On the Effects of Narcotics and the Journey

With narcotics and opiates, the traveler must be lulled to sleep immediately at the start, and his limbs must be carefully arranged original: "membratim explicandus" so that the lower body is not carried away from the torso, nor the head from the body, but so that the violent force of the acceleration is distributed across every individual limb. In those huddled together, the parts closest to the propelling cause suffer more, being pressed by the weight of the parts resting upon them. Then a new difficulty takes hold: an immense cold and the prevention of breathing. We encounter the former through a power innate to us, and the latter by applying moistened sponges to the nostrils. Once the first part of the journey is completed, the transport becomes easier. See above, Number 57. Then we expose the bodies to the open air and withdraw our hands. At that point, they curl themselves up like spiders; we transport them with little more than a nod a slight movement or signal, so that finally the bodily mass inclines of its own accord toward the proposed destination. This is said only for the sake of the argument. Nature deserts me; I do not know if it is pleasing to turn to a joke in a serious matter. The allegory also grows cold. That Demon, who is called Astronomy, supplies the lack of things necessary for sustenance through an innate power of fiery fervor for observation—though he does so quite coldly. But this momentum original: "ῥοπὴ" (rhopē) - weight, inclination, or turning of the scale is of little use to us because it is too slow; therefore, as I said, we accelerate it with a nod, and we now precede the body so that it does not suffer any damage from a very hard impact upon the Moon. One should not pass over such an opportune story from Aristotle concerning the Philosophers who climbed Mount Olympus in Asia for the sake of observation.

Men are accustomed, when they wake up, to complain of an ineffable weariness in all their limbs, from which they recover quite late in order to walk. Namely, when the body has been snatched from the sphere of the Earth's magnetic power by such a distance that the magnetic power of the Moon's sphere now outweighs it.

When the magnetic powers of the Earth and the Moon are suspended by contrary attraction, it is just as if no body were enticing it anywhere. Then, therefore, the body itself, as a whole, pulls its own limbs as parts smaller than the whole.

Not entirely by a nod. Strength is still needed. For every body, by reason of its matter, possesses a certain inertia inertia: Kepler's term for the natural resistance of matter to motion toward movement, which provides the body with rest in every place where it is positioned outside of pulling forces. It is necessary for whoever is going to move that body from its place to overcome this force, or rather, this inertia.

Specifically, when the sphere of the Moon's magnetic power prevails due to proximity. For assuming that any mass of Earth, equal to the Lunar globe, pulls equally strongly: a body so located between both globes—such that the proportion of its distance from each is the same as the proportion of the bodies themselves to each other—will hang immobile, the pulls in different directions canceling each other out. For example, if it is distant from the Earth by 58 and 1/59 Earth-radii, and from the Moon by 58/59 parts of an Earth-radius. But the same body, moved just a little closer to the Moon, will now follow the pulling Moon, its force prevailing due to proximity.

At the beginning, indeed, it is very little; but very much when close to the Moon, as follows immediately. Likewise: it is of little use, clearly nothing, to those who make no effort; but it helps those striving to lift the body even when the Earth still prevails. See above, Number 62.

See Numbers 67, 68, 69. But let the traveler see to it that he arrives with his body so intact that he is even able to wake up. The allegory here offers a proven medicine to those bound by a vow of Virginity against natural impulses: intense, continuous, and burning observation speculation/study.

Our bodies are cherished by the warmth of continuous evaporation from the bowels of the earth, which falls back either as rain or, during the night in the absence of the Sun's warm ray, condensed into dew and frost. The skin, stripped of this external warm vapor, begins to shiver. Even the vapor emanating from the body, having lost the heat by whose force it had exhaled, gathers into itself and becomes cold matter; by the work of coagulation, it acquires a motion toward the body from which it sprouted, and being brought into the body, it brings cold to it. Finally, the ethereal breeze, deprived of the Sun's ray, is cold by the privation of heat. As it is very thin, it conceives a cold of very little efficacy by itself as long as it is unmoved. But when motion is added, it gains a certain force of density by the effect itself, so that the more violent its impact upon the body (or the body's flight into it), the denser and more penetrating by its subtlety it becomes, and thus also colder. And so cold becomes an active quality through the densification of matter, which I recognize as only privatively cold when not yet densified. I leave the transition from a privative form to an active one for others to explain. See this speculation in my Optics, carried out through the comparison of light and the color black; and where you see me struggling, help to unearth the causes.