895J Johannes Hiskias Cardilucius (1630-1697); Johannes, de Rupescissa, approximately 1300-approximately 1365.; Paracelsus, 1493-1541.; [Winthrop, John, 1606-1676 owned a copy.]
Magnalia Medico-Chymica, Oder Die höchste Artzney- und Feurkünstige Geheimnisse : Wie nemlich mit dem Circulato maiori & minori oder dem Universal aceto mercuriali, und spiritu vini tartarisato die herzlichsten Artzneyen zum langen Leben und Heilung der unheilsamen Kranckheiten zu machen : Zwar aus Paracelsi Handschrift schon im vorigen Seculo ausgangen, aber so corrupt, daß es fast niemand verstehen können, itzo aber aufs neue verhochdeutschet und von Satz zu Satz erläutert. Nebenst beygefügtem Hauptschlüssel aller Hermetischen Schrifften, Nemlich dem unvergleichlichen Tractat genannt: Offenstehender Eingang zu dem vormals verschlossenen Königlichen Pallast.
Verlegung Wolffgang Moritz Endters/ undJohann Andreæ Endters Sel. Erben. Anno M. DC. LXXVI (1676) Price $2,900
Octavo Nuremberg, Endter 1676. 24 folios, 409 pp., 15 folios, 32 pp. [24] This copy is bound in a manuscript leaf over boards. With soke woodcut diagrams. Somewhat spotty, partly slightly worm-eared, front with old handwritten entries.
Johannes Hiskias Cardilucius belongs to the late wave of German Medico-Chymici who sought to systematize Paracelsian medicine in the wake of both the Thirty Years’ War and the institutionalization of chemical practice in university and apothecary circles. Educated within a milieu that still revered Paracelsus as the prophet of chemical reform, Cardilucius’s Magnalia Medico-Chymica presents itself as a recovery and clarification of “the highest medical and fire-art secrets” derived from Paracelsus’s lost or corrupted manuscripts. It thus positions itself explicitly as a restorative work: “itzo aber aufs neue verhochdeutschet und von Satz zu Satz erläutert.”
The volume belongs to a long sequence of 17th-century “Paracelsiana” printed by the Endter firm at Nuremberg, which catered to a public fascinated by hermetic medicine and its promise of universal remedies. The text’s central concepts—the Circulato majore et minori, the aceto mercuriali universali, and the spiritus vini tartarisatus—all refer to laboratory procedures of purification and recirculation that symbolized the transmutation of both matter and spirit. The “circulation” invoked here is alchemical rather than anatomical: a metaphor of refinement through repeated distillation, rather than the Harveian circulation of blood.
Cardilucius writes at a moment when Paracelsianism had already begun to merge with the new experimentalism of Boyle and van Helmont, yet his idiom remains resolutely hermetic. While contemporary anatomists such as Harvey, Pecquet, and Bartholin were redefining the body through observation and measurement, Cardilucius continued to interpret physiology through correspondences of macrocosm and microcosm—the “circulation” of life within the spiritus mundirather than within the vascular system. Nevertheless, the Magnalia reflects the late Paracelsian effort to reconcile empirical laboratory practice with metaphysical speculation: recipes for “tartarized spirit of wine” and “universal mercury” sit beside discourses on divine illumination and the regeneration of nature.
Rather than embracing the new mechanical philosophy, Cardilucius’s Magnalia represents the persistence of the iatrochemical imagination at its most ambitious: a learned, quasi-mystical alchemy that saw in the operations of the furnace and the circulatory flask the same rhythms that governed the life of the cosmos. The work thus marks both the culmination and the exhaustion of the Paracelsian project—standing on the threshold of the chemical Enlightenment, but still speaking the language of the philosopher’s stone.
Sudhoff 405. Brüning 2331. Ferguson I, 143 (without the appendix). Duveen 118. Neu 824. First edition. – Annotated edition of the spurious Paracelsus work “Wunder Artzney” based on the 1586 edition (Sudhoff 209). Contains in the appendix a translation of the work “Introitus apertus,” which J. Lange published in Latin in Amsterdam in 1667. – A sequel (not included here) appeared in 1680. – Somewhat spotty, partly slightly worm-eared, front with old handwritten entries. VD17 39:116154G
Cardilucius was a late 17th century compiler and practitioner of iatrochemistry, active in the Nuremberg milieu. He positioned himself as a defender of alchemy as a medical art, arguing that its purpose was the preparation of powerful remedies rather than the pursuit of metallic transmutation. He circulated in chymical networks and his name appears in recipes, such as the soncalled ‘Cardilucius powder’ (a medicinal gold preparation). The ‘Wunder Artzney’ The pseudon Paracelsian text known as ‘Wunder Artzney’ (‘Wondrous Medicine’) was first printed in 1586 (Sudhoff 209). Though attributed to Paracelsus, it is considered spurious within the Paracelsian corpus. The text presents a collection of recipes and curative secrets, often promising miraculous results. Its appeal lay in blending practical chymical instructions with the aura of Paracelsian authority.
Cardilucius’s Magnalia mediconchymica .incorporates glosses, contextual explanations, and new material aimed at clarifying and extending the earlier text. Importantly, it also includes as an appendix the alchemical treatise ‘Introitus apertus ad occlusum regis palatium’ (‘An Open Entrance to the Closed Palace of the King’), a classic hermetic text often attributed to Eirenaeus Philalethes. This addition situates the work within a wider hermeticniatrochemical tradition.. Its true purpose, he stresses, is medical: the transformation of substances into healing remedies capable of relieving the sick. This aligns with the broader Paracelsian project of ‘chymical medicine’ (iatrochemistry), where laboratory techniques were repurposed to prepare potent drugs. In this way, Cardilucius positions himself as an interpreter and transmitter of Paracelsian healing for a later generation.
VD17 39:116154G; Sudhoff 405; Ferguson I, 143 (1686 edn.); Duveen 118
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