Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

The Magistrate of the Great Work In the early seventeenth century, as the kingdom of France was transitioning into the age of absolute monarchy and classical rationalism, a prominent jurist and politician from Bordeaux dedicated his private hours to the silent work of the alchemical laboratory. Jean d'Espagnet , who served as the President of the Parliament of Bordeaux, was a contemporary and close friend of the essayist Michel de Montaigne and the demonologist Pierre de Lancre. While his public life was dedicated to the administration of justice and state affairs, d'Espagnet's historical legacy belongs entirely to the Western Hermetic tradition, where he is remembered as one of the most elegant and profound alchemical philosophers of the French Renaissance. D'Espagnet published his principal works anonymously in Paris in 1623, bound together in a single volume. The first was the Arcanum Hermeticae Philosophiae Opus ( The Secret Work of the Hermetic Philosophy ), a ...