GREAT WORK
OF THE
PHILOSOPHERS
OR
PHYSICAL STONE

Following the Ninth Treatise
NICOLAS DE LOCQUES

True calcination or reverberation is when the matter has become golden in color ( aurei coloris vel quasi, according to Raymond Lulle). This is the true mark of the first preparation of matter.

Three calcinations of eight hours or three reverberations of twelve hours each.

Dissolve everything you can with very pure azoth, through so many repeated digestions, that you can no longer get anything out of it.

After that, calcine the land left by the streetlight for ten or fifteen hours.

Then dissolve again with new azoth, until you can extract nothing more.

Reverberate again, dissolve, and repeat these operations until the azoth can extract nothing more. Then throw away the remaining earth, because it is useless, filter all your solutions, and evaporate on the ashes in a glass vessel, up to half, then leave to crystallize.

Pour in the clear and let the crystals dry, knocking over the vessel.

Filter the clear that you have separated, and evaporate half of it as before, crystallize, and repeat filtering, evaporating, and crystallizing, until there is nothing left in the feces.

Dissolve all your crystals by digestion in distilled water, filter evaporate, and crystallize as before, and repeat the same until you have all the crystals, by digestion, filtration, evaporation, and crystallization; which you will dissolve again in the same liquor, repeating as above, until the water no longer has any color, and is very clear, leaving no feces in dissolution and filtration.

Then put your very dry crystals in glass vessels, in the MB, to evaporate all the foreign water, which was coagulated with the crystallization.

Take some of this material, and grind it on the marble, then put it in a very cold and humid place to resolve, keeping well away from dust; which will be a a little long, but you will finally have metallic and clear water, which will still have left some soil.

Filter this water which is the reduction of bodies into first matter, which the Sages called chaos, where the elements and principles are confusedly contained.

Then, it is the next matter of nature (and not of the elements) which is determined to the metallic genus and not to the species, because it is disposed to receive the form of all metals.

It is the first preparation of matter that philosophers have never spoken of.

Put this metallic water in a glass vessel at MB, as long as the foreign humidity of the air is exhaled and the matter is reduced (being cold) into a transparent and clear crystal, which is that sea of ​​glass cited by several philosophers. Put this crystal in small pieces in glass retorts, only three ounces in each, stopper well, putrefy in B for twenty-one days, then distill gently over the sand, and the phlegm will first pass into drops of water.

Then increase the fire, and you will see white spirits, then white veins in branches in the container, which are the serpentines of the hieroglyph of Abraham the Jew cited by Flamel, when he said that he brought out a fountain from a rock whose streams were going to precipitate into the abysses with an infinite number of serpents, which ran here and there.

Continue and increase the heat until nothing more can pass through, which is done in eighteen or twenty hours, and you then have all the yellow distillation. (keep the feces) Put all these distillations in a large glass retort, and distill through the B everything that can rise; You will have a yellow gum left at the bottom, which you will leave in the retort and seal well. Take the clear distillation and throw it back on the feces of the above distillation (which lasted eighteen or twenty hours) after having crushed them well, and this in a retort putrefy for twelve more days, then distill as before.

Then reject this distillation into the retort where the gum, so named by Mary the prophetess, is rejected. Distill as before.

Return the distillation to the said feces, and putrefy for twelve days as before, distill again, then repeat the other operation on the gum.

All these operations will be repeated in turn, until the distillation becomes clear, and the earth remains very black, light, and an impalpable powder.

This is what is called the true dead head, because it no longer contains neither sulfur nor mercury, and consequently neither soul nor spirit; without which preparation there is never a dead head, nor a dead body, which only contains the fixed salt, which is the principle of all fixation and coagulation.

Take all this distilled spirit, and put it back on the gums in the retort, and seal it, and repeat until the yellow gum, which is in a small quantity, is dissolved; then distill at B until there are only four fingers of yellow liquor remaining in the retort.

Then stop the distillation.

Take what remains in the retort, and put it in another small retort, and distil over the sand over a good fire until everything has passed, and if there is any gum left in the small retort, you will add more of the first spirit distilled above, and circulate as long as the gum is dissolved, then distill with sand, and repeat in this way until all the gum has passed, apart from some indissoluble feces.

So you will have the phlegm, the spirit, and the oil mixed together. Put everything in a retort, sigillate well, and circulate for six days, then distill at B, and all the phlegm and spirit will come out, and the oil, sulfur, or soul of the matter will remain at the bottom, which must be keep well.

Take the spirit and the phlegm, circulate them together for fifteen days, and the spirit or mercury which is of a volatile, aerial, and igneous nature, will take over and separate itself from the terrestrial aquatic by the action of fire.

Then you will distill at B with a lamp fire, until you see the drop attaching to the vessel, and then you will stop the distillation, and rectify this spirit seven times with the same fire.

This way you will have purified and rectified mercury, which you will keep tightly corked.

Finish distilling the phlegm, because some mercury impurity will still remain at the bottom. Then throw the phlegm on the citrine oil, and circulate for fifteen days, then pass everything through the retort onto the sand.

Then distill the phlegm through B, then put the oil in a small retort, and distill so many times that nothing remains, and it remains completely clear, which is done in seven rectifications.

Then you will have sulfur, just as you have above mercury, both well purified. These are the two mercuries that Saturn washed with his urine.

During the time you spent on these operations, you will have reverberated the feces or dead heads in the retorts for twelve hours, then dissolved once in azoth, filtered and crystallized, then dissolved, filtered, evaporated, and crystallized, by seven times in distilled water (as has been said of the matter), to purify the salt which you will dry well to B of all superfluous humidity, and then put it in a well-stopped retort with the phlegm, and circulate as long as the salt is dissolved, apart from a few feces which remain in the bottom.

Filter this phlegm where the salt is dissolved, then evaporate it in the bath, then dry your salt, and it will be sufficiently purified.

Now you will have purified the elements and washed the principles.

You have mercury, spirit, air, seed, or quicksilver of the philosophers.

You have the sulfur, oil, soul, fire, or living gold of the philosophers, and you also have the salt, earth, body, womb, fountain, or living Moon of the said philosophers.

All that is needed is to bring them together.

Meeting
Why do you put in a vessel a part of the earth, and take ten parts of the mercurial seed, which you divide into seven parts, of one of which you will water the earth without drowning it (which is the white virginal milk cited in Flamel, and one of the belts of the cutlasses of St Paul) to digest in the secret fire by distilling with steam B by lamplight, as long as nothing more passes through, and the matter has taken seed, which is what it needs.

Take care also that it does not remain dry and arid, and that, being burned and deprived of all humidity, the germ is destroyed, and the radical humor consumed.

So then open the vessel, and put in one of the other parts, and do as before; and so repeat from all the divided parts of your seed.

This being done, adapt to your cucurbit a small screed and a container, and to the same insensible fire, and some superfluous humidity will still pass (which is what Cosmopolitan says when speaking of human generation, which the woman's womb retains from the seed, what is necessary for conception, and pushes or throws the rest out) Thus you will have the womb swollen and spongy and fattened with its own seed: The marriage of Gabertin with Beya, of Isis and Osiris, the incest of brother and sister, father and daughter, mother and son, the androgyne of the philosophers, their hermaphrodite, and finally the double mercury, the dry water that does not wet, the mercury of the philosophers , And not common mercury, natural mercury, and metallic mercury.

This white and spongy matter is now disposed to volatilization, because ten are stronger than one, and the volatile spiritual has taken ascendancy and dominion over the fixed and the corporeal, and the body and the spirit are so well united together and married, that they are inseparable, die, resurrect and live together, being only one thing, and one and only substance, two spirits and one body, two bodies and one spirit , these are the two Dragons of Flamel, one fixed, the other volatile, which carries the fixed with its wings, and which will always fly, as long as Saturn, through putrefaction, has cut off the winged feet of Mercury. This is noticed by the fixed Dragon which holds the entire foot of the volatile, to show that after having flown well, it will finally have to fall and fix itself together.

This material being prepared for volatilization is placed in a vessel, on the sand over slow fire, and immediately everything will sublimate, and will show at the top of vessel as a sheet of white and transparent talc, which is virgin earth or leafy earth, so sung by philosophers, who left his last earth or impurity at the bottom of the vessel.

Take an ounce of leafy earth, put it in a hermetically sealed vessel, and cook over a secret fire, you will see after forty two days putrefaction and darkness, which is the philosophical dissolution, and the reduction of the earth into water, which is the first conversion of the elements, then the change of colors, which are very diverse, and in great number, and between the the main ones appear the iris, the rainbow, or peacock's tail, then the green without which nothing succeeds, this is why the philosophers have called it, O beata viriditas, signum germinationis (O blessed weed, the sign of germination); and then everything rises in vapors or smoke, which is the conversion into air, and physical sublimation, which the Cosmopolitan reasonably said, that he who does not know how to cook air understands nothing in this art.

After that this air is converted by circulation into water, which falling on the remaining earth, re-waters it and gives it back its humidity of which it is deprived for some time, which is called philosophical distillation, or physical leaching and lotion, and finally the earth having taken it back, is reduced to ashes, and calcine, which is called physical calcination, the conversion of the element of earth. Which made Mary the prophetess say (do not despise the ashes, for in these is the diadem of your heart) although she also heard this said with regard to the artificial calcination of the dead earth, because that in its ashes resides the fixed salt, which is the principle of fixation and freezing , the matrix or receptacle of the seed, and the center of all generation, without which all art is useless.

And finally the matter whitens and settles, which is the element of fire which takes dominion; and then this material thrown on a red copper strip whitens it and penetrates without smoking. This far went the experiment, which I saw carried out by one of my friends, who having fermented four parts of this powder with one part of Moon in fine stratified sheets between two well-lit crucibles, for twelve hours of cementation and six hours of fusion, found a white crystalline and transparent material, similar to the soft sublimate, which fixed the heated mercury in the fine Moon, one weight in a hundred.

To turn red
You will divide your white powder into two parts, one to multiply to white, the other to change to red. If therefore one of the parts of your white powder weighs an ounce, you will put it in the vessel and you will add two larges of the oil, sulfur, or quick gold of the philosophers, then you will seal the vessel, and continue the concoction until the redness of poppy, and during the time of said concoction, putrefaction will take place again, and all the colors will appear, however very little except citrine, yellow, orange, and three different reds.

Note: That for the medicine of the human body it is better, both the white, than the red, without being fermented, because it is more spiritual, and the more it is multiplied, the less it is necessary to give, because if you give too much, or too often, its fire could well overcome and destroy, the archaeum and the fire of nature, which only asks to be helped to have enough strength , to destroy and consume radically and insensibly, all the superfluous and foreign qualities, substances, and humidity, which are the cause, principle and origin of all diseases.

Multiplication
To multiply the powder, both the white and the red, it is necessary to dissolve it by digestion for twelve or fifteen days, in ten parts of the volatile solvent, a part of perfect and fixed medicine, which by repeated distillation and cohobation, causes the dissolution to pass entirely through the retort, which is done easily, because there is no longer either in the solvent or in the dissoluble , no feces or impurities.

Then you will put this solution in a steam still from B to the lamp fire, and distill until it no longer distils, then there will remain at the bottom of the vessel a fixed and incombustible oil, red like blood, which the philosophers have called drinking gold, and the white solution they called drinking silver, and talcum oil. So we can see that neither one nor the other is not drinkable gold or silver, nor the talcum oil of chimerical blowers.

This white or red oil will be hermetically sealed in a vessel as before, and cooked until perfect and fixed whiteness or redness. And by this way, you will multiply it as many times as you want, and to infinity; but after four or five multiplications, it is so spiritual and igneous, that the multiplication is done in nine or ten days, although it passes through all the colors, and when it is multiplied enough, this is what is perfected at the seventh time at most, you will ferment it as was said for the white, in the first operation, because both are similar.

Note that although all these things created above have harmony and analogy; nevertheless the sky and the earth, the earth and the water, the fire and the air, the hot and the cold, the dry and the humid, the Sun and the Moon, the seed and the womb, the male and the female, have some differences between them, and each has its virtue. Another philosophical work of vitriol Take Roman vitriol, the quantity that will be necessary for you, for example ten or twelve ounces, dissolve it in distilled water, let the faeces settle; pour the clear by inclination into a glass vessel, evaporate at B until film, then leave to cool and stand for three days, and will form lucid crystals of a very beautiful green color.

Remove these crystals and keep them in dishes or plates, or other glass vessels, or glazed earthenware. Evaporate the remaining liquor again until it forms a film, and put it in a cold place for three days, where crystals will still form , which you will put with the first. Continue this process and crystallization until all of your vitriol is reduced to crystals. Put the vessel where the crystals are in secret B, at such heat as the sun gives in mid-summer, and your crystals will turn into white powder. Put this powder in distilled rainwater as above, leave straighten the feces, pour the clear by tilting into another vessel, freeze as before until film, then in a cold place where the crystals will again be formed, which will be half as pure and lucid as the first, and the color green will be half as beautiful, as we have never seen a more beautiful one (which made the philosopher say that it is the last consequence of preserving one's greenness, especially since if one loses it, at the same time we waste our time and our efforts).

Evaporate the remaining moisture again to a film, and crystallize in the same way, continuing in this way until the total crystallization. Then put your crystals in dry B as above, converted into white powder.

Dissolve this powder as above in distilled water, let the feces settle, pour the clear by tilt, evaporate, crystallize, and convert into white powder.

And always do these same operations until your nail polish remover no longer makes feces.

So, having this white powder well washed and purified, you are assured of having prepared your vitriol perfectly well.

Keep this white vitriol powder carefully to continue its operation, as we will tell you later.

Note that the reason you did not evaporate to dryness at instead of crystallizing and reducing to a white powder, which takes a lot of time.

This is because vitriol contains in itself a certain very subtle spirit (as we pointed out in the treatise on vegetable work, where we spoke of the spirit which is in the interior part of all herbs, and this there is that greenness of all things which appear green on the outside), which greenness is their true flower, their virtue and quintessence, and if you lose this greenness, I tell you truly, that you will have lost their quintessence, and consequently all the time that you will have spent working on the thing which has lost its greenness, because it is nothing more than a dead body, either leaves, herbs, roots and other species, generally anything that appears green on the outside.

This is why take care to preserve it well, because the greenness is so subtle that you lose it invisibly, as we have clearly shown in the vegetal work or we have said, in what way it is necessary to draw out the viridity of all herbs, leaves, roots, or of all things, which being manifested, then changed into extreme redness, such as has never been seen: see in the vegetable work where you will learn what it is It’s just this greenness.

We must therefore preserve this vitriolic greenness by the gentle way of crystallize, because if you coagulated at the beginning, you would lose this pleasant quintessence and your material would become yellow instead of whitening. Now when your vitriol has been thus stripped of its faeces, then reduced to powder in the dry oven, then the greenness is covered with whiteness, but if it took on humidity it would become green again on the outside. We must therefore turn the inside to the outside, and the outside to the inside, to retain by this means one's soul, one's spirit, one's life, and quintessence, which is a great mystery of our art.

The vitriol being thus prepared, it is in a state of becoming red like a ruby, containing in itself perfectly the four elements, And this is this Peter whom God gives gratis.

So take the said white powder of vitriol separately, put it in a long-necked matras, sigilate hermetically, and put in the oven of lamps on the sifted ashes, giving the fire of the heat of the Sun in the month of Mars, until until your material turns yellow, and hold it in degree until it is perfectly yellow.

Being in this state, gradually increase the fire, that is to say add a lamp, and keep it like this for eight or ten days. Then see if your material begins to turn red; and if it begins to redden, increase the heat, and leave it like this for another eight to ten days, and if it no longer benefits from redness, increase it one more lamp, but if you see the redness increasing, leave it at that degree, until you no longer see an increase in redness.

You must add a lamp and continue like this until your material is as red as a ruby. Being red at this degree of heat, leave another eight or ten days at this degree without changing it any more.

Now when matter no longer increases in redness, then you will be certain that matter is turned inside to outside and outside to inside, and that you can no longer lose your greenness, because it is converted into redness, and lodged in the center, unable to return outside, and remains red eternally.

However it will not be fixed, because if it were fixed it would be entirely corrupted, because it must still be dissolved in water, frozen, and then distilled by the still.

Note in passing that all metals can be reduced to oil if they have been dissolved in strong water, then precipitated and washed, as has been in their chapter, and thus as we have sufficiently taught of vitriol all metals will become like blood, even Jupiter and the Moon, because the inside of all metals is red, some more, others less. And for this effect when they have reached the last redness, they will have to be dissolved and refreeze, and continue this work until it no longer produces feces, and yet the elements remain perfectly joined, then you can distill them and pass them into red oil, and make of these metals the same as we let's continue the vitriol.

You can also do the same thing with mercury, if you dissolve it in strong water, and precipitate it, and wash it of its salt, dry it, and put it in the glass vessel, just as it is said of vitriol , and do everything we just said about said vitriol. Or you can sublimate the mercury, and put this sublimation into the glass vessel &c. You can also dissolve the mercury in water, and purge it of its faeces, retaining the four elements, and then distill it into red oil &c. What can still be done with antimony &c. Back to our vitriol.

Take the aforementioned powder of red vitriol when it can no longer benefit in redness (opening the vessel) put it in another vessel of strong glass, or in a bottle of stone (or sandstone).

Pour a good quantity of distilled wine over it, and boil in the bath, stirring three or four times, as we told you above about the vitriol, to extract all the purity, and throw away the faeces. Then put the cap on your alembic, and distill the vinegar until it becomes dry. of the material.

Then your vitriol will remain dry at the bottom, much purer and clearer than before. Continue this process until he no longer produces feces. And then freeze into a dry powder.

Now take a strong cucurbit, put your powder in it, fit a large screed, then distill.

The yellow spirits will come out last. Then let it cool, and remove your container in which you will find your blessed oil, which you will keep carefully, to use with your salt. As we will say later.

Then remove the cap from your still, and you will find in the cucurbit a earth white as snow and lucid as crystal, which is the earth of vitriol rectified, and stripped of all its feces.

Where we must now pulverize this earth, and soak it with its red oil, which will enter and penetrate his body putting them in the philosophical furnace at moderate heat for forty days, and everything will coagulate into stone of philosophers transmuting all metals into gold . For the Stone of the Philosophers is made of vitriol without any other addition, which changes all metals into pure gold but it is first necessary to fix its oil on its earth, as is said &c.

Note, however, that this oil of vitriol can be reserved for better uses, as we can say elsewhere.

Recapitulation
Where is it that we have taught you why and how, one must clarify and rectify, or separate the vitriol from its feces, by dissolving it, pouring it by tilting and crystallizing, until it is stripped of all its faeces. Then it must be put in a closed vessel to calcine it while retaining its four elements.

As we must bring in the greenness within and bring out the redness without .

Then the way of dissolving it again in distilled vinegar, then removing the feces which it contained in its internal whiteness, and which it had not wanted to make cidevant until the inside was turned outwards.

For you must know that all things contain two kinds of faeces, which it is necessary to separate.

Firstly in their coarseness and crudeness, as the dissolution was made, when the matter was still green, and that I recommended to preserve this greenness well under penalty of losing everything.

Secondly, when the inside is turned outwards, and the outside in; because then it must be dissolved and frozen again, until it no longer produces feces.

And this is how the other faeces are separated from it, which were previously inseparable from the salt because they were internal.

Where the reason by which the inner nature does not want to abandon its faeces, since everything is turned into water. This is because the coldness is outside, although everything is water, and this coldness so encloses the heat within that it cannot leave its feces until it is turned outside . But when she is outside she opens and leaves her feces, because she is no longer constrained and reserved by coldness.

It is the same with its opposite, for when the heat of something is without, the coldness is found within, and is so constricted that it cannot open, and likewise retains its feces.

Much more when there would be some heat with humidity mixed in the interior heat, the external heat would drive them outside; what we let us look daily at the distillations, which are done by the B as by the fire, because then the air, the water and the fire rise, and the cold and dry earth remains at the bottom because of the heat, which has externally approached the vessel.

This is why it must be rectified twice when we want to make a true elixir, or a quintessence from whatever kind of material it is found, whether with herbs, roots, sugars, honeys or such others. chips of this nature which are found.

You will also have learned how and why this vitriol is distilled, and an oil red as blood is obtained, leaving its soil at the bottom of the vessel.

Then as we must soak this earth with oil, and put in the athanor in a philosophical egg for forty days, to be made the Stone of the philosophers.

I also then said that this oil could be reserved for better uses, and for other works of greater consequence, which we will deal with elsewhere

End of the work of vitriol

Sapienti satis - Wise enough