emistic book, which bears the name of the
Persian magician, Osthanes (Berthelot, Orig., p. 52), the divine water
heals all maladies. Water of life,--elixir of life.

Many readers will shake their heads over the psychoanalytic exposition of
the parable. The gross development of sexuality and the OEdipus complex may
seem improbable to him. The alchemistic hieroglyphic has now in unexpected
manner shown after all, that these surprising things were not read into
the parable by psychoanalysis, but rightly found in it, even though
psychoanalysis has not by any means exhausted the contents of the parable.
What might at first have appeared to be bold conjecture, as for example,
killing of the father, incest with the mother, the conception of the red
blood and white bones as man and woman, the excrementitious substance as
procreative, the prison as the uterus, has all been shown to be in use as
favorite figurative expression among the alchemistic authors.

The alchemists like to dwell on the process of procreation, and on
infantile sexual theories. The deep interest that they show in these
matters, and without which they would not have used them so much in their
hieroglyphics, the meaning that these things must have, in order to be
regarded as worthy to illustrate the processes of the great work, and
finally, the meaning that in some form or other they actually have in the
emotional life of every man, all of this makes it evident that the line of
imaginative speculations with which we have become acquainted, deserves
independent treatment. In practice there was a fission, and procreation
becomes an independent problem for alchemists. Yet the followers of the
art did learn from nature, in order that their art might follow the works
of nature even to improve on her; what wonder then if many of them set
themselves to the artificial creation--generation--of man? Yet the belief in
generatio equivoca has not long been dead. Must it not have seemed somehow
possible, in view of the supposed fact that they saw insects develop out
of earth, worms out of dung, etc., that they should by special artificial
interposition, be able to make higher forms of life come out of lifeless
matter? And of all the substances not one was indeed completely lifeless
for the "animated" metals even, grew and increased. In short, if we regard
the matter somewhat more closely, it is after all not so extraordinary
that they made serious attempts to create the homu