The Transformation The Transformation
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Illustration by Joanna Grochocka; source: "Not So Made-Up Stories" ("Historie nie do końca zmyślone") by Tomasz Wiśniewski
Dreams and Visions

The Transformation

Tomasz Wiśniewski
Reading
time 5 minutes

Many alchemists have tried their hand at the difficult art of transmutation, but a real breakthrough in this domain was made by Michał Sędziwój (known more commonly in English as Michael Sendivogius), an adept of the arcanum and secretary to King Sigismund III Vasa of Poland.

Michał Sędziwój (1566–??) received a good education that fell onto fertile ground – as a boy he had no need for a tutor who, with cane in hand, would have to encourage him to read. He devoured thick volumes, one after the other, spanning domains as distant from each other as astronomy and botany. But his greatest passion was alchemy. He personally met the great initiated minds of his age. We cannot, however, state that he did not have his feet on the ground – he proved to be an effective diplomat on several occasions, well-known even in the most prominent courts of 16th-century Europe.

During his lifetime, he had already become the author of works deemed as outstanding, in which

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Henryk Ochorowicz Steps Across the Threshold Henryk Ochorowicz Steps Across the Threshold
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Illustration by Katarzyna Szybka
Fiction

Henryk Ochorowicz Steps Across the Threshold

Tomasz Wiśniewski

Is time stronger than love? Some say it is not. But is love stronger than time? An answer to this less-frequently-asked latter question is offered by the story of Henryk Ochorowicz and Queen Marysieńka.

Henryk Ochorowicz’s origins alone appeared enough to foretoken his bland existence. His father was a pedantic jeweller, fairly wealthy yet unbearably lacklustre, and his mother was the long-suffering wife of a pedantic and lacklustre jeweller. Henryk remembered very little from his formative years save for solitude and silence; the period of World War I was neither easy nor silent, but it went by eventually. Anything Henryk saw, heard or felt seemed to have gone by anyway (and nothing interesting ever came of that seeing, hearing and feeling, either). He finished university with poor results. He did not attract the interest of women, nor did he take any interest in anything. Finally, after the death of his parents, which did not affect him to any particular degree, he quickly sold the business he had inherited and continued his life, loitering here and there, dressed in a well-worn coat and a wrinkled hat, his only companion in life being a ginger cat. Everything indicated that he would never appear in anyone’s recollections.

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