Book I.

great world : therefore, we shall hasten to speak of the creation of man, and his divine image ; likewise of his fall, in consequence of his disobedience ; by which all the train of evils, plagues, diseases, and miseries, were entailed upon his posterity, through the curse of our Creator, but deprecated by the mediation of our blessed Lord, Christ.
THE CREATION, DISOBEDIENCE, AND FALL OF MAN.
According to the word of God, which we take in all things for our guide, in the ist chapter of Genesis, and the 26th verse, it is said — God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness ; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” — Here is the origin and beginning of our frail human nature ; hence every soul was created by the very light itself, and Fountain of Life, after his own express image, likewise immortal, in a beautiful and well-formed body, endued with a most excellent mind, and dominion or unlimited monarchy over all Nature, everything being subjected to his rule, or command; one creature only being excepted, which was to remain untouched and consecrated, as it were, to the divine mandate : “ Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat ; ” “ But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it ; for in the day that thou eatest of it, thou shalt surely die.” Gen. ii. ver. 16. Therefore Adam was formed by the finger of God, which is the Holy Spirit ; whose figure or outward form was beautiful and propor- tionate as an angel ; in whose voice (before he sinned) every sound was the sweetness of harmony and music : had he remained in the state of innocency in which he was formed, the weakness of mortal man, in his depraved state, would not have been able to bear the virtue and celestial shrillness of his voice. But when the deceiver found that man, from the inspiration of God, had began to sing so shrilly, and to repeat the celestial harmony of the heavenly country, he counterfeited the engines of craft : seeing his wrath
against
Chap. I. NATURAL MAGIC. 15
against him was in vain, he was much tormented thereby, and began to think how he might entangle him into disobedience of the command of his Creator, whereby he might, as it were, laugh him to scorn, in derision of his new crea- ture, man.
Van Helmont, in his Oriatrike, chap, xcii., speaking of the entrance of death into human nature, &c., finely touches the subject of the creation, and man’s disobedience : indeed, his ideas so perfectly coincide with my own, that I have thought fit here to transcribe his philosophy, which so clearly explains the text of Scripture, with so much of the light of truth on his side, that it carries along with it the surest and most positive conviction.
“ Man being essentially created after the image of God, after that, he rashly presumed to generate the image of God out of himself ; not, indeed, by a certain monster, but by something which was shadowly like himself. With the ravishment of Eve, he, indeed, generated not the image God like unto that which God would have inimitable, as being divine ; but in the vital air of the seed he generated dispositions ; careful at some time to receive a sensitive, dis- cursive, and motive soul from the F ather of Light, yet mortal, and to perish ; yet, nevertheless, he ordinarily inspires, and of his own goodness, the substantial spirit of a mind showing forth his own image : so that man, in this respect, endeavoured to generate his own image ; not after the manner of brute beasts, but by the copulation of seeds, which at length should obtain, by request, a soulified light from the Creator ; and the which they call a sensitive soul.
“ For, from thence hath proceeded another generation, conceived after a beast-like manner, mortal, and uncapable of eternal life, after the manner of beasts ; and bringing forth with pains, and subject to diseases, and death ; and so much the more sorrowful, and full of misery, by how much that very propa- gation in our first parents dared to invert the intent of God.
“ Therefore the unutterable goodness forewarned them that they should not taste of that tree ; and otherwise he foretold, that the same day they should die the death, and should feel all the root of calamities which accom- panies death.”
Deservedly, therefore, hath the Lord deprived both our parents of the benefit of immortality ; namely, death succeeded from a conjugal and brutal copulation ;
neither
16 NATURAL MAGIC. Book I.
neither remained the spirit of the Lord with man, after that he began to be flesh.
Further; because that defilement of Eve shall thenceforth be continued in the propagation of posterity, even unto the end of the world, from hence the sin of the despised fatherly admonition, and natural deviation from the right way, is now among other sins for an impurity, from an inverted, carnal, and well nigh brutish generation, and is truly called original sin ; that is, man being sowed in the pleasure of the concupiscence of the flesh, shall therefore always reap a necessary death in the flesh of sin ; but, the knowledge of good and evil, which God placed in the dissuaded apple, did contain in it a seminary virtue of the concupiscence of the flesh, that is, an occult forbidden conjunction, diametrically opposite to the state of innocence, which state was not a state of stupidity ; because He was he unto whom, before the corruption of Nature, the essences of all living creatures whatsoever were made known, according to which they were to be named from their property, and at their first sight to be essentially distinguished : man, therefore, through eating of the apple, attained a knowledge that he had lost his radical innocency ; for, neither before the eating of the apple was he so dull or stupified that he knew not, or did not perceive himself naked ; but, with the effect of shame and brutal concupiscence, he then first declared he was naked.
For that the knowledge of good and evil signifies nothing but the concu- piscence of the flesh, the Apostle testifies ; calling it the law, and desire of sin. F or it pleased the Lord of heaven and earth to insert in the apple an incentive to concupiscence ; by which he was able safely to abstain, by not eating of the apple, therefore dissuaded therefrom ; for otherwise he had never at any time been tempted, or stirred up by his genital members. Therefore the apple being eaten, man, from an occult and natural property ingrafted in the fruit, conceived a lust, and sin became luxurious to him, and from thence was made an animal seed, which, hastening into the previous or foregoing dispositions of a sensitive soul , and undergoing the law of other causes , reflected itself into the vital spirit of Adam ; and, like an ignis-fatuus, presently receiving an archeus
or
Chap. I. NATURAL MAGIC. 17
or ruling spirit, and animal idea, it presently conceived a power of propagating an animal and mortal seed, ending into life.
F urthermore, the sacred text hath in many places compelled me unto a perfect position, it making Eve an helper like unto Adam ; not, indeed, that she should supply the name , and room of a wife , even as she is called, straightway after sin, for she was a virgin in the intent of the Creator, and afterwards filled with misery : but not, as long as the state of purity presided over innocency, did the will of man overcome her ; for the translation of man into Paradise did foreshew another condition of living than that of a beast ; and therefore the eating of the apple doth by a most chaste name cover the concupiscence of the flesh , while it contains the “ knowledge of good and evil ” in this name, and calls the ignorance thereof the state of innocence : for, surely, the attainment of that aforesaid knowledge did nourish a most hurtful death, and an irrevocable deprivation of eternal life : for if man had not tasted the apple, he had lived void of concupiscence, and offsprings had appeared out of Eve (a virgin) from the Holy Spirit.
But the apple being eaten, “ presently their eyes were opened,” and Adam began lustfully to covet copulation with the naked virgin, and defiled her, the which God had appointed for a naked help unto him. But man prevented the intention of God by a strange generation in the flesh of sin ; whereupon there followed the corruption of the former nature, or the flesh of sin, accompanied by concupiscence : neither doth the text insinuate any other mark of “ the know- ledge of good and evil” than that they “ knew themselves to be naked” or, speaking properly, of their virginity being corrupted, polluted with bestial lust, and defiled. Indeed, their whole “ knowledge of good and evil ” is included in their shame within their privy parts alone ; and therefore in the 8th of Leviticus, and many places else in the Holy Scriptures, the privy parts themselves are called by no other etymology than that of shame ; for from the copulation of the flesh their eyes were opened, because they then knew that the good being lost, had brought on them a degenerate nature, shame- fulness, an intestine and inevitable obligation of death ; sent also into their posterity.