Talk:Basil Valentine

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A fact from Basil Valentine appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 26 December 2013 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the third key of alchemist Basil Valentine may describe a complex chemical process known as the volatilization of gold chloride?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2013/December. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Basil Valentine.

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VALENTINUS & FRIAR LAWRENCE[edit]

There seems to be a link between Valentinus & Shakespeare's character Friar Lawrence in Romeo & Juliet. Compare these two extracts:

Valentinus:

All herbs, trees, and roots, an all metals and minerals, receive their growth and nutriment from the spirit of the earth, which is the spirit of life. This spirit is itself fed by the stars, and is thereby rendered capable of imparting nutriment to all things that grow and of nursing them as a mother does her child while it is yet in her womb. The minerals are hidden in the womb of the earth and nourished by her with the spirit that she receives from above

Friar Lawrence:

Now, ere the sun advance his burning eye/The day to cheer, and night's dank dew to dry,/I must upfill this osier cage of ours/With baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers./The earth that's nature's mother is her tomb:/What is her burying grave, that is her womb;/And from her womb children of divers kind/We sucking on her natural bosom find./Many for many virtues excellent,/None but for some, and yet all different./O'mickle is the powerful grace that lies/In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities./For naught so vile that on the earth doth live/But to the earth some special good doth give.

There are obvious echoes in Shakespeare's text. Lawrence is a Franciscan, Valentinus was a Benedictine, but Lawrence in R & J talks about his Art and is a maker of potions and medicines. Frances Yates thought Lawrence was based on the Venetian Franciscan Friar Giorgi, Christian Kaballist and author of De Harmonium Mundi. Perhaps Shakespeare was giving a nod to both Valentinus and Giorgi in R & J. ThePeg 21:45, 15 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Article needs re-writing[edit]

The article is in need of serious revisions. Although authorship of the basil valentine texts is still debated (the consensus seems to be drifting towards Johann Thölde), their spuriousness is not. They were most certainly not written in the 15th century and there has never been a basil valentine at the Benedictine priory in Erfurt. This can safely be dismissed as pseudo-history. The most obvious argument for this is that the Basil Valentine texts are strongly influened by the theories of the 16th century alchemist Paracelsus, making it a chronological imposibility that the author lived before the 16th century.

Article has been substantially expanded[edit]

Mary Mark Ockerbloom (talk) 23:24, 26 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

See Rudolf Steiner lecture of 1923-12-29 – World history in the light of Anthroposophy

Basil Valentine [Alchemist and Benedictine monk, lived from 1413 onwards in the Monastery of St. Peter in Erfurt. His writings were not discovered or printed till the beginning of the seventeenth century. See Eleven European Mystics. ] — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.246.230.176 (talk) 16:47, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Rudolf Steiner lectures[edit]

also see lecture 8 of the cycle 1917-Dec Historical necessity and free will for a section on Basil Valentine (this lecture is not online at rsarchive unfortunately) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.246.230.176 (talk) 16:49, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Illustrations query[edit]

Why are the illustrations pink? Surely they were not originally intended to be coloured. Nuttyskin (talk) 15:06, 9 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]