Christopher Duffin
London, England

Plague was an ever-present threat and source of anxiety during early modern times. Bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic forms regularly swept through Tudor and Stewart England with little respite between successive epidemics. Blamed variously on divine wrath, astrological events in the heavens, pestilential airs, and the transfer of “seeds of affliction,” the disease had no effective cure and state-enacted protection schemes relied upon ineffectual approaches to avoiding miasmatic airs. Desperate to find some sort of protection from the plague, members of the public relied increasingly on amulets, often with a basis in folk medicine, as potential prophylactics. One rather specialized example was the zenexton.

The word first appears in the writings of Paracelsus (Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim; 1493–1541), a rather iconoclastic, largely itinerant Swiss physician who developed his own distinctive medical theories. However, it is the alchemist and disciple of Paracelsus, Oswald Croll (1563–1609), who furnishes most of the details concerning zenexton in his Basilica Chymica (Fig. 1).¹ He provides recipes for producing small prophylactic cakes which were to be housed in metal containers and hung about the neck. Helpfully, details were given for two variants of the amulets—one designed for the poor and the other for “rich and noble persons.”

The core ingredient was eighteen dried toads, pulverized to a fine powder. Croll offers the sage observation that the preparator’s nostrils should be stopped or the head turned away during this process, to avoid the offensive odor. To this powder was added the first menstrual blood of young maidens, dittany, tormentil, pearls, coral, and a series of geological ingredients—white and red arsenic, “Oriental Hyacinth” (probably red zircon), and emeralds. Each of these components enjoyed a pedigree of use in folk medicine as alexipharmics, and in some cases, a reputation for being able to protect specifically against plague. Dried toads hung about the neck in a bag, for example, were esteemed as being able to intercept disease-carrying miasmas before they reached the heart; being a poisonous animal itself (possessing dermal poison glands), the toad was believed to attract any airborne poisons by magnetic attraction. Precious red coral was believed to lose its color in the presence of poison, and emeralds were renowned for being able to resist poison. Pietro d’Abano (1257–1316), Professor of Medicine at Padua, indicated that if placed on the table at meal times, an emerald would weaken the virulence of any poisons present, and that taken as a powder suspended in a suitable liquid, it was able to expel all poisons from the body.^2,3 John Parkinson (1567–1650), apothecary to James I of England and a founding member of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, wrote, “The hearb [dittany] is so powerful against the poyson of all beasts that are venemous, as that it doth drive them away by the very smell, and killeth them if they touch it, where it is hung.”⁴ Of tormentil, he noted that it “resisteth all poyson or venome of any creature” and “of the plague and pestilence itself.”⁵

Musk and amber could be added in a bid to further combat the offensive smell of the preparation. The pulverized mixture was then added to gum tragacanth and rose water and worked into small cakes of different shapes. The poor could then place the cake into a red silk bag and suspend it by means of a ribbon from the neck so that it overlay the heart. There, it could intercept “Venomes or Astrale Diseases” and render them harmless by consuming them.⁶

An altogether more salubrious container was recommended for those who could afford it. Croll suggested steel or gold as the material from which to construct an appropriate “instrument” to hold the amuletic cake (Fig. 2). Gold examples could further be enhanced by the addition of encrusting precious stones. Paracelsus believed that one important cause of the plague was the influence of the stars. Indeed, he suggested that mankind’s evil so poisoned the heavens, that their response was to reflect that poison back to earth in the form of star-mediated infection. Protection and treatment therefore required an astrological component. Croll indicated that the holders should be engraved as follows:

The Sculpture of the Instrument must be made at the certain position of the Celestials, viz. Sol and Luna entring the Sign (b) Scorpio: At the same time also the Pentacles must be scaled, or at least, when Luna attains the Sign Scorpio; for so the superiors with inferiours in sympathical undissolvible union are conjoyned and united.⁷

Simpler zenextons listed by Croll included quicksilver (liquid mercury) or arsenic (orpiment and realgar) and ores of mercury (cinnabar) enclosed in a hazelnut (or filbert); these again offered protection by attracting any poison to them by their supposed magnetic qualities. If the red bags into which these preparations were placed turned blue, that indicated that the plague cakes were doing their job effectively. The discolored bags, now contaminated with poison, should be destroyed by burning and the cakes transferred to a new container in order to continue their prophylactic work.

Thus, zenextons represent a distinctive form of anti-pestilential amulet whose prophylactic and alexipharmic powers were grounded in a syncretism of Paracelsian astrological medicine and folk therapy. Designed to be adaptable in addressing the protective needs of both rich and poor alike when plague epidemics threatened, they exploited the supposed antitoxic virtues inherent in a range of herbal and geological medicinal simples.

References

1. Oswald Croll. Bazilica Chymica, & Praxis chymiatricae. London: John Starkey, 1670,136-138.
2. Pietro D’Abano. De venenis, atque eorundem commodis remediis. Marpurgi: ex officina Eucharium Ceruicorni Agrippinatis, 1537, 28.
3. Christopher Duffin. The Emerald: A Magico-medicinal Stone. In: Barroso, M.D.S., Duffin, C.J. & Silva, J.A.M. Insights into Portuguese Medical History: From the Birth of the Art of Asclepius. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2022, 81-178.
4. John Parkinson. Theatrum Botanicum. The Theater of Plants. London: Thos. Cotes, 1640, 29.
5. Parkinson, Theatrum Botanicum, 395.
6. Croll, Bazilica Chymica, 136.
7. Croll, Bazilica Chymica, 136.