Bacstrom’s Apparatus to Attract Lunar Humididy

By Iulia Millesima

Is Bacstrom’s apparatus to draw lunar humidity an eighteenth century

naivety? From Moon really descends humidity? Does Secret Fire dwell in
humidity?

sigismund bacstrom apparatus to attract lunar humidity

In Manly Palmer manuscripts collection Sigismund Bacstrom introduces an

astonishing, and too much complicated, apparatus to attract lunar humidity.
As you can see from the image, it is a typical late eighteenth century
vessels, recipients, cooker and coolers equipment to collect condensations.
Is this equipment technically sound? And sound for what?

This Bacstrom’s drawing, which is without a written description, apart from

the notes accompanying the outline, has been scarcely mentioned in
alchemical environments. I’m not amazed of that, since modern alchemists
scarcely own the knowledge and the experience to make a point on the
topic. Here, this goes without saying, I don’t mean to state to possess such
learning and wide experience. But, perhaps naively, I think this article
deserves a place in the alchemical search for Secret Fire/Mercurius history.

We have already seen that our Secret Fire, in addition to dwell in terrestrial
raw matter, comes daily to the ground from the sky (1). We have also seen
that collecting it directly from the sun is extremely difficult (2). Also we
know that raw matter has often to be “magnetized” for a certain period
under outdoor sun-moon conditions (3) before undergo laboratory
operations. Of course to magnetize is here a synonym of ” increasing the
amount of Secret Fire we can find inside our raw matter. Nevertheless the
verb “to increase” is not entirely correct in this case, because I was always
told that very hardly Secret Fire shows a “chemical” behavior, being not
chemical at all but physical.

If you put salts to outdoor conditions, we can notice chemical variations like
oxidation, acidification, deliquescence and so on. Sometimes unexperienced
alchemists take this appearance ( since it is only appearance) as a sign of
alchemical magnetization. In fact these exterior signs are totally useless if
certain conditions go unobserved. A deliquescence per-se means nothing.

Very know is little about Secret Fire behavior and even less about its
composition. Although a sub-atomic consistency is supposed ( electronic
cloud), there is a long alchemical tradition of mirrors-like operations. Such as
in Mercurius Duplicatus (4), for instance. A Secret Fire always needs another
Secret Fire to mirror upon, and vice versa.

But let’s start observing Bacstrom’s ( since he doesn’t provide any different
author) apparatus. An orifice in a wall, a glass funnel, a series of
communicating glass bowls. The first heated up, the others chilled out by
cold water. In ancient roman public latrines an ingenious ventilation system
was provided, consisting of an oven with an overlying cylinder: the hot air is
less dense than the surrounding cold air, and therefore floats as the cold air
drops underneath it and pushes it up out-of-the-way, this causes a
ventilation. In addition, the rising hot air currents were shrunk by the upper
cylinder and consequently further speeded, causing the surrounding air to
move away from the oven.

In Bacstrom’s drawing under each chilled out vessel an ending container is

provided. It is easy to suppose that a kind of humidity is certainly gathered.
A condensation of water molecules, I guess. Could Bacstrom conjecture this
condensation actually was “lunar humidity”?
We have already seen, in articles as Nuisement and the Sun Resisting
Capture and Pietro Perugino and the Lady of the Wind, that the Secret Fire
coming from the Sun is sent to earth through the Moon during the night.
What we haven’t seen yet is that ancient alchemists defined the Secret
Fire/Mercurius, necessarily coming from the Moon, as a “lunar dropping”. In
seventeenth century the military surgeon John French, in his ” Art of
Distillation” hazardously presented a method to gather this supposed
humidity with a sponge. In twenty-first century Fulcanelli, more wisely, said
that the closest representation of our Secret Fire/Mercurius could be the
lunar beams. Bacstrom did probably take these words as real. And we have
no evidence he failed to understand.

I want to add a technical detail: orifices. Being them either slits or holes. We
know that when an air flow is forced through a narrow opening it is also
speeded up. Although I’m not sure this is the theory intended to explain the
Secret Fire increase phenomenon, a large space after a hole and/or a slit
seems to collect humidity and sounds. And we know that they both can be
involved in Secret Fire.

To end, surely a precipitation of droplets of the common air humidity could

take place in the condensation vessels. Has this product something to do
with a supposed lunar humidity? I don’t know, but orifices do miracles in
Alchemy.