User:LynnThorndike/Alchemical Pseudolulism

Since the 19th century, the study of Ramon Llull's authentic works has clearly established the pseudepigraphic nature of the entire alchemical corpus, which in total exceeds one hundred works. It was thought to be a forgery of the late 14th and early 15th centuries, with later additions.

At the end of the 20th century, Professor Michela Pereira revealed an earlier textual matrix, dated around 1332, which has no pseudepigraphic intent in its genesis. It is an original production by an unknown personage, whom Pereira calls magister Testamenti in reference to his most emblematic treatise. Other writings would have been added to this primordial nucleus with the passing of time.

His contribution completely changed the way of approaching this germinal group of treatises, since for the first time it was revealed to us with concrete data that we were not dealing with conscious forgeries, but with original works, which transmit the ideas, the personality and the biographical data of a real alchemist. After compiling information about this personage based on what he tells us, both in his Testamentum and in the other writings he cites as his own, he has been identified with a man called Raymundus de Terminis (cat. Ramon de Térmens). He would be a Mallorcan who held the office of eques or miles, trained as a magister in artibus or in legibus. This type of person usually held administrative, mercantile jurisdiction, diplomatic or public order posts. He also had a knowledge of medicine, especially related to surgery, with a montpellerina training. His activity is documented on the island of Corfu and in Albanian towns. He served as bailiff in Berat and Vlorë, or in commercial operations for Robert I of Naples and Philip I of Taranto in the Adriatic and Ionian Seas.

Representative functions for Philip would also justify his presence on the island of Britain in the early 1930s. We know that Philip sent an embassy there to arrange a proxy wedding engagement in 1331 between his daughter, the child Margaret of Tarentum (1325-1380) and Edward of Balliol (c.1283-1367), a pretender to the Scottish throne with the help of Edward III of England (1327-1377). This diplomatic mission would also explain Ramon's presence at the church and hospital of St Katharine by the Tower, where the alchemical Testamentum was signed in 1332. This place was administered from 1331 by the Lord Great Chamberlain John de Vere (1312-1360), who was also involved with Edward III in the organisation of the Scottish campaign in favour of Edward of Balliol.

His original works would tentatively be Testamentum, Vademecum (=Codicillus); Liber lapidarii (=Lapidarius abbreviatus); Liber de intentione alchimistarum; Scientia de sensibilibus (=Ars intellectiva; Ars magica); Tractatu de aquis medicinalius (=De secretis naturae primeras versiones); De lapide maiori (=Apertorium); Questionario; Liber experimentorum y una versión primitiva del Compendium animae transmutationis metallorum (=Compendium super lapidum; Lapidarium). His writing is dated to the 1930s of the 14th century.

Thanks to the Liber experimentorum (1330) it has been possible to determine his activity in the 1920s and his stay in England during the War of Saint Sardos (ca.1323-1325). His work in alchemy was eminently experimental at that time, but from 1329 he would have been very concerned to organise a theory that would support his practice. To try to do so, he turned to alchemical texts with an important theoretical content, such as the Summa perfectionis; works of natural philosophy, especially those of Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus; and Ramon Llull's Trees of Science.Argumentative developments based on the latter source would make his works characteristic.Together with his name, Raymundus, and his Mallorcan origin, they created the right conditions to ignite the flame of pseudepigraphic confusion a few decades later.

Another significant characteristic is that this man revised his texts, producing different versions in at least three languages: Catalan, Latin and Anglo-Norman. Sometimes these were adaptations for the different courts through which he moved. At other times he opted for expansions, recensions, epitomes or glosses. This can be seen very well in small works, such as the Ars intellectiva, but above all in longer treatises such as the Testamentum and the Liber de secretis naturae.

His original corpus would have been dispersed in two main areas: 1st) territories under English rule in the first half of the 14th century; and 2nd) the Mediterranean, mainly in the Adriatic Sea and its connections with the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily.

Thirty or forty years later, around 1360-1380, the first Pseudolullian nucleus was identified in Valencia, around the group of therapists surrounding the figure of Berenguer Fluvià. The De secretis naturae would be the most important text in this process, and to a lesser extent the Compendium animae, the Testamentum and the Codicillo.

Decades later all these treatises would have circulated again, already with a pseudepigraphic attribution, in Southern Italy and the Adriatic Sea, where the first commentators convinced that they were reading an alchemist Llull would appear around the year 1400, such as Petrus Voleacius de Ragusa (s.e. Dubrovnik), the Graecus Philosophus Guido of Montanor and the monk Ferrarius. Precisely in the Adriatic Sea, where the biography of the authentic Llull was less well known, the texts were mixed up. The Lullian attribution was joined to the original colophons, regardless of the fact that their dates involved anachronisms and historical inconsistencies when applied to Llull.This is how Guillaume Fabri de Dya and Cristoforo da Perugia wrote the first legends between 1430 and 1475. From this point onwards, the later elements are more or less complex extensions.

At the same time, with an incipient movement in the Mediterranean, the treatises reached England in the middle of the 15th century, where they prompted the search for and reinterpretation of those left there by the magister Testamenti himself a century earlier, both in Latin and in Anglo-Norman.

The legend of Llull the alchemist
The legend of Ramon Llull as an alchemist, as it has survived to the present day, tells us that he was initiated in this practice by the famous physician Arnau de Vilanova (1238-1311). The English King Edward III invited him to England, where the Mallorcan would have had the courtesy of making gold and stamping coins called Nobile Raymundi or Rose nobles. When his skills were proven, the monarch proposed that he finance a crusade against the Muslims. Llull agreed. However, Edward used these alchemical resources to attack the King of France and imprisoned the philosopher in the Tower of London. He forced him to continue transmuting metals, although he finally managed to escape.

This narrative format is quite late and was established in the mid-16th century, as Michela Pereira has show. It is consolidated and popularised in the Symbola aureae mensae duodecim nationum (1617) and the Tripus aureus (1618) by Michael Maier (1568-1622). It is collected with a good number of additional details in the De Ortu et Progressu Chemiae Dissertatio (1668) and the Conspectus Scriptorum Chemicorum Celebriorum (1696) by Ole Borch (1626-1690).

As Pereira has revealed, the most elaborate version is a Historia quando Raymundus Lullus, Maioricanus Comes, scientiam transmutationis didicerit, et quando ac qua de causa traiecerit in Angliam ad Regem Rupertum, preserved in two 17th century manuscripts. His account is the result of several previous stages, in which the story mutates in a surprising way.

OAnother advance in this line is the account of Johannes Cremeri, supposed abbot of Westminster in Llull's time, which appears in the Tripus aureus (1618) by Michael Maier (1568-1622). There is no record of this work, either in quotations or in manuscript sources, before the 17th century. Of course, Cremeri is not known to anyone in 14th or 15th century documents and, in fact, there was no abbot by that name in the Westminster lists. It also presents a King Edward III who receives Llull despite reigning a decade after his death; and it describes a journey to England which does not appear in any of the authentic Lullian works. His writing is clearly a modern invention made up according to the established fantasy of his time.