This book will eventually include medical treatments following the outline I made in 2013. It will originate from the late hand of Doctor de Alhazen.
“The common man understands the world as he is able to understand it. A man that is not blind knows that blindness is the absence of sight and may only catch glimpses of understanding when his eyes are shut or darkened by absence of light. And to man, what is the Lordly Source? Before that, all men are blind, catching only glimpses. We can no more describe in certainty the length or breadth of the Wellspring than a blind man may describe the color of the sky. “– Recollected Verses, Petrus of Lundsend
1. Introduction
To be human is to be curious. By our relative intelligence, our privilege in contact with the Lord of the Springs, our ability to manipulate natural forces through labor and ingenuity, Man is greatest among the living things in this world. The folk tales from across the Urth largely espouse a special gift: the ability to create from our fancy. A tree may bear fruit and mindlessly drop them upon the ground to spread their kind. A fox may breed in its den should food be plentiful enough. It is only Man that creates beyond copy, beyond offspring, and leaps toward feats of construction that are greater than what any single individual may accomplish. The virtues of our world are the virtues of the communal force.
However, the folk tales of our various regional cultures also espouse a warning. The same gift of creation through the mercurial possibility of the soul also yields imagination enough to destroy. Emotion, bred from the mix of fluctuating fluids, can drive Men to lash out at their own kind. Anger, apathy, greed, the desire to dominate; these forces are wholly narcissistic in nature. With no regard for others, these impulses are also uniquely human in their character. These impulses, focused only on the progress of an individual are hateful to the community. They court the selfish eternity of death, where Man can serve none but the worms in his grave.
A physician is a man or woman between these two worlds; we honor creation through the maintenance of the human body, we court selfish death by detaching ourselves emotionally from those we serve. To be a physician is to have a desire to know as well as a desire to serve. These impulses, if not balanced like any other humour, can lead to distress. Some healers do not last long in the world, torn between treating people as objects to mend and friends to save. Know that if you pursue this art, there will be distasteful things to temper the glorious. You will gain the power to save, certainly, as you learn more about the natural forces of this world; the world will open up to you as you gain new eyes to see things as no other will see them. You will not forget this gift; you cannot forget the sights that you have seen with your doctor’s eyes. The power to save is glorious indeed, but the physician, if they are to remain human, will struggle with its application and the dire consequences of each misstep.
2. Nature and its divisions
A student of medicine is a student of the world. There is little that you can learn that cannot be applied to other fields. A physician is an architect, an artist, a butcher, a gardener, a cook, a politician, a commander, and a parent. The fundamentals of the world are the pillars that inform the decisions of the knife, the cleansing philter, and the empathetic touch. In this man’s opinion, all professions – to the extent that they are able – should pursue the study of their environment and its inhabitants.
Nature – the visible world and all of its processes – is vast. One must be a cartographer at heart, but also have an eye for detail; the kingdom’s history may be unveiled over the course of a map and its shifting boundaries, but it is in the razor edge of the sword and scalpel that events are turned. To try and understand many levels existence simultaneously is a trying practice. A favorite mental exercise for my new students begins with the worm in the ground. A person, fresh to the practice of physic, may disregard such a small creature as a part of the environment. A farmer’s perspective, for example, understands its existence superficially – the plow turns the earth and when the ground is moist worms are found. An angler with a shovel and a bucket knows the behavior of the worm a bit better; he knows where to dig to find these creatures as their wriggling flesh is a part of his profession. Fat, lively worms are better at catching fish. The angler, in pursuit of better catches, actively seeks these animals and comes to understand where they are most likely to be found, what, in essence, is pleasing to a creature which he cannot speak or otherwise communicate.
Let us now return to the farmer. While the worm is resident in the farmer’s fields, they are subject to the powerful actions of the farmer. They are diminutive in size and reside in the medium of the farmer’s employ. Their health and size, as folklore has it, is an indicator of the general “health” of the field and the vital substances necessary to produce great amounts of food. Look now to the next administrator of levels, the lord of the farmer’s land. Though the comparison is unfavorable, as a philosopher may see the farmer from the lord’s eyes as a resident of the lord’s medium. His governance and powerfully enforced actions judge the farmer’s life much in the way that the farmer’s actions govern the worms well-being. A healthy farmer, devoid of disease or violent disposition, is a good indicator of the relative health of a hamlet and therefore the lord’s governance.
With this in mind, we take another step upward along the chain of beings toward the monarch. A monarch, a lord among lords, is empowered by right of rule and the faith of those governed. As the worm is to the farmer, the farmer to the lord and the lord to the king, so the chain of governance and effect progresses. A theologian moves yet beyond this step to a king of kings, a governing force resides over the governors. What is a worm to a king? What is a king to a worm? Crossing such bridges of thought gives the student a sense of the broad existence of Nature in all its components and levels of observation. A physician must be able to look at the whole by analysis of a part; to know the king by the worms in the fields or vice versa. We must judge health through many sources of information, broad and minute, to construct a precise understanding and diagnosis.
The most common methodology for overcoming the vastness of reality is through the practice of division. Science – a derivative term for natural philosophy – comes from the same ancient root of language that formed schism, shear, and scissor. To separate, cut down and categorize through relative comparison is one way of sitting at the great feast of knowledge. Digestible portions are important; broad understandings can be built upon and refined as the focus is drawn down the scale. To understand a vast subject, it is common for men to start with the small pieces, such as language. Know the alphabet first so that you may read your manuscripts.
a. Creation
The language of the world starts with the first utterance, the beginning. Many folk tales relay what they believe to be the generation of the universe in which we reside. First among these is the fantastic text of St. Remiel that was recovered a few decades ago. Its language, far from the more precise dogma of our times, is wild and even heretical. However, it underpins a major points in philosophy and theology that continue to this day. Prime among these is the Created Universe, generated by a willful act of a Maker. In terms of our previous example, Remiel’s Maker would be a king of kings of kings. As the actions of the plow are earthshattering to the worm, imagine what futility such a creature would have when faced with political intrigue or the march of armies across the home in the dirt. There would be no comprehension, no context to draw upon to understand for our hypothetical nightcrawler.
If the universe was created through a willful act, then it would logically follow that there was some manner of logical embedded in its manufacture; though it would be alien to our understanding, it would have some sort of pattern that we could recognize. In truth, the way in which we perceive the universe gives rise to logical organizations of creatures, beings, types of matter, diseases, etc. Is this logic in place or is it imposed by the observer in a desperate attempt to take small bites at the feast of reality?
The second major point that Remiel brings to light is the ancient understanding of an elemental reality. Not only can matter be categorized upon its appearance and behaviors, but even its essence, what is largely hidden from our view is likewise able to be divided into readily recognized Primes or indivisible elements. Earth and water, the heavy chthonic forces that create the foundation of our world are readily found beneath our feet and even with the bodies of the deceased. No man familiar with the decay of a body after death can deny that without the buoyancy of the soul, our corporeal forms quickly descend into a solid and liquid miasma that no longer has a discernable structure. The celestial elements of air and fire are also observable. Fire, with its ability to both provide light and to destroy, is housed within the humours of each animal I have yet observed save for the white fluids of the water dwelling fish. So melancholy are they that their very blood sheds its color in favor of the paleness of their home element. This elemental philosophy has greatly informed medicine for hundreds of years. Without it, we would have no grasp of the internal body processes that occur within each and every one of us.
The hand of the Lord of the Springs in the creation of the world has been largely disputed since Remiel first put it to paper. Bagnora, a philosopher from Lithmore shortly after the Consolidation, felt that the world was not created but was merely subject to alteration by its occupants and administered to by the Lord of the Springs. Bagnora, a priest, argued that the creation of the universe had nothing to do Lord of the Springs. The revelations of the Lord were largely human in their concern. Human purity as humanity was both a medium He could well up from but also acted a gateway for the Leviathans that Remiel spoke of.
To digress shortly from the fundamental concepts of Nature, I wish to touch briefly upon the bizarre ramifications of Remiel’s theogony. While to him the Lord of the Springs was the fountainhead for reality, the existence of these Leviathans as unintended off-shoot bizarrely cripples the overwhelmingly power presence of a figured to be a deity in the creative and judiciary sense. Remiel’s implication, at least to me, seems to be that the Lord of the Springs is a part of a continuum of existence outside of the realm of man’s sensory perception. In order to analyze his theological concepts, we must begin with the principle image in the scheme of what has been lately deemed as an allegory. The prime image in Remiel is the interface between water and air as the surface of a deep, dark sea. Allegory is thus useful because all men may relate to the glass-like finish of a perfectly calm lake or pond. At this intersection of two worlds, bereft of wind and all internal movement, there is a seamless continuum between one place and the next. A static existence that possesses a dual nature but is nevertheless ceaseless and same throughout.
While Remiel incorporates a good deal of the Suffering Matron into his work, a holdover from previous religious constructs, setting aside the chained deity yields this image of two intimately incorporated planes of existence; the air over the water. Both deep within and deep without, the space of air and the depth of water have their own abyssal voids. To stare into the sea or the night sky is to peer into the eyes of the same beast. In this relationship then, what is the Lord of the Springs? To Remiel, this figure is one of dynamic motion across the face of this continuum. The namesake, the Spring, is a source of water from deep within the earth that spills out over the face of the world. It is characterized by movement, the mixing of elements into each other such as light, air and water. The bubble of a spring, were it to catch the light of the sun, could appear to a man to be a flickering fire though it was elementally opposed.
The allegory of the media – water interacting with air – seems to indicate that Nature cannot abide primal elements in their pure state for long. While the “original” state of the universe that Remiel describes is inherently stable because of its inability to be differentiated, this static state has no motion and cannot be considered “alive.” For men to exist, the elements must move and mix together, settling into a combined form which may animate and ambulate. The Lord of the Springs, while not the creator of this world, is the template for all reality because of His characterizing motion. A man is a being of all the elements. Other animals, too, contain much the same humours and internal structures as we.
In Remiel’s allegory, what is water and what is air? While the Lords symbol into our world is certainly the Spring, surely the fantastic writings of Remiel would not simply refer to the physical existence of water bubbling up from the darkness. Both elemental domains – the sky and the sea – are life giving. A man’s chest must swell at regular intervals as he takes in the air of the world. He must drink to slake his thirst. Both of these actions, it is thought, are an instinctual effort to balance humours. Thirst, however, has a ritual significance for all faithful members of the Order. In Remiel’s mind, water must be the realm of the spirit, the infinity from which the Lord of the Springs wells up.
If water is the domain of the spirit, then air must be the medium into which the Lord emerges. Air, in Remiel’s allegory, is an ephemeral world that moves quickly and has little substance when compared to the infinite realms of the spirit. Is this not the perfect description of the physical realm? Are we not crude vehicles of matter in which the Spirit resides all too temporarily? This reading of the Sainted Remiel’s scripture...
