Agrippa von Nettesheim seems to speak of a light-substance, which, despite being very light, has its own degree of density.
Agrippa appears highly alchemical in his definition of Light as an ineffable substance, which he calls the Elixir or “Quintessence”. He identifies an indefinable matter as the instrument for communicating the life of the soul to the body and for maintaining the divine soul within the material body. This substance is defined as the noblest part of the body and, at the same time, the lowest and most intimate part of the soul. Agrippa describes it as a “lucid and very light body” that receives the impressions of external objects and assimilates them to the soul. If you need to give it a definition, you can also call it “vapor.” Agrippa himself defines it this way.
A vapor, typically, emanates from a body…
Nevertheless, is has a nature similar to the stars. But the fact that it can also be extracted from gold leaves us confused.
It is hard to believe that a star’s emission could be extracted from metallic gold.
Yet, Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim defines it as pure, lucid, subtle vapor that the heat of the heart generates from the purest blood: appropriately extracted from gold or other bodies, it was called an Elixir by Arab astronomers, but it could also be called “sky”, “ether”, or “Quintessence”. This spirit, derived from the four elements work, “possessed a vital principle” and had a nature “analogous to the substance of stars”: spirits and effluvia. Effluvium, Quintessence and Elixir are terms which give the idea of something coming out of a body. Originally, it came down from the stars. Still, we can we define it as the “medium” of propagation as a substance between matter and the soul.
Is this what the alchemists meant by “alchemical light”? Many functions, a semi-materiality… at this point one wonders whether this alchemical light is static like photonic light or mobile like a vapor.
Let us hear from two of Agrippa’s contemporaries. Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499):“Corpus tenuissimum, quasi non corpus, et quasi iam anima, sed etiam quasi non anima, et quasi iam corpus”. A very subtle body, almost not a body and almost already a soul, but also almost not a soul and almost already a body.
Ioannes Fernelius/Jean Fernel (1497-1558, the physician who invented the term “physiology” to describe the body’s functions) interpreted Ficino’s ineffable substance as the carrier and seat of the mind and all its properties.
I wonder whether this “tenuous substance” is static or follows the peculiar alchemical characteristic of “movement”.
Plato tells us something interesting about this.
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Main Index: 3. Rays and Optics according to the Ancient Authors