The Chymical Jousting of Brother Perardua

The Chymical Jousting of Brother Perardua with the Seven Lances that He Brake is Crowley's alchemical allegory in The Equinox I.1 (1909), pp. 89–93. Its headings describe knightly victories, while its prose follows the preparation and destruction of increasingly extraordinary substances. The two vocabularies turn the Magnum Opus, or Great Work, into both an experiment and a dangerous adventure.¹⁾

Brother Perardua is a Zelator, determined to obtain a grain of the Powder, a minim of the Elixir and the Tincture of Double Efficacy. The narrator immediately qualifies his ambition: he does not yet fully understand the mystery of the art. His courage, drawn in part from earlier military experience, does not eliminate that incompleteness.²⁾

This opening creates a tension that persists throughout the tale. Perardua repeatedly achieves something remarkable, yet each achievement becomes material for another operation. What looks like the end of the work from one position turns out to be a preparation for a further change.

The story's archaic voice contributes to the effect. Words associated with old books of alchemy sit beside heraldic creatures, mock-chivalric names and assertions of secret knowledge. The narrator speaks as a member of a brotherhood, addressing other brethren and warning against false practitioners. The reader is placed outside some of the claimed secrets even while being allowed to follow the narrative.

The section headings announce the slaying of opponents. The opening victory is over Sir Argon le Paresseux; later headings introduce further adversaries, including a wizard, a dragon and a king. In the prose beneath them, however, Perardua is sowing, tending, heating and transforming. The physical joust is not narrated as a separate sequence of realistic combats.³⁾

The pairing makes each operation a contest. An obstacle is overcome, but the victory does not protect its product from being destroyed in the next phase. This is one way the tale resists treating attainment as the accumulation of permanent trophies.

Perardua begins with a scroll containing twenty-two seeds. From them he gathers seven plants, arranged in a line corresponding to seven centres of intention. The story adds numerical and bodily associations without stopping to give an explicit prose key to every symbol.⁴⁾

The plants are heated and moistened in the vessels of the work. The resulting form is increasingly elaborate: it has a crown and horns, sapphire wings, a lion's forepart and the hindquarters of a bull. It stands upon a white sphere and a red cube. This composite being is subsequently called the Sphinx.

The narrator describes the result as an exceptional perfection. That claim is essential to the next movement: Perardua does not abandon a worthless failure, but deliberately subjects a carefully perfected achievement to a further ordeal.

Perardua prepares a Red Dragon, also called a Fiery Flying Serpent, to consume the Sphinx. Its seven coils and fiery attributes continue the numerical pattern. The work is destroyed in the dragon's heat, and the narrator stresses that what emerges is not what entered.⁵⁾

The new product is described as a button of fused gold, immediately qualified by the statement that it is not ordinary gold. It has twelve faces and twenty-four projecting and inward angles. The tale calls it the Pavement of the Firmament of Nu, linking the alchemical imagery with a celestial or Qabalistic setting.

This passage makes the cost of transformation explicit. The earlier form cannot simply be kept intact while its owner acquires an additional power. Its disappearance is part of the production of something different.

The description insists on discontinuity between the material entering and leaving the dragon:

Now then is this work utterly burnt up and abolished in that tremendous heat that is in the mouth and belly of the Dragon; and that which cometh forth therefrom is in no wise that which went in.

— Aleister Crowley, The Chymical Jousting of Brother Perardua.⁶⁾

The military heading announces the dragon’s defeat, while the prose makes the dragon the agent consuming the prepared work. Reading both together complicates a simple opposition between hero and obstacle. The apparent enemy performs an indispensable transformation, and victory includes surrendering the product of the hero’s earlier labour. That double function is one reason the headings cannot serve as a sufficient synopsis of the tale.

The narrator distinguishes three kinds of gold:

The comparison is a hierarchy within the story's symbolic language, not a classification for a modern chemical laboratory. The final product is valuable precisely where it becomes least like a stable possession.⁷⁾

Crowley's analogy with unequally cooled glass explains its vulnerability to a touch. Its dissolution may be spectacular or almost imperceptible. The important feature is not the amount of visible drama but the disappearance of the form that had embodied the previous attainment.

The highest of the three golds is defined through an impossible prospect of possession:

But this our Animal Gold is to this mighty pitch unstable, that it can neither increase nor decrease, nor can it remain that which it is, or seemeth to be.

— Aleister Crowley, The Chymical Jousting of Brother Perardua.⁸⁾

The final qualification, “or seemeth to be”, makes even the description of its present condition uncertain. The following glass analogy supplies an image of sudden disintegration, but the text then allows dissolution to be almost imperceptible. Thus visible drama is not the measure of the change. The reader has to follow what ceases to exist in the account, rather than looking only for a louder or more spectacular version of an earlier operation.

In the final dissolution, the seven, the twelve and the three concealed mother seeds disappear. The text says that the other ten are dimly suggested, while warning that the image of a serpent becoming a lightning-sword is only a glyph. It declines to provide a simple material connection between the stages.⁹⁾

The apparatus itself is shattered: vessels and furnace no longer survive as the equipment of an unchanged worker. Nevertheless, what Perardua originally sought appears, with the Elixir and Tincture now given in increased quantities. The closing mockery by the brethren prevents this from becoming an uncomplicated scene of congratulation. His remembered designation is Non Sine Fulmina.

The ending combines success with danger and loss. It leaves the reader to consider how an achievement can fulfil the original intention while destroying the forms through which that intention had been pursued.

The groupings of twenty-two, seven, twelve, three and ten invite comparison with 777 and Qabalah. Those comparisons help explain the density of the tale, but a proposed correspondence should still be distinguished from one explicitly supplied by its narrator. The work is an allegory, not an executable laboratory recipe.

Compare The Wake World, where attractive destinations can obstruct further travel, and Aha!, where attainment requires relinquishing an established standpoint. The three works give the Great Work different literary forms: a palace journey, a teacher's dialogue and alchemical combat.