Mytho Physico Cabalo Hermetic Concordance

MYTHO-PHYSICO-CABALO-HERMETIC CONCORDANCE

FABRE DU BOSQUET

I. Preliminary speech.

The origin of natural science is lost in the times of the childhood of the world, the Patriarchs possessed it. It was to his results that they were indebted for the long and happy days they enjoyed. Hermes, their contemporary, is the first of the Philosophers who traced its principles and who put a certain order into them; but not wanting to profane the mysteries of a science that God seemed not to want to make common to all men, he invented the hieroglyphs, the symbols, the enigmas, under the veil of which he transmitted it to posterity. It was on the writings of Hermes that the Schools of the Temples were formed, among the Egyptians, among the Greeks and among the Druids, where the priests alone interpreted them and explained them to their Disciples.

Moses, very perfectly instructed in all the Sciences of the Egyptians, is the one who brought that of nature to the highest degree of glory: there is no one, however little he is versed in the knowledge of his sublime works, who do not recognize there the finger of the Divinity: everything there announces its greatness, its wisdom and its omnipotence; he describes the creation of the world, the development of chaos and the creation of man, with as much truth as if he had been a witness to it, and all those who in their systems deviated from Genesis, lost in their vain reasonings.

But, one might object, how can it be that for so many centuries, men have neglected to educate themselves and cultivate a science which they had such a great interest in knowing and preserving, since by secret means of which she is the dispenser:

1. Nature has not set the limits of the age of man at eighty and one hundred years.

2. That it is possible for him to avoid, even at this age, the humiliating traces and infirmities of old age.

3. That he can enjoy without interruption the most robust health and all the graces of youth.

4. That he can give himself infinite riches at will.

5. That by the same means, he can push back the limits of his power, his Enlightenment and his reason, by developing his genius, and by giving it an extent, an intelligence and a penetration, far above what he could conceive.

6. That the inestimable fruit of his intelligence increased by these sublime means must be that of knowing God, Nature, and of knowing himself.

We could respond to this objection that this Science has not been universally forgotten, that in this immense interval, there appeared a certain number of Philosophers who by their application, and by their perseverance managed to distinguish the path which leads to it, but that they thought it necessary to sow briers and thorns in their tracks in order to disguise them from the eyes of those who would not be guided in their work by a profound study of the great principles, and of the secret means of Nature.

Truly enlightened people today no longer doubt the possibility or the effects that the Stone of the Hermetic Philosophers must naturally produce. The conformity of ideas, principles, facts and results, of all the men who have written about it although from different centuries and from different countries, is an incontestable proof of its reality.

History tells us that Diocletian had all the works dealing with hermetic art burned, believing that this would deprive the Egyptians of the means of making gold and subsequently put them in a position to wage war. against him.

Despite this barbaric hostility, there still remains a very large quantity which is scattered in different countries. The King's library alone contains a prodigious number of ancient and modern manuscripts and printed books written on this subject, and in various languages, which if they were known and brought into greater light would undoubtedly reveal secrets, including the humanity could reap the greatest benefits.

All the fictions reported in the works of Pindar, Orpheus, Homer, the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Gauls, are only allegories taken from the material, the manipulations, and the effects that Patriarchal art produced, the essential relationships that we find there with the hermetic treatises of more modern Philosophers, at the same time as they serve to penetrate the mysteries one through the other, should leave no doubt to an unprejudiced man about the existence and on the possibility of the work of the Sages.

The blind and poorly educated people, despite the authenticity of these proofs, still regard the results of Philosophical Science as a chimera, on the other hand the proud scholars, not believing possible what they have not been able to understand or find, ridicule her; so that the small number of those who could judge better are forced into silence by the torrent and the multitude of contrary opinions.

The rapid and distinguished progress made by positive chemistry has contributed not a little to this general description, independently of the useful discoveries that society owes to it; the ardent followers of this art have published loudly, with some appearance of reason however, that matter, the path of manipulations, nor the secrets of transcendent chemistry, if they had had some reality, would not have escaped the multiplied works and to the sagacity of the Boerhaves, the Bekers, the Konkels, the Stahls, the Lepots... The conclusion they draw from this argument would be without reply if we did not have to oppose to them the assertion of their own Apostles, who , although having failed in this research, nevertheless had the good faith to admit in their writings that they believed in the possibility of the work of the Hermetic philosophers.

It seems that there is a fatality attached to the most learned observers of vulgar chemistry, they have all taken a path diametrically opposed to that which it was necessary to take to come to know it; they became the tyrants of Nature while they should only be its imitators, instead of destroying the mixed ones in order to analyze them, on the contrary they had to have recourse to Nature to perfect them, accustomed to n To use only force and violence in their operations, they believed by these murderous means to surprise Nature and penetrate her secret works, and on the contrary they found only the residues of materials and the volatile substances that they separated them, but all equally deprived of the life that Nature had introduced there. The multiplicity and differences of stoves,

President d'Espagnet in his treatise on the Hermetic Arcana, canon 6, details with great precision the cause of the errors of common chemists. “Vulgar chemists,” he says, “have gradually become accustomed to moving away from the simple path of Nature by their sublimations, their distillations, their solutions, their freezing, their coagulations, by their different extractions of spirits and tinctures. , and through a number of other operations more subtle than useful, they fell into errors which were a continuation of each other: they became the executioners of this Nature, their subtlety too laborious far from opening their eyes to the light of truth to see the ways of Nature was an obstacle which prevented it from coming to them; they moved further and further away from it,

With a penetrating genius, a firm and patient spirit, an ardent desire for Philosophy, a great knowledge of true Physics, a pure heart, moral integrity, a sincere love of God and neighbor, every man, however ignorant he may be. whether in the practice of common chemistry, he can confidently undertake to become a Philosopher, an imitator of Nature. »

“If Hermes the true Father of Philosophers,” says the Cosmopolite in the first Treatise on New Chemical Light, “if the subtle Geber, the profound Raymond Lulle and so many other true and famous chemists returned to earth, our vulgar chemists would not only wouldn't want to look at them as their masters, but they would think they are doing them a lot of grace and honor to confess them for their disciples: it is true that they would not be able to do all these distillations, these circulations, these calcinations, these sublimations, in short all these innumerable operations that the vulgar chemists have imagined, for having misunderstood the Philosophers. » In another place of the same treatise the Cosmopolite says: “Vulgar chemists are quite enlightened in known chemistry and quite instructed in its processes, but blind in hermetic chemistry and carried away by usage. They set up sublimatory furnaces, calcinatories, distillatories, they used an infinity of vases, crucibles unknown to simple nature, they called to their aid the fratricide of natural fire; how with such violent methods could they have succeeded? They are absolutely contrary to the procedures followed by the Hermetic Philosophers.

It results from the two passages of these two true Philosophers, that the violent and multiplied manipulations of the chemists are not those which a man must follow who seeks to enlighten himself on the processes of Nature; but we must know these and not work at random, otherwise we expose ourselves to wandering and working in vain.

Geber says: “That any man who ignores Nature and its processes will never achieve the end that he proposes, if God or a friend does not reveal them” and although Basil Valentin, in his second addition to the Twelve Keys, says : “Our matter is vile and abject and the work that we carry out by the regime of fire alone is easy to do. You do not need any other instructions to know how to govern your fire and build your oven: just as he who has flour will not take long to find an oven and is not much in the way of baking his bread. » It is nonetheless true that linear processes are very difficult to find, as well as to put into practice. The Cosmopolitan in his treatise on the New Light expresses himself with more sincerity and says: “That when the Philosophers assure that the work is easy, they should have added: for those who know it. »

Pontanus in his Epistle admits that he erred more than two hundred times while working on true matter, because he was ignorant of the fire of the Philosophers.

The first difficulty experienced by those who begin to study the Science of Nature is that of finding the true matter; the second difficulty consists of the appropriate manipulations; and the third is that of finding the hermetic fire; this is why Hercules (who designates the artist) will consult the Nymphs of Jupiter who refer him to Nereus, the oldest of the Gods following Orpheus, son of Earth and Water, or the Ocean and Thetis. Its name means wet. Homer in his Iliad, Liv. 18 verse 36, calls him the Old Man: he is the first matter of the Sages which they say is so common and so despised.

Hercules therefore went to seek Nereus; but he had all the more difficulty finding it, and especially distinguishing it, as at each moment it took new forms, because this matter being capable of all forms has none determinate. ; it becomes oil in nuts and olives, wine in grapes, bitter in wormwood, sweet in sugar, deadly in hemlock, beneficial in sage, and so on. However Hercules looked for him with so much obstinacy that he finally found him covered with rags which make him vile in the eyes of the vulgar; that is to say that he found it in this form, which is not one, in any way and which does not present anything graceful or specified, such as is the first material of the work .

It is therefore necessary to have recourse to Nereus or to chaos, but as it is not enough to know and have in one's possession the first true and proximate material of the work, Nereus from whom Hercules asked something of more sent it to Prometheus, who had the secret of stealing fire from Heaven.

By means of Nereus, Hercules obtained the knowledge of the first matter, and that of fire through Prometheus, but the Works required by both were taught to him so obscurely and enveloped in so many allegories, that we won't have fun explaining them. However, we will make up for it in a more intelligible and more abbreviated manner than the analysis of mythological fictions could be.

The preparation of the first material is composed of two distinct parts, and each of these two parts is subdivided into two other parts; the two parts which form the subject of the first part of the first division are the solution of matter into mercurial water, and the preparation of this water, to the point of converting it into the mercury of the philosophers, this is what is involved. bounds the first work of the hermetic work.

In the subject of the first division, the first part of this second must begin with corruption: and the generation of Philosophical Sulfur is the complement of the work. The first takes place through the spiritual mineral seed of the earth, the second spermatizes this earth, volatilizing it and fixing it in turn. The third, by means of corruption, creates the separation, union and homogeneity of substances, the fourth completes and determines the absolute fixation of matter by rubifying it. This is the creation of the Stone of the Sages.

Philosophers have compared this preparation to the Creation of the world which first presented only a Mass, a chaos, an empty, formless and dark earth which was nothing in particular, but in general capable of becoming everything.

God said, The light was made, it came out of its limbo and placed itself in the highest region; then the darkness disappeared before her. Chaos and confusion gave way to order, night to day and, so to speak, nothingness to being: this is the first part of the hermetic work until the universal dissolver.

God spoke a second time, the confused elements separated, the lightest were placed at the top and the heaviest at the bottom, then the earth freed from its moist abysses appeared, and seemed completely filled with luminous fluid which made it fit to serve as a matrix to all seeds.

This separation of water from earth, where air was found and fire spread, is only a successive change of matter in the double form of Water and Earth, which led the people to say philosophers that water is the whole foundation of the work without which the earth could not be dissolved, nor cause putrefaction. In the second part of the work, the Earth is the body where the humid elements end, freeze, and are buried to resume a nobler life.

The Hermetic Philosophers in the writings they left spoke only very little of the first matter and the first mercury of nature: they were very extensive, although with much ambiguity, on the great principles of art. , and on the progressive forms which matter takes in the second operation, but they have covered with an impenetrable veil the first ostensible agent, the first processes and the whole course of the first operation, up to the perfection of their universal solvent. , which is the dividing line found between the first and second hermetic works.

The Old Testament, Egyptian and Greek Theology and that of the Druids, on the contrary, speak almost not of the second operation: but they expand so prolixly and in such a varied manner on the first, that by dint of wrapping it in parables, enigmas and fictions they have formed a labyrinth in which it is almost impossible not to get lost.

I was careful to avoid these two extremes, and without wanting to desecrate the mysteries of Nature I developed as much as I believed the duty, the meaning of the enigmas, the Parables, the hieroglyphs and that of the fictions of Mythology, in all the essential points, and which it is most important to know, to which I have adapted as much as I could the passages from the writings of the Philosophers which relate to it, so that through this concordance, amateurs of the science of Nature can move away from a very large part of the pitfalls with which all the paths which can lead to it are strewn and against which we cannot avoid coming up against, when in this research we are not directed by principles whose truth cannot be equivocated or contested.

I do not know if I will be happy enough to fulfill my object, but I have only proposed the secret pleasure of facilitating the study of Nature to those who have the courage to take care of it, and to seek through work to penetrate it and deepen it: I indicate to them bases and means, on the certainty of which they can count and according to which if they do not reach the goal to which the doctrine of the Elements could lead them, they will at least acquire - they have knowledge which, by enabling them to appreciate the promises, recipes and sophistications of people who would like to impose them on them, will also protect them against the illusions and prestige of the so-called enlightened Cabalists.

II. Mytho-Physico-Cabalo-Hermetic Concordance

I filled a balloon with dephlogisticated air, I filled another with air from the atmosphere, I put an animal of the same species in each of the two balloons. He who breathed in atmospheric air, after three, four or five days, fell on the side of weakness and inanition; the one that I had put in the dephlogisticated air after the same space of time enjoyed the best health and the greatest strength. I repeated this experiment several times and on several animals of different species, the results were constantly uniform.

A dog, in a balloon full of atmospheric air, could only live for a little more than four days; he lived for nineteen in dephlogisticated air. A cat lived twenty-two days in dephlogisticated air; it could only live five and a half days in atmospheric air.

I introduced a certain quantity of dephlogisticated air into a room. I noticed that pure air was much heavier than the air of the atmosphere; it always took the underside and constantly chased away the atmospheric air above it. This last experience demonstrated to me the truth of the circulation of which Hermes Trismegistus speaks in the Emerald Table, pure air being heavier than the air of the atmosphere, circulates from top to bottom and only rises when it is phlogistoned, that is to say when it is loaded with vapors; the effect of flammable air and that of smoke are proof of this theory.

If by the results of my first operation, I convinced myself that the operation of pure air prolonged the life of animals four or five times longer than that of atmospheric air, I also realized that when the atmospheric air was too dephlogisticated, far from prolonging the life of the animals which inhaled it, it on the contrary hastened their death. The vital fire was there so close and had such great force there, that instead of being attracted by the interior vital fire of the animals, it on the contrary attracted theirs and made them expire in the air, which, if it had been more modified, would have increased the subject of their life.

The dangers to which one would inevitably expose oneself by the effect of this deadly attraction by inhaling the dephlogisticated air, made me look at this physics experiment, less as a discovery applicable to the good of humanity than as an adminicle, as a basis very suitable for carrying our views infinitely further than the limits of positive Physics. I could not hide from myself that the dephlogisticated air containing a greater part of the vital fluid which is the source and support of life, must, by making it more manifest, by means undoubtedly little known, carry life men well beyond the limits that age seems to prescribe to him today. This idea of ​​which I was sovereignly imbued, The Cosmopolitan scholar said: “Est in aere vitae occultus cibus”, “it is in the air that the nourishment of life is hidden”. This passage has indeed become an axiom among enlightened people. Today we no longer doubt that air is the only substance of the Macrocosm which contains the principles of life and subsequently those of its conservation.

All the Hermetic Philosophers assure that with a few drops of their elixir, they cured all illnesses, they restored the old, by increasing their strength, and restored life to the sick, when it was ready to die. This elixir could only be a liqueur. The Philosophers had therefore succeeded either in condensing into liquor the air which they had purified, or in obtaining frozen air which they had reduced to quintessence.

The point of difficulty that formed my imagination lay in being able to condense the air into liquor or in finding a condensed matter which was a product of the air.

The air of the atmosphere nor the dephlogisticated air could provide me with a means of achieving the ends I proposed due to the absolute impossibility of condensing them.

I thought it would be more possible to find condensed matter which was a product of air; but after a great number of experiments on the various substances which the air produces as dew, storm rainwater, flos coeli, hail, snow, etc., I convinced myself of the difficulty of finding that which the Philosophers had used to compose their universal medicine; despite the uselessness of my research and my experiments, I was so strongly convinced of the possibility of the thing, that far from giving up the hope of a happier success, I on the contrary decided to read again the Hermetic authors, to study nature, to observe it as much as it would be possible for me, from the moment it comes from the hand of God, to the fullness of its effects in the three kingdoms of nature.

I read with more attention than I had ever done before, and in a more thoughtful manner, what Moses transmitted to us on the creation of the universe and that of man in particular.

I also followed the story of his flight at the head of the Israelites, and that of his march towards the promised land.

I drew from it inductions which seemed to me to support the most striking possibilities, and to speak to my reason in the most imperative manner.

The universe was taken from chaos, which was undoubtedly only a Silt composed of earth and water. Man was only made on the last day of universal Creation, because God, wanting him to be the summary of the Macrocosm, that is to say the summary of everything that He had already created, could only create the Microcosm or this summary after having brought the whole to its perfection. The body of man was created from a Silt extracted from the purest substance of the bodies already created.

His mind was drawn from the most quintessential part of all that constituted the universe.

“The soul, O Tat,” says Hermes in his Pimander, “is the own substance, or the own essence of God, for God has an essence such that only he can know himself. » The soul is not a separated part of this divine essence, as one separates a part from a material whole, but it is like an effusion, almost as the brightness of the Sun is not the sun itself. This soul is a God in men; because what properly constitutes humanity borders on the Divinity. This is what made
David say: “Ego dixi dii estis et filii excelsi omnes. »

The soul maintains itself through thought and contemplation of the divine light to which it owes its origin.

The body draws its nourishment from the purest substance of the three kingdoms of nature.

The spirit is nourished by principles analogous to itself which it finds in the air that man breathes. That is to say that the soul of the world, the universal spirit are its special and particular food... it is the instrument which God uses to give form to the Universe and being to all mixed ones.

The preservation of the body is entrusted to the mind. It is he who works in the inner laboratories, the foods which nourish him. It is the true archaea of ​​which scientists place the greatest strength at the heart and at the orifice of the stomach. It is the igneous principle which constitutes the active soul of man, which gives to his body action and movement under the orders of the soul, as the Universe receives it through the simple Elements under the orders of God.

The spirit gives life to the body, it preserves it as much as its faculties allow it, it would make it almost immortal if it itself in all periods of life could be substantial in sufficient quality and quantity. This would be the case with the life of man, if his spirit could be nourished daily by a pure substance which was analogous to it, like a lighted lamp which would become almost inextinguishable if, in proportion as the oil was consumed, it was added. news.

We are forced to agree with the Philosopher Prophet, according to the analytical table of the substances which contribute to the formation of man, that he is the most perfect work of divinity and the most perfect production of nature; he has been made its king; in fact it seems to be intended only for him. However, he does not make a better use of it than that which brute animals make of it, except for the ridiculous satisfactions which his pride, his avarice and his self-esteem give him, when he can succeed in fulfilling the views of his pitiful passions. It is only through the burlesque ideas that they inspire in him that he respects himself, and that he places himself with arrogance above the brutes who, apart from these passions, nevertheless enjoy the same privileges as him, so that his pre-eminence and his royalty are no more than a chimera when by the means that God has given only to him alone, he does not know avoid the anxieties and infirmities to which all animals in general are subject.

The first duties of man should be to seek to know, to learn deeply and to use fruitfully, as the Egyptians, the Druids and the Hermetic philosophers had achieved, the beneficial productions that liberal nature spreads abundantly on the surface. of the globe. She presents to the eyes of her darling children the means to bring the perfection of their individual well above what her maternal care could have done because of the bark which envelops her insides and which she cannot break by her own strengths; the work required by the knowledge of these means and the development of its mysteries is reserved for hermetic art.

Earth and water are the two sensitive Elements, they contain air and fire; from the union of the first two a Lime is born which nature uses to form all bodies. This Silt is the next material of all generations. It is a kind of chaos where the Elements are confused.

If the Universe, man and all laughter come from a Slime, sound reason must tell us that in the work of the Philosophers which according to them is the creation of a small world, the first matter must be one Silt, and this chaotic Silt can only be the Silt of the air since air is the only substance in the macrocosm which contains and which is the vehicle of the vital fire in which all the virtues of Heaven and earth are contained.

“There was,” says the Scripture, “Genesis chap. 1, a chaos from which no individual was distinguished; the terrestrial globe was submerged in the Waters, they seemed to contain the Sky and contain in their bosom the seeds of all things. There was no light, all was darkness. The light appeared, it dissipated them and the stars were placed in the firmament. »

The work of philosophers is precisely the same thing: firstly it is a dark chaos, everything seems confused, so that it is absolutely impossible to distinguish the principles which compose the pure matter of the work. The Sky of the Philosophers is immersed in the Waters, darkness covers its entire surface, the light finally separates from it, the terrestrial Sun and Moon manifest themselves and come to spread joy in the heart of the Artist like life in the material.

The work of the Sages also seems to be modeled on the creation of man. God made the body of man from earth which he kneaded and which seemed inanimate; he inspired her with a spirit of life. What God did with regard to man, the agent of Nature does on the earth, or Philosophical Silt, he works him by his interior action in such a way that by giving him life he also gives him the provisions for strengthening.

The body of man is a principle of death analogous to this shapeless mass from which God formed the world, it represents darkness, the spirit of man holds and participates in this substance animated by the spirit of God which at the same time beginning walked on the Waters: "Spiritus Domini ferehatur super aquas", and which by the light which it spread there infused into the mass this heat which gives life to all created beings, and which at the same time gives them this virtue fertilizing, the principle of generation which provides each individual with the desire and the means to multiply his species.

God is the soul of everything, the spirit which wandered on the Waters is nature itself and the terrestrial globe is the matter to which the spirit communicates its vivifying virtues, that is to say, God imprints life to nature and nature to all bodies.

In the same way the soul of man animates his Spirit, as his material body receives life from Nature: from this we are forced to conclude that to arrive at the knowledge of Nature, we must go back to this spirit of God which walked on the Waters, because it is only he who contains life and it is only with him that we can compose the universal medicine of the Philosophers.

Let positive chemistry amuse itself in destroying and decomposing the mixtures, in which, after the laborious labors which it requires, one can find only the results of bodies deprived of the vivifying substance which Nature had imparted to them.

Through this chemistry, one learns to distinguish the bases and the different terrestrial and material substances which have contributed to the formation of the mixtures in order to extract from them remedies as susceptible to corruption as the very animal to which they are administered.

Transcendent chemistry, on the contrary, does not destroy any body, but it seeks to know the spiritual substance through which all compounds receive life and subsequently after having known it, it seeks to compose an incorruptible quintessence which can make up for the daily loss and to the decline that man's life experiences when he has passed the season of his brilliant years, and to introduce into his material body the incorruptibility which is the essence of his life, to which he owes his strengths, his graces and his youth.

The spirit infused in the womb with the very seed which animates it works there to form and perfect the dwelling and the dwelling which it must inhabit, according to the species and the quality of the materials which the passive substance or the patient part, and again according to the layout of the premises and the specification of the material. If the materials are of good quality, the building will be more solid, the temperament will be stronger and more vigorous.

If the materials are bad, the body will be weaker and more languid and less able to resist the assaults it will have to sustain as long as it remains. If matter is susceptible of a more delicate and more perfect organization, the child will be more alert, more ready, more lively, the spirit will manifest itself in the actions of his life with more brilliance and sagacity, because that the spirit in the mother's womb will have arranged its organs in such a way as to be able to exercise its functions freely thereafter, but if the matter is gross and earthly, if the spirit which is infused therein by man is weak by itself, by its lack of force or quantity, the organs will be defective or vitiated, the spirit will only be able to work at its home weakly, and the child which will come from it will be more or less stupid, that due to the obstacles that the mind will encounter in the organization of the body, the soul will have less intellectual faculties, so that it will only be able to manifest its perceptions approximately as light penetrates and appears to us through thick fog. Corpus quod corrumpitur agravat animam, et terrena inhahitatio deprimit sensum, multa cogitantem (Sap. 9).

This is why reason in children only manifests itself at a certain age, and in some rather than others as their interior organization becomes more or less advanced. This is why also in proportion as the organs of man weaken, we must attribute the cause of their decadence to an accident or to the inevitable effects of age, reason, intelligence and memory also appear to be weakening.

Man would experience none of the cruel and humiliating vicissitudes to which the weakness or imperfection of his organization subjects him, if he could increase the volume, the strength and the quality of his mind by the philosophical quintessence, which being a small portion of the universal spirit of man and having a common focus with the spirit of man, would give the latter the means of strengthening, disposing and perfecting the organization of the body at the same time as it would free the soul from the bonds of matter which in certain individuals absorbs almost entirely the faculties to which its divine origin makes it susceptible.

It follows from the truths contained in the preceding digression that, in the assembly of the substances which contribute to the formation of man, God infused the soul and the spirit in the first man with the faculty of reproducing them in children; the two substances transplanted into the woman's womb find there the matter which they must work, vivify and animate. "You who ask God for the gift of the philosopher's stone, says the author of the Germanic rhymes, beware of looking for it in herbs, in animals, in minerals, vitriols, alums, salts are not worth nothing for that, lead, iron, tin, copper, even gold and silver can do nothing for the magisterium, but take Hyle or cahos, or the first matter, principle of everything. » It is the Protheus of the Ancients who, as said
Virgil Georg. 4: “Omnia transformat sese in miraculous rerum. »

It is only in this chaotic matter that the fermentative virtue is found without specification. “The virtue enclosed in this matter, says Philalethes, is the masterpiece of nature and the miracle of the world. It is this virtue that makes water become grass, plant, tree, fruit, blood, flesh; stone, minerals: finally it is she who forms everything. Look for her, she deserves it and only look for her; when you possess it, it will crown your happiness, since it is an inestimable treasure, but I must inform you, he adds, that the fermentative quality does not work outside its species, and that the salts do not do not have the power to ferment metals. It is not that with the first being of Salt it is not possible to extract a mercury from metals; but this extracted mercury is all the less suitable for the work, that the primum ens of Salt renders the mercury from which it has extracted a quality much inferior to common mercury; because in this operation the alkalis separate the sulfur from the extracted mercury, which renders the latter more distant from the metallic nature than is common mercury.

The fermentative virtue extracted from the chaotic subject can alone separate from raw mercury an earthly matter which burns like coal, and a humidity which dissolves in common water. The impure matters that the chaotic subject separates from quicksilver have made the Philosophers say that crude mercury had two original stains: the first is a filthy and dirty earth, the second is very much like dropsy; what remains of the quicksilver in this admirable operation is its predestined element, it is a heavy and mercurial water to which the fermentative virtue has communicated a spirit of life which is the true embryonic sulfur of the invisible water of the philosophers.

This operation made the author of the New Chemical Light say: “No water in the Isle of Philosophers is suitable for this extraction, for this animation, except that which is drawn from the rays of the Sun and the Moon. »

When with the first mercury of the Philosophers we managed to extract mercury from raw mercury, and to bring them together to the point of making the same homogeneous substance, this double substance is called double mercury by Trevisan, gold composed by Philalethes. It is the Rebis of the Philosophers or the Chicken of Hermogenes. It is of this double mercury that the followers said: “Est in mercurio quidquid quaerunt sapientes: in eo enim, cum eo, et per eum perficitur magisterium. »

One can indeed reach the magisterium with the Double Mercury alone without adding gold, because this mercury contains the principles of gold, this is what made the philosophers say that mercury was a crude gold, as the gold was cooked mercury.

The matter which conceals the fermentative virtue is the same as the hermaphroditic Venus of the adepts; it is, they say, a moist substance, the universal spirit of the world, a viscous vapour: from it comes the Rose, the tulip, gold, metals, and generally all mixtures. According to Basil Valentin, it is everything in all things, that is to say, it is specific and unites with the seminal virtues of all natural mixtures to make them grow and to multiply them.

Synesius, the Cosmopolite, Philalethes and almost all the wise men agree on this chaotic matter, some have called it Green Lion, others Green Duenech, like Paracelsus and Riplaeus; but the majority called it Hyle. “Their mercury,” they say, “is imprisoned and chained in this spiritual mineral chaos that nature presents to them, from where it can only be delivered by the help of hermetic art, which comes to help nature and which begins where she has finished. »

The mercury released from its first coagulation contains within it a dual nature: one igneous and fixed and the other volatile and humid; it is the seminal point that must be developed to reduce the spiritual seed of power into action and make the invisible visible, says Basil Valentin.

The first mercury of the Philosophers contains only the spiritual mineral virtue, and the second mercury furnishes the material principle of gold, one gives life, the other matter, and the union of the two forms the double mercury, or the azoth of the Philosophers.

Appendices.

6. The Hebrew author whose title is the house of Melkitsedek speaks of a first Hermes in these terms: “The house of Canaan saw a man of consummate wisdom emerge from its midst, named Adris or Hermes: he instituted the first of schools, invented letters, sciences, arts; among the number of sciences, there was one which he only communicated to his priests, under the condition that they would keep it for themselves with an inviolable secret. He obliged them by oath to divulge it only to those who, after long trials, would have been found worthy of succeeding them. The Kings forbade them to reveal it under penalty of life. »

Alkandi and Gelaldinus mention the second Adris or Hermes nicknamed Trismegistus par excellence. These two authors express themselves thus: “In the time of Abraham, Hermes or Adris second lived in Egypt, peace be with him, he was named Trismegistus because he was at the same time prophet, philosopher and King; he taught the art of metals, Alchemy, the science of numbers, natural magic, the science of Spirits. The science of nature was what led him to all the other sciences. »

Pythagoras, Empedocles, Archelaus the Priest, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Democritus, etc., drew their knowledge from the writings of Hermes communicated to them by the Egyptian priests.

Eusebius expressly declares according to Manethon that Hermes was the teacher of the hieroglyphs, that he reduced them to order and revealed them to the priests, that Manetho high priest explained them in secret to Ptolemy Philadelphus who, although very communicative, nevertheless did not never revealed them.

Zosimus Panopolite, Eusebius, Synesius, assure that this Science was cultivated for a long time in Memphis.

Plutarch, Greek theologian, physicist, says that the ancient theology of the Greeks was only a discourse of Natural Physics hidden under the veil of fables. He even tries to explain it by saying that Latona was the Night, Apollo the Sun, Jupiter the Heat. He adds that the Egyptians said that Osiris was the Sun, Isis the Moon, Jupiter the universal Spirit spread throughout all nature, and
Vulcan the Fire.

In the first philosophical operation, Latona is the daughter of Night, in the second, she is Night itself. It is in the second part of the operation that she gives birth to Diana and Apollo, that is to say the hermetic Sun and Moon. It was also the Latona of the second operation that Morien wanted to talk about in his interview with King Calid, when he said: “Dealbate Latonem et rumpite libros. » It is, however, very important to note that in the first as in the second operation Latona or the Laton must be whitened.

In the second operation where Latona is the black blacker than the black of the philosophers, her whitening gives birth to Diana and Apollo, instead of in the first operation, her whitening gives birth to the Doves of Diana or the fiery Spirit of Raymond Lulle.

Hieroglyphics were considered sacred; they were kept hidden in the most secret places of the Temples. It was only through the explanation of hieroglyphics that one was initiated into the secret knowledge of nature. These explanations were only made in what was called the Sanctuary and only to those whom we found worthy by the extent of their genius and their wisdom.

Origen, Against Celsus book. He says that the Egyptian priests entertained the people with fables, and that they hid their natural Philosophy under the veil of the Gods of the country.

Coringius was forced to confess that the priests of Egypt practiced the art of making gold, and that chemistry had originated there.

Diodorus of Sicily, Antiq., book. 4, chap. 2, speaks at length about a secret that the Kings of Egypt had for making gold.

7. Moses, initiated into the mysteries of the Egyptian priesthood, was the one of his time who delved the most into the sublime sciences of which the two Hermes had been the editors. He penetrated the meaning of the hieroglyphs and used the same means to which they added the parables, to preserve and transmit to posterity all the sciences that he had acquired.

Philo the Jew, lib. 1st De vita Mosis, reports that Moses learned
symbolic Philosophy or the science of Nature in Egypt.

Saint Clement of Alexandria relates the same thing from Moses and adds that the Egyptian priests only taught this science to the Children of Kings or to their own children.

Rambam, Hebrew author, assures In Exordio Genesis that everything contained in the law of the Jews and Hebrews is written in an allegorical sense, and in a parabolic way, to hide from the people the secrets of the sublime science of Nature .

Solomon looked upon hieroglyphs, proverbs, riddles, parables as objects worthy of study by a sage. “The Wise,” he said, “Proverb. chap. I, will devote himself to the study of hieroglyphs and parables, he will apply himself to interpreting the fictions and enigmas of the Ancients, he will penetrate the meaning of the parables, he will discuss the proverbs to discover the science hidden there. »

Solomon strictly forbade the priests from explaining the meaning of hieroglyphs, parables, etc., anywhere other than in the temples and to their disciples. Each temple had a kind of college where young people who had demonstrated good morals were received to be instructed in the principles of the priestly art. They were called Levites.

Hyram was the high priest established there by Solomon; before reaching the Priesthood, that is to say the rank of Master, there were two grades to pass: that of apprentice and that of companion. The places where the apprentices and companions assembled to be documented were not the same, they were distinguished in the temples by two columns, at each of which there was a high seat for the priests under whose regency they stood. found.

The column of apprentices was marked by this sign in the Zodiac denotes Aries or the month of Mars; the column of companions was marked by a bull's head which in the Zodiac designates the month of April. These mysterious signs for the Philosophers were later interpreted in a ridiculous manner by people who did not know their etymology: that of the sign of Aries, undoubtedly by its resemblance to the Greek y, by the word Jaquin; and that of the sign of Taurus by the word Boos; to which they neither attributed nor could attribute any meaning.

These two signs among the initiates indicated not only the first two months of the year and those where Philosophical work was to begin, but they were also two hieroglyphs of Mercury son of Maya, or first Mercury of priestly art.

From the rank of companion, one passed to that of Master or priest to which one could only be elevated after the most rigorous tests, and in the Sanctuary of the Temple which was the most secret place, called the Holy of Holies, from name of Osiris which according to Plutarch means Saint; according to Macrobius the place where we see clearly the place where we see the Light; according to Horus Apollo this place was called Makurenos (place of death, place of putrefaction, place of development). All these different names were equally suitable for this secret place, but the last one, the one attributed to it by Horus Apollo, is in the eyes of a Philosopher the most significant. According to Apuleius, this secret place in the Temples of the Druids was indicated by this inscription: Virgini pariturae (to the virgin who is to give birth).

But as in all times as well as in all nations, the number of men ambitious for glory and fortune, without being ambitious for the works which lead to one or the other, has been infinitely greater than that of studious men; the high priest Hyram was assassinated by the disciples to whom he had had the firmness to constantly refuse the rank of master. The murderers were punished, the least guilty were driven from the Temple. These have not been able to achieve the knowledge of God through the sublime knowledge of the science of Nature (called by the Sages "Natural Magic", the name of which the poorly educated people pronounce only with fear, cujus sapientia est stultitia coram Deo) devoted themselves to the study of negromancy called black magic which was facilitated by magicians and false prophets.

When Cambyses, King of the Persians, ruined Egypt, the priests dispersed; they carried into Greece the sacerdotal art enveloped in the fictions of Egyptian Theology to which they adapted all the Gods of Paganism. They transformed Isis and Osiris into Juno and Jupiter, Venus and Mars, etc. In the Gauls under the name of Druids, they built temples, they established schools there as in Egypt and for the people, they formed a cult related to the Egyptian and Greek divinities, under the veil of which they taught the mysterious art to their disciples. They had erected a temple to Isis, in a village corruptly called Issi, situated two leagues from Paris. It was, in fact, the most proper place to begin the labors required by hermetic philosophy; they had raised another on Mars, on the hill of Montmartre which took the etymology of its name, Mont de Mars. It was the one that they had intended, because of the elevation of its soil, to attract the celestial dew by the philosophical magnet prepared in the temple of Isis.

The name Gauls was originally given to the nation made up of several peoples gathered together because of the predilection they had for the God Mercury, and of which the Rooster (Gallus) was the symbol. According to the Gauls, Mercury was the dispenser of all the goods of heaven with which he maintained their commerce and their union; it is the science of this correspondence of Heaven with Earth that the Druids called the science of natural magic. The rooster that they had dedicated to Mercury also had a more mysterious meaning than the one they commonly gave it: according to this, it designated the vigilance and care that the people had to bring to agricultural work, as an essential condition for worship of Mercury to make it favorable. But according to the mysterious sense of art,

It is on the model of the Egyptian temples and those of the Druids that Raymond Lulle, famous Hermetic philosopher, formed a school in which he taught the great principles of the science of nature, to the precepts of which he added the gradual knowledge of matter. and the manipulations required by each gradation. The last grades to which the material reached were only taught in the most secret places of his school and only to the disciples who, after having distinguished themselves by their application and by their zeal, were judged worthy of being promoted to the venerable rank of master. . After promotion to this eminent grade, they were instructed in the full extent of power to which the adaptations proper to the philosopher's stone could elevate them.

These schools were the origin of the societies known as Freemasons; these societies owed their establishment to apprentices and inapplicable journeymen who had not been able to achieve the rank of master; However, proud of the fame of the schools of which they had been the disciples, they undertook to form new schools under the name of Lodges, in which they taught, under the shadow of the mystery, only the little that their dissipation had allowed them to do. to learn lessons from their master; that is to say, they could only teach the words, the crust and the surfaces of the sublime science, to the knowledge of which they had not been able to attain.

In proportion as these lodges have moved away from their origin, they have also moved away from the true meaning that the first teachers could have given to certain words of which today we do not have the slightest idea. These words which no longer mean anything have become their secrets, and what had first been instituted by the Egyptian priests only to train Prophets and sages, and by Raymond Lulle to train hermetic philosophers, such as became so in this school Riplée and Christophe bishop of Paris, is today only a place of assembly where we only deal with mômeries, pusillanimities and essentially with sumptuous banquets in which we pronounce without ceases words to which they attribute no other meaning than that of bread and wine and water.

“O Egypt, O Egypt,” said Hermes in Asclepios, “there will remain of priestly science only fictions and words whose hidden meaning and divine mysteries men will not penetrate. This prophecy has long been fulfilled.

The meaning of the word Ophir has not been better preserved than those used by Freemasons. Ophir in priestly language (the priestly language was what we call the ancient Egyptian language) among the Egyptian priests meant hidden gold, gold
mysterious. This gold was made in the Temples by hermetic art; Part of it was intended for the embellishment and maintenance of the Temples and the priests, to whom no kind of heritage was ever attributed, and the other part of the gold was intended for the Kings; but as everything that had any connection with natural science was always shrouded in mystery and fiction, the immense quantity of gold that Hyram made high priest, either to make his temple the most magnificent and richest in the world, or to cover the excessive expenses Solomon indulged in, made them suppose in the eyes of the people that every year Solomon sent ships to Ophir to look for gold; hence became the most useless searches of geographical travelers to discover where Ophir could be placed from where Solomon had obtained such a prodigious quantity of gold.

8. The material of priestly art is a silt composed of earth and water, that is to say of two substances, one of which is fixed and the other volatile. The Egyptian priests personified these two substances: they called Osiris or Hidden Fire the active principle, dry and hot, to which they attributed the functions of the male; they called Isis the passive, cold and humid principle which took the place of the female. They added a third to whom they gave the name Typhon, whom they assumed to be their uterine brother, because the radical and celestial homogeneous substances represented by Isis and Osiris owe their origin to Heaven and the heterogeneous, impure, accidental spirits and terrestrial designated by Typhon are the vapors of the earth which in fiction is supposed to be their common mother.

Whatever execration that Egyptian theology has devoted to Typhon, it is nonetheless true that without him Isis and Osiris could not be frozen and made sensitive, so that it is to this impure deity that the wise owe their knowledge of their first matter, which without this cause of condensation would remain invisible and impalpable as it is in the air.

Isis and Osiris contracted marriage, says Manethon, in the womb of their mother and Isis emerged pregnant with Arueris or Horus. From the meeting of the first two principles, a third is in fact born which is their son, which contains and contains within itself his father and its mother as to their radical substance, that is to say that when the two principles which constitute the pure matter of hermetic art had been brought by the manipulations of the artist to this state of purity, they did not were no longer called or known by the names of Isis and Osiris, or first chaotic matter, but in this state of purification they were the matter of the wise referred to as Horus by whom Typhon was slain. That is to say again that then Isis and Osiris who are the principles of all life of which Horus is formed, are freed from the principles of destruction and death which are the Typhon, the Phlogiston or the vapors of the earth which had condensed.

According to Apuleius, the goddess Isis speaks thus of her feast: "My religion will begin tomorrow, to last eternally, that is to say that the religious science of nature and the work of the first seed, origin of all production and of the wonders of the world will last as long as the universe, and that it is observed there every day and incessantly. » He adds: “That when the storms of winter are appeased, when the troubled, troubled and tempestuous sea is made calm, peaceful and navigable, my priests will offer me a boat as a demonstration of my passage by sea into Egypt under the conduct of Mercury commanded by Jupiter. This is the great secret of the Hermetic Philosophers for the extraction of their matter and for the corruption from which my son Horus, or the philosophical Royal child, must be born. »

There is no passage in the treatises which the Hermetic Philosophers have written which is so clear, so true and so instructive for the beginning of the Hermetic work as that reported by Apuleius relating to the feast of Isis.

Isis and Osiris according to the feeling of the best educated authors included all the Gods of paganism, Isis according to them was Ceres, Juno, the Moon, the Earth, Pallas, Minerva, Proserpina, Thetis, Cybele, Venus, Diana, Hecate, Bellona, Themis, Ramnusia, Nature, etc.

It is all these different names which gave rise to that of Myrionyme which bore Isis or the Goddess with a thousand names. Osiris was also taken for all the Gods, he was Jupiter; Vulcan, Mars, Apollo, Phoebus, Cupid, Mithras, the Ocean, etc., but he was not Mercury because he could only exist through the union of Isis and Osiris, he alone represented both.

The mysterious story of Isis and Osiris, or rather this fiction, subsequently became the foundation of Egyptian Theology which was hidden under the apparent symbols of these two deities, while the priests and philosophers saw in them the most sublime secrets of Nature.

Osiris was for the people the Sun, or the Star of the day, and Isis was the Moon; the first was, on the contrary, for the philosophers, the terrestrial sun, the vital and hidden fire of nature, the igneous, fixed and radical principle which animates everything.

Isis was in their eyes the active and vital principle; this is why Apuleius, Metamorphoses, book I, speaks thus of this goddess: “I am Nature, mother of all things, the mistress of the elements, the beginning of the centuries, the sovereign of the Gods, etc. » Isis, in fact, was the mother of all things because united with Osiris, they together compose the luminous fluid which gives life to all Beings. She was the mistress of the Elements because united with Osiris, they were the simple Elements which element the four Elements. She was the beginning of the centuries because Isis and Osiris owe their birth to the substances that God separated from Chaos at the beginning of the world. She was the sovereign of the Gods because as has already been said, all the so-called pagan Gods owed their origin to Isis and Osiris.

Horus, their son, was considered by the Sages as the complement of the first hermetic operation, Apollo among the Philosophers, was the same as Horus; this is why they had Typhon killed in the first and Python in the second; they are an anagram of each other.

Vulcan was brother of Jupiter; he was cast down from Heaven; one was the central fire which we call Archaeus, like that of all bodies, and the other designates the celestial fire. Vulcan precipitated from the Heavens indicates that the fire of the archaeus is a portion, a derivative of the celestial fire.

The central fire is carried from bottom to top by the vapors which envelop it. Heavenly fire flows from top to bottom because pure air has more gravity than atmospheric air. Vulcan, it is said, forged the lightning of Jupiter, because in fact the matter of thunder and that of lightning is formed by the vapors of the bodies which remove the central fire, and constrain it to rise with them. He was the husband of Venus for the same reason that Osiris was the husband of Isis.

That is to say that the mythological Venus designating the first material of art, contained the central fire as Isis contained Osiris in her womb, and as Juno contained Jupiler. Vulcan made a net which enveloped Mars and Venus, because the vapors or the phlogiston which constantly envelop the central fire are the net which enchains Mars and Venus. This net is the same substance as Typhon which condenses Isis and Osiris.

9. Protheus is the son of Neptune or the Ocean which designates the sea of ​​the philosophers, Neptune, husband of the nymph Phenice, whose name means purpura color, that is to say that when the sea of ​​the philosophers became red like that of Moses, Neptune married the nymph Phoenice: this red sea gave birth to Protheus, that is to say the promised land, which Protheus or matter of the wise, as Virgil and Philalethes say, is transformed into all kinds things. It is this transformation of which the philosophers speak when they call this matter, sometimes Dragon, Lion, Serpent, sometimes agile vulture; the allusion to the metamorphoses of Prothée is taken as much from the different colors that matter takes on as from the change it undergoes in the course of hermetic operations.

The mythological fable of the fight of Archelous with Hercules means the same thing as that of Protheus, of Neptune, and that of the Nymph Phoenice. Archéloüs is son of the Ocean and the Earth. According to the hermetic sense it represents the first material of the work which must resolve into mercurial water. He wants to marry Deianira daughter of Oeneas, which means red wine, that is to say that when the first mercurial water has become red, Archelous wants to keep the result which is the earth, gum, adrop or Deianira; Hercules who is the artist also wants to possess it because it is the fruit of his previous work, this rivalry gives rise to discord and gives rise to the fight of the suitors: Archéloüs, to better resist the forces of Hercules, changes into a bull which is its symbol. Hercules grabs him by the horns and after tearing one off, he strikes him down. Defeated Archelous asks for his horn again and offers to Hercules to give him the horn Amalthea in place. This one accepts the exchange. Archéloüs, in fact, becomes for the artist who knew how to fight and defeat him, that is to say say reduce it to stone, the Source of all Goods, of which the horn Amathée is the hieroglyph.

Archelous, like Protheus, took whatever form he wanted. He transformed himself into a snake, a bull, an eagle. The horn of Amalthea is the horn of plenty. Corne Amalthée means “I heal everything at the same time”, that is to say animals, plants and minerals.

III. Analysis of mythological Mercury.

Mercury and Mercury are so often spoken of in the Books of the Philosophers and in the fictions of Mythology invented by the Sages, that it seems almost indispensable to demonstrate by the relations which they have, that the one and the other are one and the same thing.

Mercury was the son of Jupiter and Maya; some say that Maya was one of the Pleiades and a greater number say she was Cybele or the Earth.

Mercury was nursed by Vulcan in his mother's womb.

Mercury was born on a mountain where Juno suckled him from her breasts.

Barely out of the cradle he defeated Cupid, or love, in a struggle.

Afterwards he stole the tools from Vulcan and the scepter from Jupiter, et cetera.

Mercury born from Jupiter and Maya is the first material of the work, daughter of Heaven and earth that the celestial fire and the central fire combine to form.

Mercury was nourished in the womb of his mother by Vulcan, because Vulcan designates the central fire of the Globe which we call the archaeum of Nature, from the principles of which Mercury or the first matter of the Philosophers is substantiated as long as it remains in his mother's breast; that is to say in the bowels of the earth.

“Vulcan is the igneous fire of our stone, says d'Espagnet, canon 80, he is the archaeus of nature, the son and Vicar of the Sun; he moves, directs and perfects everything, provided he is set free, that is, provided Mercury comes into the world. » He adds that: “In the second work, the matter passes into putrefaction and becomes black or the heads of crows, the Philosophers call it Dark Sun or eclipse of the sun, the matter in fact must be called Dark Sun then, since before the first putrefaction of the second work, it was universal solvent, or Apollo disguised as a shepherd and guarding the oxen of Admetus. »

Mercury is born on a mountain, that is to say, when the artist, by purifying it, has rid this matter of the bonds of its first coagulation, or, if we can express it this way, when Mercury is freed of the afterlands, in which it was submerged, it is the leafy land of the Philosophers. He is their magnet, their magnesia, he has only yet acquired the wings placed at his heels, he must then be carried to a high place so that Juno or the air, by nursing him, completes the personification of him and him grow the wings he wears on his head. When it has been sufficiently nourished with the Celestial Dew, it becomes the first mercury of the Philosophers, which only needs a few manipulations to become their universal solvent.

Mercury stole the tools that Vulcan used, in the same way that a student steals his master, when under his doctrine he becomes as learned as himself. It is in the same way that must be interpreted the flight that Mercury makes of the Scepter of Jupiter because indeed the Mercury of the Philosophers contains the virtues and the properties of these Gods. He received those of Vulcan before he was born, and those of Jupiter through the food that Juno, filled with the prolific virtues of Jupiter, administered to him on the mountain where she nursed him.

Mercury defeated Cupid in a fight, it had to happen this way, because Mercury had twice as much strength as Cupid. This one had only the principle which leads animals to multiply, and the other contained within it the vital principle of Nature in the three kingdoms, animal, vegetable and mineral.

Mercury was represented as a young man with wings on his head and feet, holding a golden chain attached at one end to men's ears, he carried a Caduceus which was a golden rod, around which two serpents were twisted, which Apollo had given him as a present.

Mercury had wings on his feet and on his head because the hermetic Mercury is completely volatile, before it was fixed by the second operation of the work. In the second operation Mercury takes its name, it gradually becomes Saturn, Mars, Jupiter, the hermetic Moon and Sun, et cetera.

The golden chain by means of which Mercury led men wherever he wanted, was not, as mythologists claim, an allegory of the power that eloquence has on minds, but it was of what the hermetic Mercury being the principle of gold, and gold being the nerve of the arts, of commerce and almost the only object of human ambition, it becomes the motive of all the actions of men and engages them in all the steps that can lead to its possession.

The historical interpreters of mythology having found that the tongues of the victims were consecrated to Mercury did not imagine that this offering had any other object than the eloquence of the God; but if they had suspected the nature of this god and had paid attention to the fact that the tongues of the victims were only burned in the secret ceremonies of his cult, they would no doubt have thought that these sacrifices made in the secret designated rather that which the priests had sworn to keep on the explanation of mercury of the secret work of the wise, than the imaginary eloquence of this God.

The two snakes twisted around the Caduceus, one of which was male and the other female, represented the two substances of the work, one fixed and the other volatile. The first hot and dry, the second cold and humid, called by the Philosophers: Serpents, Dragons, brother and sister husband and wife, Gabrit and Beya, dog of Corassene and bitch of Armenia, agent and patient, et cetera.

These two substances which at first glance appear to have contrary qualities, nevertheless have such a perfect homogeneity between them that when they kiss, they become inseparable. It is by their combined virtues that the Golden Rod was produced, which Mercury could only receive from the hands of Apollo, since the latter designates as the Sun the complement of the hermetic work, it is apropos of these two substances that Raymond Lully in his treatise on the Quintessence said: "One must compose two substances opposites, one which has the property of fixing, hardening and freezing the other which is volatile, soft and not fixed. This second must be hardened, frozen and fixed by the first, and from these two there results a frozen and fixed stone which also has the virtue of freezing what is not, of hardening what is soft, of mollifying what is not. which is hard and to fix what is volatile. »

It is however good to observe what Raymond Lulle undoubtedly omitted on purpose: the first substance, before freezing, fixing and hardening the second, must be volatilized by the second, it is only by this indispensable manipulation that we fulfill the wish of the axiom of the Philosophers: fac volatile fixum and fixum volatile.

The two serpents of the Caduceus are the same material of the two dragons of Flamel and that of the two birds of Senior, et cetera. Mercury was often called by the Ancients, the three-headed God, he was considered a Celestial, Terrestrial and Marine God. In fact, through manipulations, he gradually acquired these three empires; when the hermetic earth, which the Philosophers called Adrop, Moses, the Promised Land and the mythology Deianira, Protheus, was formed from this water, Mercury is the god of the earth. When Mercury is still submerged in the Sea of ​​the Sages, he is the god of the Waters; when these two substances are united and they sublimate, Mercury becomes the god of Heaven; this is why the Philosophers said that their matter was a compound of three things: water, of earth and an igneous quintessence which vivified the other two principles. This quintessence is nothing but the instruments stolen from Vulcan, and the scepter stolen from Jupiter.

About this triform divinity, the author of the Rosary of the Philosophers expresses himself thus: “The material of the Stone of the Philosophers is Water, which is to be understood as water taken from three things; because there must be neither more nor less; the Sun is the male, the Moon is the female, and Mercury the sperm, which nevertheless makes only one mercury. »

Mercury swept the room where the Gods assembled. That is to say in the hermetic sense taken from what happens in the second operation of the work, that Mercury or the quintessential spirit of matter, constantly working in the vase to purify it, then sweeps away the assembly hall, and arranges it receive the Gods who are nothing other than the various colors that matter takes in its progression: the first color is black or Saturn, the second is gray or Jupiter, the third is white or the Moon, the fourth is citrine or Venus, the fifth is saffron or Mars, the sixth is purple red or the Sun. etc.

So that the colors that the material takes on in the second work gave birth to all the gods of Olympus. This is why Cybele was considered the mother of the gods, because being hermetic mercury, she necessarily became the mother of all the gods to whom the mercury of the Philosophers gave birth.

Such is this Mercury, so famous in ancient times and among all nations, to whom Hercules dedicated his Club when he had finished his labors which are those required by the first operation of the work and up to and including, until matter has been raised to the dignity of universal solvent.

This mercury was born from the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians and was then the subject of almost all the allegories and all the fictions of the poets; the lair in which this God inhabited and which Orpheus describes is very suitable for revealing the nature of the substances whose assembly characterized this hermetic god.

“The lair of Mercury,” he said, “was the source of all goods and all wealth and any wise and prudent man could draw them there. »

It is not difficult to penetrate the meaning of things that this sublime poet, raised by Egyptian priests and instructed in the mysterious art, expressed so well.

This cave hid the principle of wealth and that of health: it therefore had in its interior, the hermetic Mercury and the Stone of the Sages which is the result, because there is only this stone in the world to which we attribute and to whom we recognize these marvelous properties.

The lair of mercury is represented by the vase in which the artist places the matter, and the mercury which inhabits it is the fermentative virtue of this mercurial matter enclosed in the vase.

Before resuming the continuation of the work, which the analysis of Mercury interrupted, I will allow myself one more episode which is placed here naturally. It is that of transcribing the Emerald Tablet of the Father of Philosophers, of analyzing and interpreting it.

Hortulain and many other philosophers have explained it, but they have done it in such a mysterious way that it is less difficult to hear the text than the commentators.

The Mercury of Mythology and the Emerald Tablet of Hermes are the sacred foundations of the science of Nature. It is from this point that the Egyptian priests, the Prophets, the Druids, Moses, David, Solomon, King Calid and all the Philosophers who have existed started; these two subjects have such an intimate connection and such an immediate relationship that I thought it necessary to bring them together: this way of treating them, although new, will one day spread that will be difficult to find elsewhere.

IV. Emerald Table of Hermes Trismegistus

Text

for it will overcome every subtle thing and penetrate every solid thing. - Thus the world is created.- From this will be and will come out admirable adaptations of which the means is here.- And on this occasion I am called Hermes Trismegistus having the three parts of the philosophy of everyone. - What I said is complete about the operation of the Sun.

V. Interpretation.

The Emerald Tablet which is a green stone designates the first material of the work, like the green mantle of mercury, the green Duenech of Riplée, the green Lion of Paracelsus, the green Dream of Fabre. It is the hermaphroditic Venus. Nereus, Archelous, Neoptolemus, Silenus, Bacchus, Hylas, Rams, Bulls, Dragons, Serpents, etc.

What is above is like what is below: These are the wings placed at the feet of Mercury and those attached to his head. The food that Vulcan administered to him gave birth to the first, Jupiter, through the vehicle of Juno which is the air, gave him the second; but as the celestial eu represented by Jupiter and the central fire represented by Vulcan come from the same root, and that Vulcan before being cast down to earth was in heaven, we must conclude that the central leu comes from the vital fire. heavenly by the eternal circulation that God imposed on the latter, and consequently that what is above is like what is below.

To perpetuate the miracles of a single thing: That is to say that the central fire and the celestial fire having also contributed to the formation of the hermetic mercury, this mercury is that only thing with which miracles can be performed; it is indeed very proper to produce them in all genres.

And as all things came from One through the mediation of One: All things undoubtedly came from One, that is to say, all things came from the first chaos through the mediation of the universal spirit which walked on the leases, and by the will of God of which nature, or the universal spirit, is the immediate instrument, which finding itself placed between God and chaos, served them as medium and mediator as Hermes says; it is through its mediation, in fact, that the development of chaos has taken place.

Thus all things are born from this unique thing by adaptation: This unique thing is the hermetic mercury which, being a portion of the active soul of the Universe and Nature itself, also acts on the three natural kingdoms, because it adapts and is specific to each of them in particular, depending on whether the seeds of some or the ferment of others determine it; this is what made the philosophers say that in their mercury was enclosed the vivific virtue of animals, the vegetative virtue of plants and the fermentative virtue of minerals; and yet these three virtues were only one, which was equally adapted to the three kingdoms.

The Sun is the father and the Moon the mother: It is not the star of the day nor that of the night that we must understand, it is the hermetic sun and moon of which Hermes wanted to speak; the vital fire is the Sun of the Sages, the humid radical in which this fire is enveloped is the hermetic Moon. The union of these two substances forms hermetic mercury, son of both; the Egyptian priests expressed the same thing by Isis and by Osiris, of whom Morus or the philosophical Mercury was the son.

The wind carried it in its belly: The wind is nothing other than agitated air. The wind therefore carried the hermetic mercury in its belly, since the air is the substance which envelops it and which transmits it to us.

And the earth is its nurse: We have already seen the birth of the mercury of the Sages of Maya or the earth and we have said that in the womb of its mother, the central fire or Vulcan nourished it; this central fire is nothing other than the pure and subtle earth which elements the terrestrial Globe, and which is the cause of its fecundity, as we will see a few pages below. It is from this spiritual land that Hermes hears about.

The Father of all Telesme is here; its strength and power is complete if it is turned into the earth: It is as if Hermes had said: The universal mercury is the father of all natural productions, and it is here, since the mercury of the philosophers which is the abbreviated y is; and its strength or power will be complete, if the artist succeeds in fixing this mercury and reducing it to the nature of earth, that is to say, to stone, which is the stone of the philosophers whose strength or power is actually incomprehensible.

You will separate the earth from the fire, the subtle from the thick, gently and skillfully: That is to say, you must free mercury from the general nature of the bonds of its first coagulation or its aftereffect, as we have already said, and separate from the earth or the gross elements which absorb it, the central fire which resides there; but as the apparent substances of the chaotic matter of the Sages are earth and water, Hermes also understands that we separate the water from the earth and that after having purified both, we meet.

It rises from earth to Heaven and again descends to earth, and receives the force of higher and lower things: This operation takes place in the artist's vase: it is the effect of circulation, by means of which the virtues of the volatile substance are communicated, mingle and merge with those of the fixed substance which is at the bottom of the vessel; as the virtues of the fixed part mingle with the virtues of the volatile, in the circumstance of which Hermes speaks, it is the purified earth and water, designated in the previous article, which to be united must experience this circulation.

By this means you will have the glory of the whole world and for this all darkness will flee from you: When one possesses the stone of the philosophers, one possesses the key to the whole of Nature, by means of which nothing in nature can be hidden nor impenetrable. Such a man is all the more above his fellows because, independently of what nature prides itself on having formed him, nothing in this world can set limits to the extent of his genius and his ability. intelligence and its penetration.

In this is the strong force of all force, for it will overcome every subtle thing and penetrate every solid thing: The stone of the philosophers truly produces the effects announced by Hermes; when it fixes and transmutes the quick silver which is the subtle thing into Gold and it transmutes the imperfect metals into gold, it then penetrates the solid thing.

Thus the world was created: Hermes meant by this, as I have already observed, that the creation of the Stone of the Sages, seems to be a copy modeled on the Creation of the Universe.

From this will be and will issue admirable adaptations: That is to say, the Stone of the Sages is not limited in its potency to sublunary Nature only, but may be usefully adapted and employed to produce supernatural, and to become familiar with the science of the celestial nature to which the stone of the Philosophers leads those who possess it, as will be seen hereafter in the treatise on the Hermetic Kabbalah.

Of which the means is here: diffuse than abstract in the Emerald Tablet.

And on and this occasion I am called Hermes Trismegistus, having the three parts of the philosophy of all the world: This passage seems to authorize the feeling of certain philosophers who have pretended that the nickname Trismegistus was only given to Hermes, that because he had found the philosopher's stone, whose virtues extend over the three natural kingdoms.

What I said about the operation of the Sun is complete: Hermes understands for the operation of the Sun the hermetic work pushed to the stone of the philosophers that the wise have called the hermetic Sun, which in fact designates the last sign and the most complete of the success of the operation.

To succeed in carrying out the hermetic work, we must seek to know and find this Chaotic Silt, in which the fermentative virtue and the first mercury of the philosophers are contained. This is the basis on which all the labors of Hercules are based and that on which they invented the greater part of their hieroglyphics, their fictions, their parables and their riddles.

We can only count on the truth of this Ooze as long as it manifests in the various manipulations the signs indicated by the philosophers, by means of which we cannot err or misrecognize it.

After having recognized and picked this Linon in the season and at the time appropriate to it, it must be enclosed in a glass vase, dissolved, and distilled. By this distillation, it deposits an oily earth, a dark red, approximately the color of an animal liver, which with each cohobation increases in weight and quality. At the beginning of the work, the earth becomes Water, and through subsequent manipulations the water becomes earth: this is what made King Calid say, in his interview with the Philosopher Morien: “When I saw the water becoming earth, I recognized the truth of hermetic science. »

After having purified the earth and the water that came from it, they must be brought together; at the moment of the meeting, the first material of the work loses its name to take that of first material of the philosophers.

The simple Elements, or the fermentative virtue are contained in these two substances united, in such a way that when we have consciously separated the heterogeneities which intercepted their action, they act in concert one on the other, from which it results a homogeneous and harmonic whole called the Philosopher's Stone, Microcosm or small world.

By manipulating the real chaotic Ooze of the air, one easily and gradually guesses the philosophical enigmas, one goes through all the mythology and one penetrates the true meaning of certain passages of the Old Testament and that of all the Works of Solomon, one is also informed in such a clear and precise manner of the reality, the possibility and the means of conquering the fruit of the Garden of the Hesperides, that no human consideration can divert from his work the happy artist who has reached to tame the Flamingo Bulls to whose care he was entrusted.

The infusion of supercelestial influence is an active, invigorating and invisible power, which descends from the empyrean Heaven and which mingles, says Basil Valentin, with the properties of the stars; from this mixture, he says, a third being was formed between Heaven and earth, which is the first production that the air transmits to all the sublunary mixtures. If this spiritual principle is found in the nature of each being for its existence, it also finds that which it needs for its repair and for its daily nourishment in the spiritual fluid, of which the air is the envelope and the vehicle: “ Happy passage of the Red Sea, he adds, for anyone who knows how to pass and cross it on dry ground; here is the Book, the torch, the mirror, the precept and the guide of Hermetic Philosophy, of the knowledge of celestial and terrestrial Nature, knowledge of God and of ourselves. »

Shortly after having put the silt of air in the vase, the march of the work begins with the view of the Red Sea. It must be crossed on dry ground, if one wishes to enjoy that of the Promised Land. This Earth is not the one on which we walk, on the contrary it walks on our heads. It is this Virgin Earth in which the spiritual fluid is corporified by love, say the Philosophers and which they have called Salt of Wisdom, Salt nitre vital, chaotic essence, Universal Spirit, mercury of life, et cetera.

There was only this land on the surface of the globe that could produce the enormous bunches of grapes brought to Moses by the two Israelites whom he sent to the promised land; it could only be with such extraordinary grapes that Moses could compose the liquor which reduced the golden calf into a liquid and drinkable substance whose virtues cured the Israelites of Leprosy. If Moses had not crossed the Red Sea on dry ground, he would never have seen the promised land and would never have had in his possession the celestial grapes that it produces.

This promised land is the pure and subtle land which elements the Terrestrial Globe; according to Paracelsus, it is its predestined element, its simple element, it is this spirit of fertility intended to vivify it: it is she which gives it the qualities proper to serve as matter for plants and minerals, which develops their germ, which unites with them and makes them vegetate.

The Red Sea of ​​Moses, the one by which Osiris and Bacchus returned to Egypt after their expedition, that of the Jew and Philosopher Abraham is the same substance and the same matter as that which produces the blood of the innocents of Flamel, that the red wine of Raymond Lull, that the red lion of Cosstolanée and Paracelsus, that the source of the red gum of Mary the prophetess, sister of Moses, or that the stinking menstruation of Riplée, that the sea of ​​blood of Fabre, that the blood of Pythagoras, as that of the igneous Dragon of Hermophilus and Philalethes, etc.

It is the blood of the Nemean Lion which is said to have descended from the disk of the Moon or born from its spit and saliva which after its birth was carried to Mount Ophelte by Iris, messenger of Juno.

It is for the same reason that the wise inventors of mythological fictions caused Mercury, son of Maya, to be born on a mountain; because until the mercury from below or terrestrial has attracted the mercury from above or celestial, the artist has only the wings attached to the feet of mercury; that is to say, he still only owns half of the whole.

The Nemean lion was killed by Hercules who, after having killed it, stripped it of its skin, that is to say, Hercules did what the Philosophers order to do: tac occultumi manifestum.

Basil Valentin says in his 12th Key: “We must strip the oriental animal of its Lion skin. »

The first matter of the work represented by the Nemean Lion could not be counted among the Philosophical Stars as was the Lion of Nemea, which was placed among the Stars, only previously the Philosophical matter, like the Nemean Lion has been brought to Mount Ophelte which means mount attracting, mount of attraction. It is the same reason which caused the Druids to build a temple to Mars, on the hill of Montmartre: the same cause caused Prometheus to be tied to a rock and Danaé (which means loving) to be locked up at the top of a tower where she received Jupiter which designates astral Gold or the vivifying substance enclosed in the air.

Lee Limon of the air is the mythological Silene who is said to be the son of the Sun and the Moon, of whom the Earth was the nurse and who himself becomes the foster father of Bacchus son of Jupiter.

Silenus is represented as an old man always full of wine, which means that Silenus returns to the artist who knows how to find and coerce him, the vinous spiritual fluid with which nature has liberally filled him; the Ram or the Goat on which Silenus rides is one of the philosophical mysteries. It designates at the same time both the first material and the season in which it must be picked. It was one of the hieroglyphic symbols of Mercury, which is what made the Cosmopolite, Philalethes and several other philosophers say that the hermetic mercury had to be extracted by means of the magic steel found in the belly of the Ram.

The substance found in the belly of Aries is in fact not only suitable for serving as a magnet to attract celestial dew, but it is also very suitable for attracting the nucleus of common mercury and introducing the fermentative virtue into it.

This rural and rustic Silenus is the Ooze of the air which must be dephlogisticated; to use the expression of Positive Physics, by separating the vivifying substances from the corrupting matters. This Silenus is the true natural hyle in which are contained the virtues of Heaven and Earth; but they are neither separated nor distinguished; the top is there like the bottom, the bottom is like the top; the elements are there confused without distinction, without action and without order, everything is there in a deep silence and in darkness, without any appearance of life or fecundity; however this chaotic land is animated and conceals a hidden life, says Basile Valentin.

When this hyle is opened and the artist has separated, purified and united the elements in the form of a thickened and gummy oil which is the philosophical compound or the raw material of the philosophers, he soon has the happiness of seeing the Sun come out earthly from Thetis's womb, to touch him, to raise him, to feed him and to see him respond to her care.

The Wise Man sees darkness before light, he also sees darkness after Light, he also discovers darkness mixed with light, says Philalethes; these are the natural effects, he says, of the union of Heaven with the Earth or of that of the higher Waters with the Lower Waters. From this union, he adds, results the birth of the Mercury of the Philosophers.

It is not that this primitive Mercury is not indispensable in common mercury, in metals, as in all the mixed things which have life, but independently of what it is specified there, it is still imprisoned and chained in a manner to leave the artist only with the means to expel it by destroying the mixture without being able to see it or grasp it. In the first material of art, on the contrary, this primitive mercury, general and indeterminate to any genre, is found closer, less restricted, more abundant and very easy and very quick to extract. The mercurial substance and the sulfur are found there with their fire in weight and measure, the two serpents of the Caduceus embrace only weakly, that is to say, they are easily separated, fixed and the volatile one designated by the two serpents. The volatile contains water and rises with the air, the fixed contains earth and remains with salt and fire. However, we only see earth and water, from one of which we must remove gravity and from the other phlegm in order to subsequently unite them into one and the same substance.

The matter coming from this meeting is that which the Philosophers call their magnet, their magnesia with which they attract the air from the air of Avislée or the nucleus of the air, which condenses and freezes in part with its magnet .

This is the only way to draw true celestial dew from the influence of the stars. Abraham the Jew and Philosopher calls this dew Sacred Bulb. Christophe bishop of Paris, certifies that when this celestial dew is joined to its magnet, it is the treasure most to be desired: Thesaurus desiderabilis.

This hermetic operation gave rise to the fable of Prometheus, who for having snatched the Fire from Heaven, with which he animated the mixtures of the sublunary nature, was tied by Mercury to a rock where a vulture devoured his liver which was constantly reborn. , torture from which he was delivered by Hercules.

Hercules is the artist, and the liver of Prometheus is the Philosophical magnet whose color is perfectly similar to that of the liver; the vulture which devoured the liver is the astral gold or the nucleus of the air, attracted by the magnet. The vulture or the substance which is supposed to tear the liver only dissolves it in part, and always ends up condensing and uniting with it, so that the vulture which gnawed at the liver became the liver itself. This conversion gave rise to the idea among wise mythologists of the rebirth of Prometheus' liver.

We could, however, criticize these Sages for having multiplied too many fictions to express the same subject; They formed a body of fables in the thickness of which it is very difficult to distinguish the object or the fact that they wanted to express.

The liver of Prometheus and the vulture are the same substances as Danae which attracts Jupiter, as the wings of Mercury's heels which attract those of the head, as Venus which attracts Mars, etc.

Philalethes calls this magnetine material the Eagle's Glue, because Jupiter, whose symbol the eagle is, signified the fire of the air or its vivifying substance: this is why Juno, who designated the air, and who did not However, the primitive humid man was regarded as his wife and his sister.

Juno in her cradle, nourished by the Ocean and by Thetis, is the first material of the wise. When Juno had attracted and was imbued with the prolific virtues of Jupiter, she conceived and gave birth alone to Hebe, goddess of Youth; and the cause of this conception and this birth, say the mythologists, was having eaten lettuce, so that one could say with more truth than the mythologists, that the air below having become pregnant from the air above gave birth to Youth. Indeed, when the air below and that above are purified and brought together by the artist and reduced into quintessence they form this Celestial Arcanum designated by the fountain of youth which brings about the rejuvenation of all natural mixtures.

“God created from the earth,” says Ecclesiasticus, chap. 38, vers. 4, a sovereign medicine which the wise man will not despise for his health and for the prolongation of his life. »

Solomon, in his Proverbs, chap. 4, verses. 9 and 10, seems to have wanted to comment on this passage from Ecclesiasticus, when he says in speaking of this medicine: “Whoever finds it will increase the strength of the body and the graces of the face. She will give to the forehead

18. Hebe, daughter of Juno or of the first material of the Philosophers, could only marry Hercules or the artist. She was the fruit of his labors: she was to be his reward, but Hercules could only marry her when he had achieved the dignity of a demi-God. He became one by his death, that is to say that his death was nothing other than the passage from man, like the rest of men, to the dignity of Philosopher, which we can in fact regard as a demigod. Hebe represents the fountain of Youth of which every true Philosopher is necessarily in possession, a brilliant crown, its fruit and its use will preserve the wise man from all illness and will multiply his beautiful days and the years of his life, because it is his own life. »

The silt of the air is this air from below which we have just spoken of, which by conformity of origin, essence and virtues, attracts its fellow from above: Similis simili gaudet.

This silt, when prepared by a skillful hand, gives after the first manipulations, the white smoke that Philalethe calls the Doves of Diana and which, when they are condensed, Raymond Lulle calls the fiery spirit of his wine. These fumes are the immediate precursor of the blood of the Pelican which the Philosophers call their very sour sour wine.

If after the extraction of these two liquors, one red, the other white, we calcine the residue and after having purified the latter we combine these three substances, they will form a homogeneous whole, composed of soul, mind and body. This mass must be circulated with a new, scrupulously delegged spirit, of which the artist cannot have too much.

The circulation having been sufficiently made, one must separate from the mass all the spirit which will not have been corporified with it; after this separation, the mass must be crushed and put in a vase to sublimate it. We must very essentially observe to carry out this sublimation in a low vase, in the fear that the matter which will sublimate, by rising too high, will condense into water and that by falling on the matter, this water will not overwhelmed ; If this misfortune happened, the artist would have wasted his time and his material. It is this accident that we run the risk of experiencing, which gave rise to the invention of the fable of Icarus.

If this sublimation is well done, there will result a crystalline and transparent salt, which the Philosophers call their Harmonic Salt because of the harmony of the substances which compose it.

If after having reiterated this sublimation, this Salt is circulated again with a new spirit and they are distilled together, the harmonic salt passes in liquid form through the spout of the capital; the resulting liquor is then called Eau de vie, vegetal menstruation, Mercury of the Philosophers, which dissolves radically without corrosion and without violence, universal solvent, universal medicine in the first degree. It is the Hermetic Apollo.

When the artist has reached this point and, on the other hand, he has prepared the metallic ferments, to push his operations towards the transmutation of imperfect metals into gold or silver, he has reached the pillars of Hercules and finished his drudgery.

Annex.

13. God created the unique matter of Sapience, says Solomon: “The divine word is its source which, by virtue of its influence, fills all beings with its life-giving fruitfulness. » This is why in his Sapience, chap. 7, he calls this matter a “vapor of the virtue of God, a candor of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the majesty of the Almighty and the image of his goodness”.

From this pure emanation of the Elements a spiritual fluid is formed in which three celestial principles and three sublunary principles are contained. The sages called the first principiants and first agents, trine in virtue; they called the second: principal principles, subsequent agents, sulfur, mercury and salt, in which the first agents are always infused.

The harmonic union of these substances in man is the subject of his life and that of his preservation; this is why the use of the Philosophers' elixir in which these three substances are found in their most perfect harmony, prolongs the life of man, preserving all his strength, his graces and his health.

In the spiritual fluid where the three principles are contained, the sages have recognized a spirit of life and a spiritual virgin earth in which the first is embodied and forms with it an incorruptible spirit and a quintessence which as long as it remains spotless and in all its purity, contains all the celestial and terrestrial virtues. This is what made Solomon say, Sapience 7 verses 22 and 24: “Nothing defiled must enter into this divine essence. », Proverbs, chap. 8, verses. 31, says that this “quintessence delights to be infused and rooted in the children of men, as being the most dignified Creature of Nature and the most capable of knowing its price”; he adds chap.8, verses. 36: “Whoever sins against her will wound her vital soul, and those who hate, neglect or despise her
love death; it is Why the Ecclesiasticus, chap. 4, verses. 12,
assures that he who loves the science of wisdom loves life. »

Solomon, Proverbs, chap. 4, verses. 10 and 22, gives the reason for this passage: “It is because, he says, Sapience or the Science of nature is his own bodily life, man,” he continues, “has the choice of good and evil in relation to his intellectual Soul, as he has that of life or death in relation to his bodily existence. He has the choice of one or the other, but if he wants to enter the Sanctuary of Nature, he will walk to the perfection of both with an equal and uniform step; he will find there the means to achieve spiritual life, as well as the means to obtain long and happy days, provided that he has an upright, compassionate and God-fearing heart.

The lack of knowledge of the principles and the first agents of nature, the inattention to seeking and knowing them, the constant dissipation for all objects which strike the material senses, the light and superficial idea that men have of themselves are the cause and source of the neglect and disbelief of the effects of natural science. David, Psalm 91. says, “The foolish man will neither understand nor know these wonders. Vir incipiens non cognoscet et stultus non intelliget haec. »

Solomon, Proverbs ch. 1, expresses himself thus on the same subject: “
Sapientiam et doctrinam stulti decipiunt. »

Content to enjoy the goods that they are forced to leave in this lower world and the human greatness, blind and dissipated men convince themselves that these are the most precious goods that God and nature can part with them. However, these frivolous advantages are far below the inestimable treasures that beneficent and liberal nature gives to those who apply themselves to developing its means, to penetrating and putting into action its natural and supernatural virtues.

VI. Second Work.

The second part of the practice of the Philosophers consists only in the thoughtful and combined execution, with prudence, of the axiom of the Philosophers: “Solve et Coagula”; The artist's hands are hardly necessary, except in the well-directed administration of the external fire.

When, through the regimes of this work, matter has passed through the essential colors, black, white, and has reached the color red, medicine of the second order is accomplished.

If we want to intrude it to bring it to a higher degree of strength and power, we must take a part of the stone fixed in red, and make it return to its chaos by a new dissolution, start again the regime of the second operation which in this one will be accomplished in half the time; after this third operation the artist possesses medicine of the third order, the effects of which are marvelous in the three kingdoms of nature; however this stone can be further exuberated and produce even more astonishing effects.

The path which can lead the artist to the possession of the fountain of Youth, the one which can firm up, bring together the pores and make the pebbles of the Rhine, the Médoc, or the rock crystal more radiant, is not the same as the previous two. Finally, that which can lead to the hermetic cabal is also different, but all have a common path to the universal solvent; from this point their regime changes, from which there follows a change of processes and a change of results.

The Hermetic Philosophers were not all equally learned; the majority were content to have achieved the transmutation of base metals into perfect metals; others, more diligent, have succeeded in transmuting transparent pebbles and rock crystal into precious stones. Others, more studious and more persevering, have found their way to the Fountain of Youth or the Universal Panacea, the miraculous effects of which are not only to cure all human infirmities, but also to restore and reestablish debilitated natural heat, to repair the moist radical exhausted by the inevitable effects of age or by accident. These philosophers knew how to recall on their faces withered by the years, the roses of youth and restore to their heavy limbs the energy, strength, flexibility and lightness that they had lost. They were thus renewed from century to century as did Artephius who by his own admission lived one thousand and twenty-five years; or to put it more plausibly, after having once been rejuvenated, they removed from themselves, through daily nourishment, all the interior effects and all the humiliating surfaces of old age.

Other philosophers, even deeper and happier, have been able to raise their inner spiritual body almost to the same degree of subtlety and purity as that of the celestial intelligences; They managed by this sublime means to see them and speak to them, to command the elementary spirits, and to enslave the evil spirits as they do Enoch, Elijah, Elisha, Moses, Daniel, Joseph. Such were among the Greeks Orpheus, Amphion, Linus, Melampus, Eumolpus, Democritus and many other philosophers, Egyptian Priests, Druids and Kings. In less remote times, certain Philosophers seemed favored by the same power, such as Artephius, Morienus, Apollonius, Arisleus, Abraham the Jew, Cortolaneus, the Cosmopolitan.

To designate this supernatural power to which the philosopher's stone can elevate those who possess it to the degree of perfection to which it can reach, the wise inventors of mythological fables said that Bacchus in his travels was accompanied by Cobales (a species of malignant demons), Fauns, Satyrs, who were at his command and who obeyed him.

Man can only bring the light of his soul to this point of extent and perfection by spiritualizing his spiritual body to a more eminent degree than nature could do without the aid of hermetic art. . The soul of man is enveloped in
his spiritual body as the material body envelopes the spiritual body.

The soul of man is purity par excellence; the material body is composed of an earthly and very corruptible paste. One is a thinking substance whose functions are limited to reflection. The other is a heavy and mechanical body whose functions are limited to the most perfect obedience.

These opposing qualities could never have formed a whole, if an intermediary had not brought them together; it is for the spiritual substance to which it was reserved to be the link of these two extremes; without this spiritual body which is their environment and which serves as an envelope for the soul, the latter would never have been able to join or attach itself to the material body because of their distance and the contradiction of their principles.

It was therefore necessary that to serve as a home for one and to preserve the other from corruption, the spirit was based on the earthiness of one and the subtlety of the other. This is why the spiritual body of man is composed of a substance formed by simple elements and by gross elements mixed together; through the first the spirit approaches the soul, through the second it is attached to matter.

The soul is the principle of voluntary, reflective and reasoned actions: it survives the destruction of the body and the dissipation of the spirit in the spiritual region.

The spirit is an igneous vapor, a spark, a fire which gives animal life, movement to the body, and seems to dissipate into the air when the material organs are destroyed. The tenuity of this vapor is too great to be perceived by the senses other than by its effects, minister of God in nature, as it is of the soul in men; it only follows, in animals, the impressions and laws that the Creator has imposed on it to animate them, to give impetus to their movements and sensations analogous to their particular species; it is specified in man and in brute animals, according to their organs; hence comes the conformity which is found in many of the actions of men and beasts.

Nature specifies it in each of them, according to the different specification that God was pleased to give to their organs, the difference in their characters, their inclinations and their way of acting, which, although different in themselves, however, lead them to the same goal, which is that of providing for their subsistence, that of their conservation and that of multiplying their species.

This spirit which is called instinct when it is a question of animals, determined and absolutely specified in each animal, is not at all so in man; because that of man is the summary and the quintessence of all the spirits which during the universal creation were created before his; also man does not have a particular character of his own; he unites them all in himself, whereas each animal has that which is proper only to it.

Every dog ​​is grateful and faithful, every cat is selfish, treacherous and sensual, every lamb is gentle, every lion is strong and courageous, every hare is timid, every rooster is proud, every tiger is cruel and bloodthirsty, every fox is shrewd and cunning, but man is all together, faithful, ungrateful, selfish, gentle, timid, proud, creeping, courageous, cowardly, cruel, benevolent, shrewd, cunning, law and in good faith. He is still above all that, trickster, liar and avaricious; frightful vices from which providence frees brute animals. Finally in man, circumstances, his passions or reason always decide what he is at every moment of his life; one finds only in man this mixture of vices and virtues. Each man would see these various characteristics develop in him and would reduce them from power to act, like brutes, on all the occasions that presented themselves, if this spirit were not subordinated to another substance very superior to his own. The soul holds the reins, it guides and leads him in all thoughtful actions; sometimes the ardor and the prompt fermentation of the spirit leave no time for the soul to give its orders and to exercise its empire; the mind acts on its own,

However, it is not to these superficial causes that actions devoid of reason must be related. We must on the contrary think that in these evaporated, or violent, brutal and angry men, the gross elements in their spiritual substance overcome the simple elements, and consequently are more analogous to the elements which animate the gross animals. That is to say, the igneous vapor which is the link between the soul and the body, is found in these individuals infinitely nearer to matter than to the portion of divine light of which their soul is closed; In these moments of delirium they are less men than beasts.

Man, as has already been said, is the epitome of all the works of God and the most perfect of corporeal beings. This is where the idea of ​calling it a small world or microcosm came from; it contains the quintessence of the entire universe, it participates in the virtues and qualities of all sublunary beings. He has the fixity of metals, the vegetability of plants and the sensitive faculty of animals and, moreover, an intelligent and immortal soul; the Creator has contained within himself, as was in Pandora's box, all the gifts and virtues of higher things, and all the vices and defects of lower things.

God ends his work of creation by that of man, and as the Supreme Being, having had no beginning was nevertheless the beginning of everything, he wanted to put the seal to his work by the creation of an individual which could not be without beginning was at least without end like him. This is what made Saint Paul say that man was inexterminable.

Man is the child of God in relation to his soul, he is a child of nature in relation to his body, these two powers constitute human nature. Vegetables, minerals and raw animals are, on the contrary, only a combined matter, moved, more or less vivified by nature. This is the difference established between human nature and material nature.

When man can succeed in adding to his spirit or spiritual body a greater portion of simple elements, his soul then finding itself less restricted by matter takes on a higher rise, more worthy of its divine origin and more conformable to the vow of supreme wisdom.

Reason, genius, intelligence develop in him in proportion as his spiritual body is freed from the gross Elements, which constantly pose obstacles to the action of the simple Elements; in the same way, in proportion as the action of the simple Elements is less discontinued, the sensations that matter influences on his soul, such as ambition, pride, avarice, et cetera, are extinguished in him; hence comes the wisdom of the patriarchs, the prophets and that of the Hermetic philosophers. It is undoubtedly to the effects of this spiritualization that we must relate the verse from the Miserere: "Cor mundum crea in me Deus, et spiritum rectum innova in viscerihus meis." If the version of the passage Beati pauperes spiritus had been more correctly made, instead of rendering it as we did in Latin and French: Blessed are the poor in Spirit; or the simple-minded; the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to them, one would have said: Blessed are those who have the simplest Spirit, that is to say whose spiritual body is composed of a greater part of simple Elements; they will hold an essential place in the Heavens or spiritual world.

What an appearance indeed that the most perfect and most favored work of the Creator was only worthy of him in so far as it was deprived of the only gift of God (the lights of reason) which distinguishes it from brute animals.

It is also to those who seek to dignify their spirit by the knowledge of the celestial virtues of nature that this passage relates: multi appellati, pauci electi; of the several millions of men in fact who have sought and who are still seeking the knowledge of the prophets, the Egyptian priests and the Druids, there is barely a single one who is happy enough to learn about it.

; However, there is no other way to achieve the possibility of this spiritualization than to become one of the Elect, and to make natural use of the philosophical quintessence, when it is brought to the ultimate in its power. .

The simple Elements are found so abundant and so close together in this quintessence that it is an almost Celestial and unblemished substance. It is she who, uniting with the part of the simple Elements inherent in our spiritual substance, increases its action, force, quantity, so that it finding it superior and dominating over the coarse Elements, it subjugates them and constrains them not to stray from the matter from which they hold; then the soul seconded by its celestial minister, undertakes nothing, advises nothing, sees nothing but all that is worthy of the divine origin to which it owes it.

The Lights, Wisdom, and Power of the Adepts who possessed it to this degree, placed them so far above other men, that they might be said to be intelligences enveloped in an earthly and mortal body.

This supernatural power, which man can reach by increasing his spiritual faculties, made Saint Paul say: “Nothing is deprived, nothing is deprived of the means of increasing the spiritual word hidden deep in the essence of all thinking beings who make their light and their life. »

The Saint Hermit, Morien, famous philosopher, in the interview he had with King Calid, his disciple, told him: “that the hermetic magisterium was nothing other than the secret of the secrets of God very high, very great, very wise and creator of all that exists, and that God himself had revealed this secret to the patriarchs and the prophets, so that after their natural death, they could have a good place in Heaven.

The great Philosopher Cortolanée also says :

“The soul is in the spiritual body of man what the eye is in his material body; both see; one, through the eyes of intelligence, sees the past, the present and often the future; the other, whose faculties are limited to what surrounds him, sees only present and sensible things; but both unite their faculties in the matter of the Philosophers; one sees it and distinguishes it bodily, the other appreciates it, combines its properties and carries it to the degree of perfection which constitutes the basis of glory, and of the supernatural power to which by means of it man can attain. . Aristeas

, famous philosopher, in the letter he addresses to his son translated by the philosopher Synesius, expresses himself thus:

“If men knew the vivifying substances that the air contains and if they knew how to make it visible and palpable by a natural magnet which was homogeneous to it, and which by corporifying it made it sensitive, they would possess the key to the Science of Nature, because it is only with the vital fluid of which air is the envelope and the vehicle that we can compose the celestial arcana, of which the usage elevates man above humanity; this secret is the greatest and most sublime of all the secrets that mortals can attain. If he uses this divine Panacea, it will fill him with good things; if he is sick, if he is infirm, if he is old, it will rejuvenate him, because it has the particular virtue of making all the misfortunes of men disappear, of perfecting metals and of making those happy and fortunate. who own it. »

The famous and learned Cosmopolite, after having spoken of the supercelestial, spiritual and elementary worlds, said:

“That the higher macrocosm contains all that the lower has. It is from the continual influence of this incorruptible water that all things in this world are animated and disposed; having communicated itself to the visible stars, it passes from the stars into the air, from the air into the water, from the water into the earth, so that it clearly appears that the lower world is the Image of the higher world, and as in this world the air stands over the water and the fire over the air, so in the angelic world, the supercelestial air, is above the supercelestial water and in the most eminent place is the supremely pure fire which composes the inaccessible light where God has constituted the dwelling place of His Majesty. Let no one blame us for starting such a lofty matter, apart from saying nothing that is unworthy of our God, nor contrary to his holy word. There is a secret key that opens the door to these secrets; it is hidden in a matter common and contemptible in the eyes of the vulgar, but very precious to those of true philosophers. »

This sovereignly pure fire which is the habitat of the divine Majesty constitutes the universal soul of nature, it descends from the Archetype to the Astral Sky; there he envelopes himself in celestial water, to rush below: he communicates the source of life to all sublunary beings; this spiritual seed never shows itself naked, it is covered with a vile and despised appearance.

This soul or supercelestial fire is called sulfur; the moist spirit emanating from the firmamental Sky is called Mercury. These two celestial substances, when united, form the humid radical of all things.

This soul and this moist spirit, united as one and the same indivisible essence, only become perceptible through the effect of their union and their mutual love which forms a third substance which we call salt; astral salt, niter of the air which hides them, which conceals them in its bosom and only closes with them the same substance composed of three. It is in this state that the Philosophical attraction attracts them, incorporates them, and makes them sensitive.

This salt is that of sapience, it forms the link between fire and water, dry and humid; it is the third principle. In the air it is subtle, fluid, invisible and impalpable; it is only sensitive to it through the effects it produces on elementary compounds.

The celestial salt is the principiant principle which proceeds from the soul and the spirit. (Every principiant principle is simple; salt contains the other two, therefore attracting the celestial salt by the philosophical magnet with which it unites, we have the simple elements with which the prophets, the Sages and the hermetic philosophers have operated things miraculous. It is the secret of the secrets of God.) This is what made several philosophers say that the spiritual salt which serves as an envelope for the celestial sulfur and mercury, was the one and only material from which the stone of the philosophers; and as these three substances identified by their union form only one perfectly homogeneous one, they said that the stone of the wise was composed of only one thing, triune in essence (these are the three principiant principles: salt ,

However, we must not imagine that the triangular and quadrangular substance of the Sages must or can be taken in its state of aerial fluid, imperceptible to our senses; we must seek to find this infused and corporified matter in a virgin earth, which is only a central vapor thickened and condensed by the air of the atmosphere, in which the first and second agents are found united; this virgin land is the tangible root of the Sulfur of the Sages, their mercury and their salt. It is this virgin earth that composes the philosophical magnet with which they attract celestial dew which united to the central fire with which it has a common origin, form one and the same homogeneous substance which brings man to the perfect knowledge of the hermetic mercury with the possession of which nothing seems impossible to the happy artist who has knew how to find it.

The doctrine of the elements is the only way which leads infallibly to the development of the principles of general nature.

This theory is the basis on which Hermetic work must bear; when we have succeeded in ascertaining the former by experiment, we possess the mysterious key to the most secret operations of sublunary nature. It is the port towards which the hermetic philosopher tends, but the sage carries his views further; he seeks sapience or prophetic power.

The use of the Panacea taken to the highest degree of purity, by opening the understanding and conception of the adept, makes the known limits of the human mind disappear; his soul, then, of which no obstacle stops the intelligence, reveals to him the admirable adaptations, where this celestial arcana can be fruitfully applied.

Bacchus taken from the thigh of Jupiter; united with Minerva emerging from the brain of this almighty God by the operation of Vulcan or central fire, compose the miraculous quintessence, the effects of which place the wise man above human nature.

It is the deepest error to believe that to achieve knowledge of nature, man must have recourse to the lights of certain spirits who are falsely supposed to be intermediaries between the divinity and himself.

These spirits that blindness makes him call by conjurations and superstitious ceremonies, are more disposed than he thinks to comply with his invitations, because all those who can be called by these means are all evil spirits. and that they ask nothing better than to be able to mislead men.

To establish one's opinion and fix one's belief on this important point, one must consult Moses' report on the development of the chaos of the creation of worlds, angels, intelligences, elementary Spirits and man.

This holy historian, in the separation of the matters of which chaos was composed, says that this separation was made in the following manner: “God separated the Waters from the Waters and made them into two distinct parts; the purest was subdivided into three; with the purest of these three, God closed the body of the angels in which he infused a divine soul; and the angelic world in which dwell Dominations, Thrones, Powers, Cherubim, Seraphim, Archangels, and Angels.

The inhabitants of the supercelestial world make up, strictly speaking, the court of the Empyrean, which immediately receives from the divinity the orders which it transmits to the lower worlds .

“From the second part of the subdivision, less pure and less essenced than the first, God formed the intelligences and the geniuses into whom he infused an almost divine soul, and the spiritual or celestial world. »

This is the region of the firmament where the numerous intelligences and geniuses dwell, who govern the universe under the orders of God, which are given to them by the inhabitants of the supercelestial world.

“Of the third part of the subdivision as the least pure. God created the elementary spirits, into which he infused only a spark of the universal spirit; he also formed from this part the gross Elements which he elemented from the simple Elements of the superior worlds. »

In these gross Elements dwell the elementary spirits to which men have given the names of Sylphs, Nymphs, Naiads, satyrs, fauns, gnomes, pygmies, etc.

These elementary spirits blindly execute the orders given to them by intelligences and geniuses, in relation to the terrestrial globe only. These Spirits die without hope of resurrection, like brute animals whose souls after their death will merge into the immensity of the universal spirit.

Elemental Spirits are almost all evil, because of their immediate communication with evil spirits; we must except, however, the Spirits of the air who live towards the East, who are assured not to be evil, but both being deprived of an immortal soul, are below the sublime secrets of nature and do not have the slightest knowledge of them: their intelligence on these mysteries penetrates no further than that of ordinary men.

It was through the elementary Spirits that Moses destroyed the prestige of Pharaoh's magicians; it is they who swallowed up Dathan, Korah and Abiron; it was they who overturned Sodom and Gomorrah ; it was by them that the walls of Jericho were torn down; they were also the instruments of the seven plagues with which Moses afflicted Egypt, et cetera; so that these spirits could be regarded rather as destroyers of the works of nature, than as investigators. It is only through their actions and through the orders transmitted to them by the inhabitants of the spiritual world that the scourges and upheavals to which the terrestrial Globe and human nature are exposed take place.

Elementary Spirits, it is said, live most often in the most uninhabited, wild and inaccessible places, in deserts, on steep mountains and in precipices; they sometimes appear to the rustic inhabitants of these terrible countries. It is also claimed that male elemental spirits like to cohabit with human women, and that female spirits like to get closer to men. We even assure you that these monstrous connections are not without examples. The cohabitation of male spirits is infinitely more frequent with the wives of men ; we even add that the famous villains whose lives made humanity shudder, were productions of this kind. These are the spirits who have been given the name of incubus spirits and spirits
succubi but regardless of the fact that they are generally all evil, their communication could only serve to suspend and stop the evils they carry out; still it would be necessary that for a man to be able to force these boiling and tumultuous Spirits, and very often perfidious, he had to have raised his spirit by the knowledge of the mysteries of nature and by the use of the
philosophical quintessence, almost to the degree of that of the geniuses and intelligences who command them.

Charlatans persuaded the gullible people that the gnomes and the Pygmies guarded the treasures and the mines buried in the earth; that it was necessary to ward them off, to learn of the places where they could be found, or to chase them away when they had been discovered. These absurd and pusillanimous tales are as ridiculous as if we were to say that fauns and satyrs guard the fruits of the countryside and that naiads and mermen guard the fish of the sea.

The three worlds of which we have just spoken were created from the first part of the division that God made of the Waters. From the half that God had reserved, he created human nature, in the composition of which are potentially contained the first three worlds, the angelic, the spiritual, and the elementary: this is why man has in him soul, mind and body.

Through his soul which is of divine essence, man corresponds immediately with God and with the angelic world which is immortal and physically incorruptible: the soul of man cannot be altered and lose the privileges attached to its divine origin, only by his mental intention; this is what we call moral good or evil; one cannot therefore, without blindness and without stupidity, suppose any intermediate being between the divinity and the soul of man. This is what made David say: Ego dixi dii estis, et filii excelsi omnes, and Cicero that God was in us.

Man as soul and spirit corresponds to the spiritual world and subsequently with the intelligences and with the geniuses who inhabit it.

The material body and spirit of man correspond to the Elemental world, to whose inhabitants it is however superior, because of the superiority of the essence of its soul over that of the Elemental Spirits.

Despite all the sublime knowledge to which man can attain through the use of the quintessence of the Philosophers, yet his power is limited by the supercelestial world. It is the line of demarcation that God has established between Wisdom and himself; whatever effort the Adept may make, it is not possible for him to bring the subtlety and purity of the Elixir of the sages, nor consequently that of his spiritual body, to the degree that the subtle matter which entered in the composition of the supercelestial world, so that by no means, except that of the express order of the divinity, the Philosopher cannot have immediate communication with the inhabitants of the angelic world, that is to say, he cannot see or hear them, except by contemplation and by the ecstasy in which his soul can be lifted up.

The inhabitants of the celestial or firmamental world cannot be called, seen or heard by ordinary men, because their essence and their power placed them too far above them; they can only have immediate communications with the Hermetic Philosophers, who could be placed with justice above humanity by the happy use of the knowledge they have acquired by means of which they have raised their spirit well to the highest standards. -above the sphere and surfaces of the sublunary world.

But one might object, how can it be that man enveloped in earthly and corruptible matter can see, hear and communicate with purely spiritual Beings? We could respond to those who made the objection that they only know the bark and the matter of man.

Man is not man through his material body; the latter has only the human firmness, which his soul gave him by the action of his spirit which penetrates the matter, moves it, and arranges it internally, in the same way as the sculptor's chisel shapes marble with -out.

Their soul takes its form from its Creator, because being the immediate production of the eternal being, it received its form coming
out of his hands; the form of man's spirit or spiritual body is taken from the form of his soul, as the form of his elemental body is cast on the form of his spiritual body.

God, by a kind of extension of himself, took from his bosom the soul of the first man on whom he imprinted his image, the intellectual faculties and those capable of propagating both: he enveloped this divine substance with the spiritual quintessence with which he had already animated all created beings; he infused this thinking and vital substance into the body of the man whom he had formed from the most subtle earth and most analogous to the work he had proposed to do.

These three substances identified in man reproduce, grow and multiply by the only way which human nature has prescribed for its prolific virtues. The soul, as the most privileged and the noblest, gives to the spirit the resemblance which the Creator has imprinted on it, and the spirit is forced to mold and organize the matter on the figure which it has received from the 'soul.

Woman being destined to be the natural companion of man, associated with his glory and his happiness, as she is with his misfortunes, to fulfill the wish of eternal wisdom and the multiplication of the species, was created of an extract of the matter from which man had been formed. His soul and spirit were also extracted from the soul and spirit of man, with all the virtues and intellectual faculties that God had implanted there. This is what made the learned Druids say that woman was the soul of our soul, the spirit of our spirit and the flesh of our flesh. It was by a consequence of their sublime knowledge that the Druids had established an Areopagus which was composed only of women in which the most important and most thorny affairs were decided, because they were attributed with more penetration and more sagacity due to the delicacy and subtlety of their organs. The supreme council, through the accuracy of its judgments, had deserved, during the duration of several centuries, the veneration and trust of neighboring nations who came voluntarily to claim and submit to its decisions. But men, supported by force and tormented by the thirst to invade and govern everything, destroyed this court of justice where gentleness and humanity presided, which they replaced by assemblies of men, whose judgments were felt often of their fiery, fiery, fierce and tyrannical character.

When we have not taken the trouble to reflect deeply on the idea that we must have substances which contribute to forming our individuality, it is very difficult for us to persuade ourselves that the substances invisible to the eyes of our body have the human form, and that it was by their effect that the parts of the palpable body of man were arranged, combined and determined in their image.

In general, the ideas we have of man are limited to the surfaces which strike the senses, and which rarely go further than what we see in him as earthly and material. This, however, is not what properly constitutes man; he is truly man only through the intelligent faculty by means of which he is capable of thinking, reflecting and reasoning: with a little self-reflection the man soon feels that his intelligence and his will do this that he is and that his body is only an instrument following the orders of the will which commands him.

It is therefore through the internal man that man is truly man; without him the external man would only be a corpse, such as he indeed becomes after the internal man, who is his soul enveloped in its spiritual body, is separated from its corruptible and material body.

The inner man retains the human form, when separated from matter, he ascends after his death to the spiritual region; he also retains the same features as those of his mortal envelope. This is why in the spiritual world, parents recognize their parents, friends recognize their friends. The death of man in this lower world is only the division of the first two substances with the last, that is to say, the separation of his gross body from his Spirit and his soul.

Man leaves his mortal remains in the world which had provided the principles of his material existence and growth. After this separation, he passes into spirit body and soul into the spiritual region. It is in the spiritual world that man receives the reward or punishment for the good or bad actions he has committed in this lower world.

Man is resurrected immediately after his death; or to say with more precision, of three substances of which his individual was composed, only two remain. This is called resurrection. This is what made Saint Paul say that man was resurrected with a body which was not the one he left in the sublunary world. The death and resurrection of man are therefore only a passage from this lower world to the spiritual world, where when he has been good and just, he has the joy of recognizing his parents, his friends, his children who, like him, have deserved this award.

The stay that the soul of man clothed with his spiritual body makes in the spiritual region is a second life, infinitely longer than the first, because his spiritual body is not susceptible to corruption; moreover, in proportion as man approaches the divinity, for whom the space of times and places is nothing, these same spaces seem much smaller and much closer to him.

The punishments that guilty men experience after their death are only perpetual illusions, fantastic and bizarre imaginations, which make them desire with fury what they cannot obtain; the object of their desires is evil itself and everything that derives from it, contempt for others, aversion, hatred,
fury, revenge, cruelty and all the effects contrary to the happiness of man and to society.

There is a divine light in the spiritual world of which man can only form a vague and confused idea, but the appearance and sight of which causes joy and brings happiness to the inhabitants of the spiritual world; the men who in this low world have been good and just can alone sustain its brilliance and majesty. Men, on the contrary, who during their life have abused the gifts of God (that is to say, their heart and their reason) cannot support the splendor of this living light, they fear it, they even flee it, because that it penetrates into the most hidden recesses of their spiritual body; it brings to light in the eyes of the inhabitants of the celestial world, as in their own eyes, the crimes, the crimes, the injustices, including the spirit of vengeance, of ambition, of avarice and greed made them guilty on the land they inhabited; the crimes and vices of men are indelibly engraved during their life, as they indulge in them, in the region of the heart and brain of their interior body, so that in the celestial world their spiritual body, finding itself diaphanous and transparent as air, is penetrated by the rays of divine light and allows the minds of righteous men to read, as in a book, the atrocities that these perverse men had the art of disguising in this lower world, where their passions were covered with an impenetrable shell in the eyes of their fellows. The shame and opprobrium of appearing in the eyes of their parents, their friends, their acquaintances, different from what they had wanted to appear during their life, makes them move away from this light of justice and truth and rush of their own accord into darkness where this divine light never penetrates; they wander there in illusion and in blindness; the consolation of recognizing there their relatives, their friends, who like them have rushed there, is denied them; they even sometimes become their persecutors. This is the punishment of the wicked.

The darkness into which guilty men rush is nothing other than the gross elements in which they lived when they were still enveloped in their earthly body, but when they no longer exist except in a spiritual body, the light of the sun and that of the stars which illuminated them during their life is for them nothing but darkness and obscurity, because on the one hand they are deprived of the eyes of their mortal body which were the natural organs which, like ice, restored to their soul the natural clarity of day and night, and on the other hand their soul stained with crimes cannot, in the spiritual world, sustain the radiance of the divine light which is that which illuminates the eyes of the spiritual body. They wander in the space of our atmosphere: they surround us, so to speak, on all sides; they are constantly watching for the moment when human weakness facilitates the means of introducing themselves into the organs of men in order to mislead them and to drive shame and repentance completely from their hearts. These are these spirits of darkness which communicate to mortals and which conjurations can make appear.

If men were equally just and guilty, there would be only one degree of reward or punishment; but as they are more just or more criminal than the others, divine justice has established different degrees of rewards or punishments, and these degrees are the measure of the more or less distance where the Spirits of men keep themselves from each other. the divine light enjoyed by the righteous in the spiritual world. The culprits move away from it forever and plunge into darkness for an eternity, so that when our globe and the gross elements which compose it are disrupted and God has separated from it the simple Elements which spread life there, they will not will be more than a residue, than a damned earth; then the spirits of darkness,

The less guilty Spirits, although very far from the divine Light, do not however absolutely lose sight of it, and when the instigations of the evil spirits which surround them could not induce them to separate themselves from it completely, they are getting closer little by little. The traces of reprehensible actions engraved in their spiritual body are erased because of the path they make towards the divine light, and because of the truth of their repentance; and finally, with time and prayer, they come to enjoy the bliss of the righteous. It is to these spirits that the passage of the prayer for the dead refers: et lux perpetua luceat eis.

I would not be far from believing that the fervent prayers of righteous men on behalf of the dead, aided by their repentance, do not can bring them closer in less time to the divine light. If this system is doubtful, at least it is very consoling for honest and grateful souls.

When man in body of spirit and soul has spent in the spiritual world the time prescribed for him by providence, he strips himself of the spiritual body, which he abandons in the region which is natural to him, and ascends in soul only in the angelic world, to enjoy the eternal and ineffable joys reserved for the inhabitants of the supercelestial world.

There is a rather striking resemblance between the effects of natural philosopher's stone and those of supernatural philosopher's stone.

The fermentative virtue is the soul of the matter of the universe; to be brought to the power of the stone of the wise, it must be made as pure as was the spirit of God which walked on the Waters; that is to say, it must be purged of all material heterogeneities and made as spiritual as the root which produced it.

Likewise, the soul of man, to be worthy of its divine origin and to enjoy the privileges attached to it, must be purged of the substances which serve as its clothing in the two worlds which it has to travel through, but at the same time Like the quintessence of philosophers, it must be without stain to enter the bosom of the Creator who gave it being.

The first must be made as pure as the natural light of which it is an extract. The second, emanating from the eternal light, must be returned to her in the state of pure innocence in which she was when she was separated; one, by preserving man from all infirmities, gives him days spun with gold and silk; the other, by plunging the soul into the most delicious serenity, delivers it from the tyranny of human passions.

One carries man to the celestial world, the other places him at the feet of the Divinity. And both are the fruit and the reward of our happy research and our labors in the science of nature.

The wise know only two lights: a divine light and a natural light. Divine light in all its splendor illuminates the supercelestial world of which only a few rays illuminate the spiritual world. This light can only be seen by blessed Spirits.

Natural light is that of the sun and that of the stars which illuminate the terrestrial globe; it can only be seen by the eyes of mortal bodies; when the organs of sight are destroyed this light is nothing more than darkness, similar to that in which man finds himself when he sleeps or voluntarily closes his eyes.

The sages have repeated in almost all their works that the natural light is in some way a modeled copy of the divine light. If one can admit some resemblances between divine light and natural light, it is hardly possible to find any between the privileges of the inhabitants of the superior worlds and those of men as long as they inhabit this lower world.

The supercelestial beings pray in the presence of the divinity, the blissful intelligences and spirits pray in the face of the eternal light, while men during their life can only imagine God or the divine light through the eyes of the imagination; yet they can only form an idea of ​​one and the other in a very vague and confused way.

There is another equally striking difference between the privileges enjoyed by higher beings and those of the humble human species.

The inhabitants of the celestial and supercelestial worlds, constantly enveloped in an atmosphere of light, are illuminated by themselves even into the deepest abysses where it pleases God to carry his orders, while men, when they are deprived of the rays of natural light, find themselves in the most absolute darkness, which they can only dissipate with the help of the weak clarity of artificial lights, which need and necessity made them invent. That is to say, there is never darkness for the creatures who inhabit the celestial regions, while humans are immersed in it for half the duration of their existence.

The immeasurable distance where the differences that we have just observed place humans from celestial beings, and subsequently the souls of just and good men from the souls of vicious and wicked men, without distinction of rank, state, or fortune (because God nor nature have spent no more expense nor taken more care in forming a man King than in training a man a plowman), a distance over which a sensible man cannot be distracted or to create an illusion, a distance which should destroy in one's heart even the germ of pride and self-love.

Flatterers will perhaps observe that nobility of blood could, however, influence a certain difference between men, even in the spiritual world; it will be answered to these stupid and dangerous men that the nobility of blood consists in its purity and that very often the blood of a laborer is purer and healthier than that of the most distinguished noble, that the soul alone could establish a difference among men, if God had drawn the souls of the nobles from another hearth than that from which he drew the souls of the mercenaries, but that as the source of the souls of all the human race is the same, all those of the creatures who come from them are perfectly equal in the eyes of the Divinity.

If nature seems to admit of some differences among men, it only consists, as has already been observed, in the more or less extensive development of the perceptions of the soul: that is to say, the interior organization the most delicate, the most perfect and the best proportioned is always that of the most accomplished individual, because it is the one which brings the least obstacles to his intellectual faculties; but this difference of the soul in human nature is not one in the Celestial world where all the souls of men, no longer being confined by matter, experience equally the same extent and the same elevation, especially if they are placed at an equal distance from the divine light. It follows from this that in the spiritual world,

The celestial spirit Lucifer or light-bearer, whom God struck with his anger, was not an inhabitant of the angelic world: if he had been, he could not have failed God because of the perfection of his essence: he was only the genius or intelligence of the Celestial world or firmamental, responsible for watching over the natural light called sun; he believed himself equal to God; because governing the focus of this light he convinced himself of being its creator, as God is of the eternal light which he dispenses in the higher worlds. His pride and his audacity attracted the wrath of the divinity, who threw him with all the geniuses who had adhered to his crazy pretensions, into the gross Elements of the Elementary world, where, deprived of the luminous atmosphere enjoyed by the inhabitants of the worlds superior, they are in darkness, like the spirits of men, who during their life lived in crime and perversity.

The geniuses that God stripped of celestial privileges by casting them into darkness are those we call evil geniuses. The spirits of guilty men are subject to them and are persecuted; all the spirits of this infernal cohort are those who respond to the conjurations of men, with all the more eagerness, as they constantly seek to seduce them, to corrupt them, to deceive them, and to make them as unhappy as 'them.

Intelligences, good geniuses and the spirits of just men are never communicated to mortals without a special grace from the divinity, such as that of possessing the stone of the philosophers.

The angels and spirits who inhabit the supercelestial world cannot communicate to men without permission and a particular order from the supreme being, as proven by Lot, Tobit, Abraham, etc.

Evil can occur and be done without the participation of God, this is what bad Spirits do, through their suggestions, and wicked or weak men, through the actions and facts that result from these suggestions, all time, however, that God puts no obstacle to it. Good, on the contrary, always comes from the divine will, either through angels or good spirits who inspire it, or through presentiments, or through the natural inclination that God has infused into the soul of the man who leads to do good, or to repentance when he has done evil.

It is still a pernicious error to imagine that man needs the lights of the Spirits of tribulation to enlighten himself on a science or on a future event; these Spirits have no knowledge of one nor the other; they constantly deceive with subtleties, with vain promises, with fascinations and with fantastic illusions; When they appear, they appear peaceful and calm and when they speak, they have a soft and persuasive voice; but they cannot give themselves a considerate face; on the contrary, it is terrible; it inspires fear and terror; their appearance makes the most determined shudder.

How can thinking men believe that dark spirits from whom God took away the celestial privileges of their original essence, or that those who during their life were greedy, deceitful, ungrateful, inhuman and immersed in the crassest ignorance, could have preserve or acquire sublime knowledge in the abode of their reprobation? this idea is madness and almost unimaginable. It would be much more reasonable to think on the contrary that if these Spirits, in the celestial world that they inhabited before their fall, or those who during their life had acquired some knowledge in the sciences, the darkness in which they wander is very suitable for to have erased the traces and to have removed from them all reminiscences.

If the men who indulge in this dangerous curiosity want in good faith to know all the illusion, and at the same time convince themselves of the truth of everything that has just been said, let them apply themselves to searching and discover, on their faces the eyes of the Spirits which appear to them, in fantastic bodies, either immediately, or through water from a bottle or by the reflection of a mirror; they will convince themselves by the uselessness of their research that these minds have none; perhaps they are not even allowed to take its configuration on the face with which they put on to show themselves to men, or to children whose approach they seek with even greater eagerness; regardless of the pleasure these spirits feel when they can deceive men, and make them stray from their duties, perceive only by means of the organs of sight of the individuals they seize. It is to these secret possessions that we must attribute the atrocious actions of which certain men have been guilty.

Elementary spirits can only appear with the bodies that nature has given them, because they enjoy corporeal life and procreate naturally like the children of men; that is why we see young and old, male and female.

It is quite generally asserted that men, without having any knowledge of the science of nature, have nevertheless manifested on some occasions supernatural powers, either by causing lost things to be recovered, or by causing the discovery of past actions and done or said in the past. greatest secrecy, either by making certain figures appear, or by having effects transported from one place to another by an invisible hand ; but these effects are all the fruit they have derived from this criminal communication. Never the spirits which had attached themselves to these individuals could teach them secrets which could
interest the life of the men or their fortune, because these spirits being able to be only malicious, cannot document them on matters of which they are ignorant, all the more perfectly since any means of doing or producing good is as unknown to them as it is impossible.

There is reason to think that these weak and gullible men only obtained these powers by an implicit agreement made with evil spirits. These very often use the Spirits of dead men, who are under their domination, to excite men to agree to similar pacts. They also quite frequently employ the ministry of the elemental spirits that they have subjugated to transport effects from one place to another by an invisible hand; because these effects are not possible for evil spirits who are blind and in perpetual darkness. Evil spirits and spirits subject to their domination can only induce men to commit crime either through instigation or by introducing themselves into their bodies. Elemental spirits can neither enter the bodies of men, to obey the evil geniuses who subjugated them. But both cannot appear to men unless they have called them.

and who only nourished their hope by prestige; let us imagine the fate experienced by the unfortunate individuals who profess to be initiates in these frightful mysteries; we will see them wandering from country to country, without a homeland or without heritage, sometimes protected by blind stupidity, always covered with ignominies in the eyes of honest, educated people.

They lead a scandalous life strewn with mortifications similar to the unworthy disciples who assassinated the high priest Hyramus, who, having not been able to achieve the knowledge of God through that of nature, abandoned the study of the science of the Prophets to rush in the horrors of necromancy. always covered with ignominies in the eyes of honest, educated people.

They lead a scandalous life strewn with mortifications similar to the unworthy disciples who assassinated the high priest Hyramus, who, having not been able to achieve the knowledge of God through that of nature, abandoned the study of the science of the Prophets to rush in the horrors of necromancy. always covered with ignominies in the eyes of honest, educated people.

They lead a scandalous life strewn with mortifications similar to the unworthy disciples who assassinated the high priest Hyramus, who, having not been able to achieve the knowledge of God through that of nature, abandoned the study of the science of the Prophets to rush in the horrors of necromancy.

Laziness, blindness and greed have led men far more ambitious than learned to think that the spirit contained in the air, so often indicated in the writings of the sages as being the intermediary between Heaven and Earth, designated the Spirits wandering in the air, from which they concluded that these Spirits were the intermediaries between man and divinity. Can we be convinced of a system based on such a marked point of ignorance?

And on such an unjudgmental basis to conclude that men could only come to the knowledge of the science of Nature by the lessons of these so-called intermediate Spirits? How can we imagine that Beings proscribed by eternal Wisdom, can provide documents on a science which leads to knowing God and worshiping him? Whatever blindness we suppose in these reprobate Spirits, we still have to think that they are not stupid enough to go against their own interests, unless they were forced to do so by divine power.

There is even a kind of sacrilege in claiming that there exist intermediate beings between the soul of men and the divinity, because according to such a supposition, independently of what one should conclude from it, that these beings for being able to hear the mental prayers and wishes of men, have the divine privilege of being everywhere and penetrating intentions, like the infinite being to whom only ubiquity is due; we would also have to conclude that it would be to these intermediate spirits to whom men should address their prayers and the outpourings of their hearts and not to God, which would be a doctrine as absurd as it is reprehensible.

The love of God and that of neighbor immediately brings the soul of man closer to the Divinity. This consoling truth is engraved in indelible characters in all honest and virtuous hearts.

To achieve the sublime sciences that men seek with so much avidity, after having asked the Father of Enlightenment those which are suitable to lead there, we must only study nature, go back to its origin, consider it as such. say at the moment it leaves the hand of God, follow it with an attentive eye and penetrating its laboratories, examine with a thoughtful mind the substances it uses and the means it uses to vivify, to produce growth and to preserve all the sublunary mixtures; but we must take the trouble to study, and not flatter ourselves that we can arrive at the knowledge of its true principles and the development of its mysterious operations by oblique and supernatural means, by means of which we can be instructed without work and without application.

The great intermediary of Nature, the one without whom no natural being can do without, the one who is the Link of Heaven with the earth, and who is the channel through which they correspond, the one who transports us in his bosom all the goods of which we enjoy, that of which every lover of Sapience must know the central virtues and the means of developing them; it is the air, which according to the learned Cosmopolitan, contains in its center, a congealed Spirit, better than all the inhabitable earth. It is this precious intermediary with which every man who wishes to penetrate the secrets of the science of Nature must concern himself, and in whose heart he will find the means of reaching the summit of all human felicities.

VII. Summary of the progressive changes through which the first material of the hermetic work must pass, to reach the degree of universal solvent.

MATERIAL

The first material of the hermetic work is the plant saturnia, hyle or philosophical chaos. This chaos is designated by Silenus, Nereus, Hylas, Archelaus, Neoptolemus, hermaphrodite Venus, the fish Skymoys, the Nemean Lion, the Emerald Tablet, the Green Duenech, the Green Lion, et cetera.

The hieroglyphs of the first matter are the ram the bull, the Caduceus of Mercury, etc.

1st CHANGE

The matter becomes mercurial water. It is the red sea of ​​Moses; the sea by which Osiris and Bacchus returned to Egypt after their expedition. It is the red wine of Raymond Lully, of Riplée, the blood of the innocents of Flamel, the sea of ​​blood of Fabre's Green Dream, the blood of Pythagoras, that of the Nemean Lion; The wine that Silenus abounds in. It is Bacchus, Aeneas, Neptune married to the nymph Phoenice, etc.

2nd CHANGE

This third material is the product of the previous one, it is what the sages call their first material, it is the red gum of Mary the prophetess, the lees of wine from Raymond Lully, the tartar of Riplée, the promised land of Moses, it is the adrop of the Philosophers. This is their first Laton, Déjanire, Prothée, etc.

3rd CHANGE

Matter becomes the sour wine of the philosophers' mountains. It is the blood of the Pelican, the doves of Diana, the ardent spirit of Raymond Lulle, etc.

4th CHANGE

This matter is the product of the blood of the pelican, it is the magnet of the philosophers, their magnesia, the glue of the Eagle of Philalethes, Juno, Venus, Danae, the liver of Prometheus, etc.

5th CHANGE

This substance is the sacred bulb of Abraham, that of Christophe Evoque of Paris, Jupiter; Walls, astral gold, astral salt, etc.

Its hieroglyphs are the eagle, the vulture; the milan.

6th CHANGE

This material is composed of the Philosophers' magnet and the sacred bulb combined. It is the Compost of the Sages, mercury with its four wings, the Aazoth of the Philosophers, the Thesaurus desiderabilis of Christophe Bishop of Paris.

7th CHANGE

This subject is the end of the first part of the hermetic work and that of the Labors of Hercules. It is the universal solvent of the Philosophers, the liquefied Salt of Wisdom, the mercury of life to which Hercules dedicated his club, universal medicine in the first degree. It is Apollo ready to marry the Nymph Coronis, of whom Aesculapius, God of medicine must be the fruit.

VIII. Preliminary treatise on physics.

In which experience and Theory combine to prove that the subject of man's life can be increased and maintained for a very long time in its strength and healthiness Est in aere vitae occultus cibus. COSMOPOLITAN. (It is in the air that the nourishment of life is hidden.)

The animal is sufficiently instructed in the way in which it must use its sense organs; but the reasonable man should add to this instinct the knowledge or at least the desire and the search for the means to enjoy them in all their integrity, for as long as possible; he should put all his application and intelligence into distinguishing the virtues and disposing of the things that surround him.

Does not Divine goodness, by exposing Nature and its effects to the eyes of its reason, seem to have wanted to designate to it the subject on which its reflections and its works must fall, by imposing on it the absolute use, for the life support?

It seems as simple as it is natural to think that if the animal takes its breath more than fifteen thousand times in twenty-four hours and only eats twice, it owes more to the air than to its food. Such a striking consequence should encourage every sensible man to seek natural ways, either to improve the air he breathes, by removing from it whatever harmful it may contain, or by always maintaining in quantity his own vital fire of so that in all ages he had the strength to attract and subsist on that which is contained in the air he breathes, with the same abundance and the same ease as a young man of twenty does. years when it is well constituted.

The experiments relating to the first means fall within the province of positive physics; regardless of the fact that its use is not without danger, as we will see later, the continual work that it would require would be very likely to keep people away from it.

The ways of the second means, although simpler, are infinitely more difficult to find; they are reserved for the knowledge of the Hermetic Philosophers and considered as the most precious fruit of their application, their constancy and their work.

The principal agent in nature is heat, fire or luminous fluid; he is the only one worthy of being, because he is of all the agents, the most active and the most penetrating; its inconceivable subtlety keeps it too far from palpable bodies for it to be possible for it to be radically attached to them and to become homogeneous with them; for the reason that the purest, the most volatile and the one which has the most tenuity cannot immediately unite with the one which is the most impure and the thickest; but as, without this union, nothing in this lower world could have life, it was necessary to arrange a substance which was placed in the middle and was as suitable to receive the influences from above as the vapors from below to carry them one and the other to the center of the two opposite regions and establish there by its means an invigorating circulation. The air was charged with fulfilling this wish; It is therefore from the air that the sublunary compounds immediately receive movement, heat and life.

The animal earth of which the human body is formed can be divided into two parts, the first of which is pure and the other impure. The first is the basis of all sublunary mixtures and produces everything by the mixture of water and fire; it is the simple element which elements the Earth and which makes it vegetative; the second is like the envelope of the first; it enters as an integral part in the composition of the mixed ones; the first is a fire which, emanating from the universal spirit of life, vivifies and preserves all bodies as long as the cold of the impure earth does not dominate it.

The action of the vital fire in the individual drives away the cold and coagulation which are the substantial qualities of the impure earth. It is to this cause that we must refer the bodily mechanism of the animal which finds itself disposed to accelerate its breathing when a rapid run or violent work by dilating all its pores, has caused it to expend a greater quantity of energy. this pure earth or vital heat.

Nature, as perfect in the organization of the animal as it is provident for its needs, has imposed on it the absolute necessity of a lively and rapid breathing only to force it in such moments to repair what it has lost. The frequency of respiration experienced after the meal should only be attributed to the animal's need to increase and strengthen the fire in its stomach, to aid in the digestion of the foods with which it is filled. The yawns that the animal cannot overcome, when its too cold stomach finds itself weighed down by repletion, are further proof of the Creator's foresight, so that this heaviness only leads the animal to sleep, instead of it would lead him to suffocation and death, if by yawning he were not forced to double the dose of vital leu contained in each aspiration.

If, when the terror of impure substances prevents the inhaled air from penetrating all its parts and communicating itself to the universality of its vital spirits, the animal could increase the measure of its attraction or vital fire, it would aspire more abundantly that which is contained in the air and would homogenize it with more success; then this fire, being in sufficient volume, would insinuate itself with force into its least ramifications, it would divide the thickened fluids and the earthy mass of these morbific deposits by expelling them by secretions and by perspiration, it would restore to the individual all the energy and all the faculties of vigor and resilience of which these impure masses had deprived him.

The heat that envelops the air that man breathes is the fire or luminous fluid which individualizes itself to that which animates all natural Beings, makes everything vegetate, everything germinate and everything hatch, it is the element of fire in whom resides the movement and life of the other elements; but when this fire is reduced to a lesser extent, it cannot then overcome the resistance of these opposites; when it has reached this point of distress, the microcosm must necessarily fall into inertia of which death is the result.

(The heat of the body of the living animal is not the effect of the friction that the fluids experience as they pass through their channels: on the contrary, it is this heat, this fire, which requires the movement of the fluids because 'it is the efficient cause of all internal movement; without this active and powerful principle the stagnant fluids in their channels would tend to corruption and decomposition; this is what happens in the entire compound of the animal and particularly in its stomach when it has passed the age of maturity; the digestive juices, having less movement because they contain less fire, thicken and make digestions slower and more difficult and indigestions more dangerous and more frequent; it is the thickening of the fluids that causes the winds; these viscous and sticky fluids fill with air,especially when eating, in the same way that soapy water forms the globes full of wind which children make a game of and amusement.)

There is reason to think that when the vital fire of which man brings the germ when born, does not have the strength to suck up and make itself homogeneous that which is contained in the air, the latter attracts its own and the end of this murderous attraction is always the end of its existence because it is the end of the disunity of the principles which constitute animal life.

What seems to confirm this opinion is what a dying man experiences; those around him notice the efforts he makes, not only to attract through breathing the spirit of life contained in the air that surrounds him, but also to retain that in which his soul is enveloped.

Common nitre or that used by vulgar chemists is the material most generally known to be that which contains the most primitive fire. When it is melted in a hermetically sealed vase, the atmospheric air which is introduced into the vase through a pipe and which leaves through another passing through the mass of molten nitre, deposits all its heterogeneous parts there and carries away those of the primitive fire spread in the niter which it abandons, to unite with the air with which nature had first enveloped it to serve as its clothing and vehicle.

If the air which passes through the molten nitre removed only the virtual substance or the nucleus, the effect of the aspiration of the dephlogisticated air on the animals would doubtless be that of powerfully fortifying their natural heat in l gently and without irritation, to temper its qualities so that one does not predominate over the other and thereby to establish the most perfect equality and the most exact proportion in the primitive elements which contribute to making it enjoy of constant and robust health.

But niter potentially contains elemental fire; of which the air which passes through when it is melted causes portioncules which can give to this dephlogisticated air deadly qualities, because this phlogiston fire is the destructive and devouring fire.

The fire from which the air deprives the molten nitre, if it were possible to extract it in all its purity, as it can be done through philosophical operation, would be nutritious, invigorating, balsamic; it would be this natural fire which is the igneous principle of elementary fire, as it is of all life-giving heat: this fire is often taken for the soul of nature and for nature itself, instead of the elementary fire contained in niter is its tyrant and destroyer.

We can infer from this experience that there exist in nature universal fluids, as contrary in their principles as they differ in their effects. The one simple, igneous, luminous, is the principle of all active life; the other, an elementary compound, takes all its energy from the first; but too often like ungrateful men, he suffocates in his bosom by the abundance of his material and by the disorders in which he delights when he gives himself over to his inclination, the one from which he receives all his effectiveness.

It is Osiris and the mythological Typhon, one is a primitive, humid, vital fire, which by the character imprinted on it by the supreme being, can only produce the perfection and conservation of all the sublunary compounds. , the other must and can only be a universal phlogiston, which being intended to be the pasture of the first should only be found in the air, as in all bodies where it resides indispensable, only to fulfill its wish. and not to subjugate his master.

The virtues of the first carry movement, heat and life into all organic bodies where it penetrates; it is the soul of every generation, it can in all cases only produce life, because being a life-giving substance par excellence, only the effect of the gifts it dispenses can result from its introduction into the mixtures; the second, on the contrary, sometimes renders them without effects, through the particular accidents to which intractable and oxidizing nature gives rise.

We could compare the operations of these two fluids to those of a wise minister, whose upright and beneficent intentions would often be fruitless if they were not seconded by the zeal and loyalty of his cooperators.

The experience of all good physicists has convinced Europe that in the purest possible dephlogisticated air, that is to say in the air which in the dephlogistication had carried away as little as possible parts of the elemental fire contained in nitre, an animal lives five times longer than in common air. The flame of a candle acquires more strength and more liveliness.

Flammable air which, mixed with common air, explodes when set on fire, detonates with incomparably greater force when mixed with dephlogisticated air, because there is between them infinitely more of contradictions and more distance than there is between flammable air and atmospheric air.

The truth of this experiment explains the cause of the superiority of the qualities of the dephlogisticated air over the air of the atmosphere: the latter, before having passed through the molten nitre, that is to say before being dephlogisticated, contains only eighteen times more heat than water; when it has deposited its heterogeneities in nitre, it contains eighty-seven times more heat than water.

Dephlogisticated air therefore contains sixty-nine times more vital fire than common air; it therefore increases the volume of the health of the animal which sucks it in by sixty-nine parts more than that which the atmospheric air could have furnished.

The suction of dephlogisticated air, if we could extract it in all its purity and if we could measure geometrically, due to the temperament and state of each individual, the quantity of suction that would be necessary for its recovery or for its conservation, would undoubtedly increase the subject of their life by ridding them of the overabundance of phlogiston which in them is a cause of death, because the extreme affinity which is found between the air and all phlogiston would that the first would eagerly take care of animal phlogiston and take it with it when the viscera of respiration would flow back the air it had sucked in.

Air is made up of three substances with distinct qualities. The first is the luminous fluid which must be considered as its soul. This is the mythological Jupiter. The second is the humid radical or primitive mercury, which must be regarded as its spirit. She is the Juno of mythology. The third primitive substance is salt, or nitre of the air, which is designated by the first mercury of the philosophers; but this, being the result of the action of sulfur on mercury or of the fire of the air on its humidity, has no other vice nor other virtue than those which it receives from discordance or of the agreement of the first two substances, of which it is in a way only a modification; but it possesses an inestimable quality in that, being the principle of all coagulation, it makes manifest and palpable, so to speak,

In places where contagious disease reigns, the air contains very little salt; the absence or dissolution of nitre from the air in such cases could give rise to useful research and fortunate discoveries for the success of epizootic treatments.

If in winter and in hyperborean regions, the air is less susceptible to the development of contagious leavens than in more temperate and warmer climates, it is only because the cold is of an alkaline nature and the niter of the air being more determined there, the air is much less suited to receiving and extending the principles of putridity than it is to concentrating them.

The luminous fluid or vital fire always tends towards expansibility and cold on the contrary towards concentration, the result is a striking similarity between the ice of years and the ice of water;

this is only formed by the action of the cold principle which dominates in water on the igneous principle. Likewise in an old man, the ice of the years is the result of the superiority of the coagulative principles over natural heat.

The aspiration of dephlogisticated air could produce such unfortunate effects, because the cold of the impure earth of the animal, like the excessive heat of the pure earth, also burns and destroys it, but in a different way. ; heat by expanding and cold by constricting and coagulating its parts.

With the help of the igneous fluid, when it has been made sensitive and reduced to quintessence, as the Hermetic philosophers know how to do, man manages to increase the measure of the subject of life and to give him the strength to get rid of , without using galenic means, contrary substances which link its action.

With the help of the elementary fluid, positive physics can only temporarily remedy local and particular infirmities.

The magnetic fluid that is said to be obtained by the Messmer tub, that which the electric machine develops and reduces in action, are effusions of this elementary fluid; everything leads us to believe this, especially since the primitive igneous fluid cannot produce visible and palpable sparks or cause crises; these effects can only be those of a secondary fluid.

Nature, like art, has its way of dephlogisticating the air, but less privileged than it; its operation is restricted to fixed and determined times at the place where man can perform it at will without ceasing.

The air is only charged with phlogiston substances in the extent of the atmosphere, because they come from the vapors of the exhalations of the earth and of all bodies, from where they are removed by the attraction of the sun. and spread in the air.

In the morning, before its rays have struck the horizon and acquired a certain force, the air does not yet contain phlogiston substances: it is the absence of the phlogiston which means that from ten to eleven o'clock in the evening until 'at dawn the air cannot be electrified;

the electric fluid is therefore only a secondary fluid , only a derivative of universal phlogiston which has no relation of essence or effect with the vital luminous fluid of which air is the vehicle.

At the moment following a storm, the air is also cleared of it because the rain carries it away and precipitates it with it.

Above the atmosphere, the clouds have the effect of molten nitre, the air passing through them is stripped of its phlogiston, which condenses there, becomes corporified and ignites there through the movement. and the shock of the clouds, and there becomes the cause and the substance of thunder and lightning, or as belonging infinitely more to central fire than to ethereal fire, with which it has no immediate communion, detaches itself from it without difficulty to return to his terrestrial element and fulfill there, alongside the archaeum of the globe and that of all the mixed ones, the place and the duty that nature has imposed on him.

From here comes the analogy of thunder with the electric fluid which has already been said to be only a derivative of universal phlogiston; this analogy proves how little factitious fluids must have with the luminous fluid, in which resides the subject of the life of all natural beings, which can only be analogous to itself or to the central fire of bodies.

The mythological Vulcan designates the central fire; before being thrown from the Heavens he lived on Olympus with his father Jupiter, who designates the vital fluid: they both have a common root.

In recent times skilful physicists have perceived in the air two distinct substances, one is a vital principle and the other a natural phlogiston; they would have been more sure of the truth of this system, if they had gone deeper into the causes and had not confused the effects of these two fluids.

“They claimed that atmospheric air, once sucked in, was no longer capable of sustaining life, because the blood and the lungs had taken away its natural phlogiston, and yet that the air charged with phlogiston did not differ from dephlogisticated air only in that the latter contained even more phlogiston. »

The contradiction of this system comes only from the fact that they did not distinguish between the different effects of these two fluids. The air expelled by the lungs contains infinitely more phlogiston than before being inhaled; because then it is charged with the phlogiston of the lungs which it carries with it; but it contains incomparably less vital fire. Dephlogisticated air, on the contrary, contains very little phlogiston and a lot of vital fire, because the parts of the phlogiston of the air which have been separated from it by the operation of dephlogistication, are replaced by the vital fire which is less discontinued in its parts, tightens and approaches so that the same volume of air contains sixty-nine times more than before dephlogistication.

Physicists have taken the igneous fluid on which the subject of life is nourished for the phlogiston of the air; and phlogiston for the igneous fluid of which air is the vehicle.

Other physicists have claimed that neither air nor water contains any vital fluid. We can reply to these, that the luminous fluid is in water, as it is in the earth, in the air, and in all natural beings; without its vital presence all of nature, buried in inaction, would return to the first chaos.

The volume of air which enters the lungs of man may be from ten to seventeen cubic inches per each inhalation; This measurement varies due to the size of the diameter and axis of the chest.

Man therefore consumes in twenty-four hours twenty muids of air by breathing alone, and he consumes or spoils twice as much, that is to say forty muids, in the same space of time by the vapors which escape. exhale from the pores of his body.

This disproportion of consumption, however astonishing it may seem, is no less positive; the proofs of this truth consist of a fact.

In a square line of the surface of the skin one finds one hundred pores, and as the surface of the skin of a man of average size is at least fourteen square feet, it results by calculation the number of two billion sixteen million pores.

The air expelled from the lungs of man contains only the sixty-seventh part of the heat which was diffused in the air of the atmosphere before the aspiration; hence it is that in a place where there are many people gathered together, the air becomes unhealthy because, each of these individuals retaining sixty-six and sixty-seventh of the fire contained in the air, we cannot at the same time end that cohob the air already breathed deprived of its vital fluid and infinitely more suitable then to take on the putrid miasmas that animal gas always conceals.

The need to breathe more nourishing and purer air is the cause of the expansion and pleasure that the lungs experience when, leaving these places of assembly, man breathes in the open air.

Borelli has proved that only fifteen cubic inches of air entered the lungs of a man of average build with each aspiration; this volume of air is equal to a body of two inches and a half which would have six equal faces, or else to a globe which would have a little more than three inches in diameter. This small quantity of air is received and distributed in all the vesicles of the lungs, the number of which is almost incredible.

Jacques Keïl puts them at one billion, seven hundred and four million, one hundred and eighty-six thousand and fifteen.

Étienne Hales only gives each vesicle the diameter of a hundredth of an inch, which supposes it to be inside the lungs. an immense surface.

These two scientists bring it to 21 thousand 906 square inches; this surface area is approximately equal to that of a table fifteen feet long by ten feet wide.

If fifteen cubic inches of air are received into the lungs and cover all the surfaces, they must necessarily extend to the point that the thickness of the column of air is equal to 15 divided by 21.906 , which will give the 1460th part of an inch which is like the 125th part of a line.

If the thickness, or the diameter of the column of air applied to each vesicle of the lung can hardly be conceived by the imagination, it demonstrates to us on the other hand how important it is for the conservation of our compound to multiply the particles of vital balm that the air transmits to him; this acts so immediately and so powerfully on this vesicular viscera, that the air dries or decomposes it if it is not watered and fed without interruption with an invigorating food, which would undoubtedly prevent in it any adhesion and any formation of tubercles, maintaining the lungs in the state of free and easy elasticity required by its constant functions.

For a man to enjoy perfect, brilliant and sustained health, his spirit of life must always remain in a state of strength and vigor, capable of giving the lungs enough spring to breathe in air with each aspiration. the universality of its numerous vesicles.

The use of philosophical quintessence is the only means; it is that which the divinity has reserved for the knowledge of the studious and diligent man, whose lively and penetrating sagacity has been able to carry his views and his intelligence well beyond the limits which pride and ignorance have circumscribed to those of ordinary men.

This divine quintessence is the fruit of his pain and his labor
: it is the reward for the work required to prepare the first material for the work that liberal nature spreads abundantly over the surface of the globe, in the season when rams and bulls leap on the tender grass; she is the nectar of the Gods. It is the use of this beneficial liquor which preserves the subject of his life and his health in an always equal volume and in an equal wholesomeness. He becomes the conqueror of years and human infirmities.

Does not the individual who enjoys these happy privileges have infinite thanks to render to the supreme goodness for having allowed him to penetrate the mysteries and the most hidden secrets of nature which place him above the Kings of the earth?

A few years ago the solution to the following two questions was proposed: "What is the property by which air contributes to the support of animal life?" » “Why, after a certain time, is the same air not suitable for this purpose? »

The answer required to develop these two questions is scattered throughout this pamphlet; to bring it back to a closer point of view, we will make it the subject of the following article.

The seminal fire which gives life at the moment of conception is a portion of luminous fluid spread throughout the macrocosm; it only differs by its particular specification to the animal. This fire is of incomprehensible subtlety and of such lively and constant action that the life of man would not be longer than that of these insects which are born and die on the same day, if through respiration he was abundantly supplied with that which the air envelops; it is the time of youth and the prime of life; but when the organs of the mixed are found to be poorly disposed or weakened by accident or by inseparable infirmities of a more advanced age, the communication of the fire of the air with that of the animal is intercepted; the order established for this trade is disturbed; the fire of life finding itself abandoned little by little by that of general nature announces in man the age of return and that of old age.

The progressive decadence of man when he is on his return is faithfully represented by the picture presented by the plant towards the middle of autumn; in its spring and in its summer, the stem is straight and the head haughty, it rises proudly towards the sky and goes to meet the spirit of life whose air seems to nourish it with complacency; but once it has grown its fruit to maturity, its hoary head begins to incline towards the earth, the life-giving influences no longer do anything but touch it; it narrows and retains only an arid and dilapidated surface of its past splendor.

Likewise, when man breathes, he only retains sixty-six parts out of sixty-seven of the vital fire contained in the air when he is in his youth and strength; but when he has reached the highest degree of perfection to which nature has been able to push him, from this point he begins to decline and retrograde. The impure death of the digestions and the phlogiston of the air that he has sucked in since his birth, links the action of the subject of his life.

The faculties of this magnet which he received in the maternal womb are weakening; he continually loses his attractive and homogeneous qualities that nature has implanted in him to appropriate and specify in himself the vital fire contained in the air he breathes, so that far from being fully substantiated by it. proportion, that is to say because of what he loses, as he did in his manhood, on the contrary, he retains less and less; from there the fluids of the stomach lose their heat and liquidity, the acids become blunted, the decomposition of its substances turns into viscous matter and it is constantly expectorated, the viscera becomes clogged, the blood becomes impoverished. , becomes corrupted, bad digestions multiply, insomnia, weariness, winds, everything finally tells him that his substances tend towards coagulation and inertia; hence it is that when a man is on the decline of the wheel, a year makes more impression of havoc and changes in his organization and on his figure, than several could have made in his young season. the decomposition of its substances turns into viscous matter and it is constantly expectorated, the viscera becomes clogged, the blood becomes impoverished, corrupted, bad digestions multiply, insomnia, weariness, winds, everything finally announces that its substances tend to coagulation and inertia; hence it is that when a man is on the decline of the wheel, a year makes more impression of havoc and changes in his organization and on his figure, than several could have made in his young season.

the decomposition of its substances turns into viscous matter and it is constantly expectorated, the viscera becomes clogged, the blood becomes impoverished, corrupted, bad digestions multiply, insomnia, weariness, winds, everything finally announces that its substances tend to coagulation and inertia; hence it is that when a man is on the decline of the wheel, a year makes more impression of havoc and changes in his organization and on his figure, than several could have made in his young season. everything finally tells him that his substances tend towards coagulation and inertia; hence it is that when a man is on the decline of the wheel, a year makes more impression of havoc and changes in his organization and on his figure, than several could have made in his young season. everything finally tells him that his substances tend towards coagulation and inertia; hence it is that when a man is on the decline of the wheel, a year makes more impression of havoc and changes in his organization and on his figure, than several could have made in his young season.

The heart and stomach begin to feel the slightest amount of natural heat; the emptiness and inaction that we experience there debilitate the most distant members; the muscles stiffen; the skin becomes wrinkled and furrowed, the movements lose their softness, they become weaker and more languid little by little the circumference that the radical humidity covered in him tightens and shrinks; being in less quantity, it must necessarily embrace less extent; soon the fire of the air that the lungs inhale communicates only weakly in the places of its first channels; this is what makes it said of an old man who cannot help himself with his limbs that he still has a good chest.

The picture of a person who is ill and who loses feeling represents with enough resemblance the progress and the causes of the progressive decline of the material body of man; the first sign manifested by the individual who experiences this crisis is a general pallor over the whole surface caused by the absence of the blood which the heart has drawn from all parts of the body, even the most distant, to increase so much its warmth and his strength against the evil by which he is suffocated; but if the vital fire is found to be the strongest, the heart returns after its victory the blood of the help of which it no longer needs; the person changes color and sees the light again; likewise, in proportion as the heart and the stomach need heat to preserve their acting and digestive faculties, when the vital fire which animates it does not have the force to retain and to individuate in sufficient measure that which is diffused in the air, it is restricted to attracting that which resides in its members; but the heart and the stomach no longer send it back, as the heart sent back the blood in the first picture, because their need increases day by day.

The perceptible and gradual diminution of the radical humidity in the man who finds himself on the lean of the wheel of human life is the reason for the cold, the numbness and the heaviness which he feels in all distant parts of trunk.

It is to the depletion of this vital fire that we must attribute the apathy and coldness of the soul that man experiences as he ages.

In his youth, he was all fiery, tender, compassionate, generous, full of zeal and love; he gives himself over with the impetuosity of a flame to the impulses that the first impressions carry in his heart; but if his fire of life diminishes in proportion, everything changes in him in proportion; in his eyes, nature no longer has the same relationships, because no longer having the same means, it no longer offers him the same resources. The fire of passions goes out; the objects which in the age of enjoyment were his amusements and his delights no longer excite in him anything but regrets, temper and jealousy, that is to say his thinking soul is so intimately linked to his active spirit (which in him constitutes his fire of life) and to the organs of his compound that, when these decrease and weaken by the lack of this fire, the sensations of the other become heavier and become less sensitive, less susceptible to charitable attachment, and are less affected by everything that is the responsibility of the passions and outpourings of the heart.

It is the inevitable consequence of this cooling that the old man, however incorrectly, calls prudence, reason, profound politics; but we must not have any illusions about the effects of self-love and agree in good faith that the qualities he attributes to himself are less the fruit of his reflections than a weak compensation for his impotence.

If this old man could rejuvenate and revert back to the time of his brilliant years, we are entitled to think that the eyes of his imagination would take up the same aspects and the same points of view as before, and what during the time from his numbness would have seemed to him reason, prudence, economy, good sense, would still seem to him, as in the morning of his existence, lukewarmness, timidity, avarice, coldness, insensitivity.

If the man in an advanced age had the same portion of fire of life as that which he had at 30 years old, and if it were possible for him to maintain the volume and the action by a daily food, he would enjoy of all the faculties of this age, his points of view would be almost the same, because he would always be in the age of enjoyment and pleasures and the bitterness of privations would not have irritated his ideas nor embittered his character; his spirit, always watered and always nourished by celestial fire, would leave his imagination constantly susceptible to the same impulses and the same sublimity. Voltaire at 80 would have appeared the Voltaire of Henriade and Zaïr, and without experiencing the humiliation and spite of an octogenarian figure,

It would be to be hoped that man, instead of trying to be distracted by his progressive decline, would put all his diligence and all his resources into preventing it and stopping its course by the simple means that nature presents to him.

It seems that a fatality from which man cannot distract himself subjugates the light of his reason; he only seeks to enjoy and yet the least of his concerns seems to be that of taking care of the means of prolonging his enjoyment. Without thinking about it, he runs with giant steps to the end of his career, and yet if when he reached his maturity, he looked behind him, he would still see the games of his adolescence on his heels.

It is no longer possible to doubt that the luminous fluid, of which air is the channel and vehicle, and which is made suitable for man by the ferment of the same essence which is specified in it, is the principal support of his life. It is therefore in him alone that lies the unique and absolute means of prolonging one's days.

The effects that purely dephlogisticated air produces on the animals which inhale it is a proof as natural as physical of the possibility of increasing the subject of life, and by an equally natural consequence this experience gives rise to the belief that, if it were possible to condense and make sensitive the invigorating fluid it contains, we would most certainly have found the Universal panacea whose power and virtues were described by the patriarchs, the prophets, the Egyptians, the Druids and the Hermetic philosophers. and the wonderful effects.

We will be convinced, by thoughtful reading of this work, not only of the possibility of condensing air and its luminous fluid, but also of attracting it and corporifying it in the same operation, by an attraction produced by this same fluid. , so that, similar to the attraction that nature has placed in the breast of all animals, that of the Philosophers attracts and homogenizes the vital fluid of the air with which the medicine of the three kingdoms of nature must be composed.

This luminous fluid or this fire of nature which is everywhere and which animates everything, must necessarily be found more abundantly and more easily extracted in one subject than in another; the material of the hermetic work contains it with all its qualities and all the abundance that one could desire. It is with this material coming from the central fire and conglutinated by the air of the atmosphere that the wise men made their magnet, their attraction, their magnesia. It is the different operations required to manufacture this attraction which gave rise to the mythological invention of the Labors of Hercules.

We can judge the tenacity of this attraction and the difficulty of annihilating it by the experiment carried out on the salts extracted from plants.

This attraction is so powerful that it preserves from ignition the prolific virtues of the seeds in which it is implanted.

Experience proves the reality of this phenomenon; with the help of a microscope, we see the birth of animal and plant seeds infused or macerated in water, a very large number of animalcules; we notice that the greater boiling, far from reducing their number, on the contrary only increases it; but what is most incredible about this phenomenon is that, if we roast and pulverize sourdoughs, peas, beans, etc., we even reduce them to charcoal by passing them on the streetlight fire, and after this operation we put them to infuse in boiling water, we are pleasantly surprised to see that the small animalcules always appear there with the same fertility; which proves that the action of fire, even the most intense, cannot weaken or diminish the fermentative principle of vegetation,

How could it be possible that the seminal fire, concentrated in the salts and which in the plant is the attraction of the universal fire, as coming from the same principle, can be destroyed by the elementary fire which is infinitely less divisible, less penetrating and less powerful than him?

According to this experience, it is not permitted for a thinking being to doubt that the attraction of man, which is the spirit which serves as an envelope for his soul and which gives to his body movement and life, can be destroyed and annihilated by the death of the individual. This doubt would be absurd and insane. In the treatise on the Hermetic Kabbalah which ends the work of which this is only the preliminary, we will be convinced, by even stronger reasons, that the spirit of man, or the inner man, is imperishable, and positively survives natural death; this is what made Saint Paul say that man was inexterminable.

In the morning, at dawn as at the moment following a storm, the air is purer, more clear of heterogeneous parts. Freedom and sensitivity of breathing, swelling
delicious of the lungs then prove in a very persuasive manner, that in these moments, man aspires to the subject of his life and that of his preservation, more abundantly than in any other.

This is the cause of the secret serenity, with which his soul is intoxicated with such sweetness; the inner fulfillment and tender and respectful contemplation to which the physical always leads the moral, is a tribute and a thanksgiving that he renders to the author of nature at the moment when she opens her maternal womb to him.

If it is true, as all the followers assure, that the knowledge of the first material of the hermetic work and the secret manipulations that it requires, were less the reward of their work than a very particular inspiration of divinity, we are justified in presuming that what they took for a celestial revelation was only the natural effect that this delicious moment produces on all beings.

Recollection and deep meditation made them understand the causes by showing them the paths of nature. A reasoned and diligent work on the materials which seemed to them to be the products of the development and the purity of the benign influences of the Elements, in these privileged moments, led them by a straight, simple and natural path, from consequences to consequences, from results to results, to the perfect knowledge of the universal panacea. These followers could have said like Moses that they had spoken to the Eternal through a burning bush; because the burning bush of this famous philosopher is only the luminous fluid,

While it is unfortunate that until now this sublime research has been shamefully relegated to a certain class of men who do not have the slightest tincture of physics or chemistry, and to whom an exalted and effervescent imagination has taken in place of science and Talent, it is even more unfortunate that blindness and too stubborn prejudice have attached to it a ridicule so general and so outrageous that those who deal with it with more knowledge of the principles and the means which could lead you, are obliged to hide so as not to cover themselves with the kind of opprobrium that the ignorant individuals who are referred to as blowers have incurred.

Why would the scientists of our day blush to tear away this pernicious veil that ignorance and blind prejudice have given birth to by openly engaging in the research and work required by the knowledge of nature?

Would it be in fear of making vain efforts? However, the recent examples of the almost incredible discoveries made in physics and chemistry, and particularly the effects which dephlogisticated air produces on the animals which inhale it, should be very likely to encourage their enterprise, with a hope of so much better founded that the effects of dephlogisticated air are considered by intelligent and good-faith men as more than a beginning of proof of the possibility of increasing the subject of life and prolonging its duration.

This vehicle full of light should, it seems to me, be powerful enough to stimulate hard-working scientists to push this discovery further and make it more universally useful.

Gaudeant bene nati
May the well-born rejoice