what “A–” meant. It was an uncanny moment. I had been asked the same question about “the meaning of A–“, very significantly, in an alchemical dream almost exactly a decade ago. In that dream, I had been of the opinion, possibly mistaken, that it stood for “Androgyne”; this time, when I hesitated to answer, Michal explained: “Adept.”
At the point I had been asked about “A–” in my dreams, I had been studying hermetic philosophy quite actively, to the detriment of my “official” anthropological studies. But I had largely ignored Dee’s writings (other than the Monas Hieroglyphica), because as “angel magic” it struck me as less relevant. Now I really wish I had read A True and Faithful Relation sooner. Needless to say, I quickly obtained a copy on my return home — both Casaubon’s version and the recent abridgement by Edward Fenton.
Dee records that the “student, or A– skilfull of the holy stone” who had occupied the chamber, Simon Baccalaureus Pragensis, had written on the walls this message (in Latin):
“This art is precious, transient, delicate and rare. Our learning is a boy’s game, and the toil of women. All you sons of this art, understand that none may reap the fruits of our elixir except by the introduction of the elemental stone, and if he seeks another path he will never find the way nor attain the goal.”
