Splendor Solis - The Splendor of the Sun
The Splendor of the Sun - Splendor Solis,
The Flower of Treasures, The Great Metallic Miracle
CONTENTS:
1. OF THE ORIGIN OF THE STONE OF THE WISE AND HOW WITH ARTIFICE it can be reduced to its perfection.
2. SECOND TREATISE REPRESENTING THE WORK OF THE PHILOSOPHERS
3. Of the said Work
4. WHAT IS THE PROPERTY OF Nature by which it takes its operation
5. VARIOUS OPERATIONS OF all this work in four brief articles which are quite easy to understand.
6. OF THE OWNERSHIP OF ALL
the work and of the entire preparation of the Stone.
7. Chapter 7 - Conclusion
Prologue
Alphidius, rightly esteemed one of the most celebrated and commendable to posterity among the ancient and wise Philosophers of his time, proposes to us in his divine writings, that ordinary contemplation, mysterious consideration and continuous reading of the approved, renowned authors, sufficiently recommended for such, and who have divinely treated us of this work, sung or revered the rarest spirits, who by curiosity worthy of such a subject, or by compassion to see so many blinded souls consuming time there, have very wisely deigned to produce to the day some brilliant spark of the excellence of our Lion who knows himself by the paw, as a guarantee only of the ardent light which they have drawn from it, or to judge at least approximately, of the precious stone by the examination of this sacred sample; This wise, I say, and provident doctor says that the search for this earthly Sun brings as much or more fruit and contentment to infants learnedly raised under the provident tutelage of this superhuman and doubtless celestial science, amicably nourished with the agreeable milk of its loving and tasty breast; that it can of contempt and discontent in the strange ears of these learned ignoramuses, who do not have the understanding sufficiently settled to judge pertinently and understand the effect of a mystery so high, so grave and serious, the sight subtle enough to see the subject, nor the brain of oneself sufficiently stamped to fix the price of this inestimable pearl: but only nourished, raised and relieved, satiated, or to say better maintained with the bitter juice of ignorance, make themselves incapable of more solid meats to digest at the right time and to put themselves back at all times like an object before the eyes, the art of the Stone of the Sages that we call the Heaven of the Philosophers.
But to them will I never advise them to entangle themselves further in the vague folds of the Golden Fleece, not even to touch with the smallest tip of a finger or with their lips this inexhaustible Labyrinth of their weak reach; because these brainless brains are not called to the glorious triumph of this degree of honor, promised and assured to only philosophical souls, not to all comers, nor to confuse the mind, capricious enough besides, to dare to suck the honey of the delights of our judicious writings: being more appropriate, useful and profitable to these ignorant heads to prefer the memory of the cost to the merit of taste without exercising it in this labor, nor making any test, however puny, of our divine operation; but rather to remove from the verdant orchard of our precious Hesperides the fruitless nose of their insufficiency, incapable of proposals too subtle for their leader, from our excellent work, in disproportionate regard to their weak thoughts.
Our celestial Muse does not amuse herself with the indifferent whims of everyone in general, but in detail considers some to despise others, making a sortable choice of her most favorites and of those whom she can recognize as true children of science, calling them benignly to the happiest rays of her golden branches, instead of keeping the others as far as she can from her homes.
Profane people do not approach our sacred treasures.
Only to the elect who are holy and consecrated.
Rhasis thinks not the less of the treatise he has made on the light of lights. No one, he says, should presume so much of himself, without assured hope of incurring, by certain blame, the shame he deserves, extending his desires beyond the imprudent limits of his capacity to draw at will from the weak springs of his feeble mind, the pure and clear essence of the admirable mixtures, though unknown to them, of the perfect elements. Also that, to speak truly, such sorts of people putting in more than they will reap, prepare more confusion than contentment, more mockery than relief, more subject a thousand times to the apprehension of a sad punishment, than to the gain of the premeditated fruit; without remembering the rod of Apelles, who in two words took up the scientific presumption of a rogue cobbler with the rod of his rigor, at the moment when he thought he was properly displaying his importunate speech outside the straight fences of his simple shoe, to imprudently take up again, and like a venerable censor, the features and the portrait of his grave painting.
You could, he said to him, speak of your slipper:
But not of a doublet, an arm or a mitten.
This is why, very aptly, Propriety, in order to avoid the poisonous blame and the censure of a touchy public, places this point of modesty before our eyes.
More than one can one must try.
And such in noise who does not know how to stutter.
With this other column which serves as a prop and solid support.
Just exercise what your knowledge of your art has given you
and experience
what you know.
But what, everyone from now on in this miserable time does not believe so much, and flatters himself so much in his opinion, that he no longer finds anything too hot, that his hand of arrogance does not take with impunity, thinking well to meet in this century of iron, some golden centuries, and more surely than the bean in the cake.
The ignorant man, overwhelmed by his ignorance,
now wants to discuss a learned science,
even thinking he knows everything he does not know.
So stale, that holding a great quarter of the caprices of the moon, they rack their brains to think of making it descend with its influences on the body of the earth, mother of the elements, even by a path that they never knew; only supported by the natural appearances of a concupiscent curiosity and desirous of novelties. But if so be that, ignoti nulla cupido , according to the Philosopher, what appearance can they conceive of the transcendent effects of our good genius?
Their minds, lighter than a light cloud,
cannot speak well of an unknown thing.
And no more than the blind who cannot judge colors, being deprived of sight, so the ignorant can only speak by stammering or with their feet under the table, from the heaven of the philosophers: Si te fata vacant, aliter non , says Augurel in his Chrysopoeia.
If heaven grants you favor,
devote yourself to this precious art
, since it is only ordained
for the most learned by the gift of heaven.
I would therefore begin to make more of their good judgment, if they did not develop this onerous research, which does not easily allow itself to be handled by the importunity of these abrupt abortions of science. All those who implore it and present their skiff at the mouth of this gulf, do not arrive on board; and most of those who sail there or embark at this port, meet with shipwreck in the middle of the road. After a thousand labors the wise Argonauts, led between the waves by the powerful hand of long destinies, alone finally conquered this rich Fleece, at the height of their valour, armed and aided by industry, experience and patience, true conductors of the calm expressly required for this divine effect.
- - - - - - Pauci quos aequus arnavit Jupiter, aut ardens evexit ad aethera virtus ,
God does not give it except to his most favorite
And to those whom heaven has tenderly nourished.
So it is necessary to approach this renowned island, which is called our Colchos, to better foresee the shipwreck, and noting the point of natural causes, to know at one's fingertips the most famous writings that the best philosophers of our past centuries have developed, and to judge the truth by the concordance of their separate paintings; otherwise I see them all bandaged up for a narrow prohibition of even letting all these ignorant people open their books.
Do you dare to leaf through with a sacrilegious hand
The price of our notebooks without our privilege?
No, no, withdraw, your bait is not
To surprise the bird that serves us as a meal.
Philosophers are curious to communicate with their fellow men, so they speak only for the most learned; thus the Complaint of Nature maintains to us, If you know it, I have told you everything, but if you do not know it, I will not advance you in anything. This is precisely why they censor their books, on pain of understanding nothing in them but a juice of confusion and waste of time, they are no longer capable of gathering the sweet honey among so many other flowers.
Rosin, in accordance with the preceding authors, does not approve of the time they use, baptizing them with the name of imbeciles of mind, for not applying so abruptly to this essay without the knowledge of things that the Philosophers have written about them. Where there is agreement, there is truth, say the Count of Treviso and the great Rosary, Concorda philosophas et bene tibi erit .
If of all your discords you want to see the concord
of the Sages, the agreements granted without discord.
Which have instituted as the foundation of this art, a natural principle, not yet familiar but by a hidden operation and science: although it is manifest and clearer than the day, that all corporeal things take their source and their being from the terrestrial mass, Terra enim est mater Elementorum; from terra procedant et ad terram revertuntur says Doctor Hermes.
The earth is the mother element of all things
, which she nurses and encloses in her womb.
As the vessel of generations, as well as their properties according to the order of time, by the influence of the Heavens, (which serve as seed and formative heat to germinate and produce matter), of the Planets, the Sun, the Moon or the stars, and so of the others consecutively with the four qualities of the Elements, which serving as matrix one to the other, move without ceasing, and to which are related all growing and nascent things with a particular origin and form in their own substances, in conformity with the divine omnipotence and will, which made them so from the first instant and beginning of the admirable creation of the world.
All metals also placed in the rank of created things have their origin from the earth, mother of the elements and nurse of all things, as already stated above, with a proper and individual matter derived as to and as to the four properties of the elements, by the influential concurrence of the force of the metals and the conjunctions of the constellation of the planets. Aristotle, in the fourth book of his Meteora, is indeed of the same opinion, when he maintains and says that quicksilver is indeed a common matter of all metals, but that nature first gathers and unites together the matters of the four elements alone, to afterwards compose a body according to the effect and property of the matter, which the Philosophers call Mercury or Quicksilver not common or made by natural operation, but having a perfect form of gold and silver, or rather deriving from the two perfect metals. Naturalists curious to know the state of minerals speak of it quite clearly in their books, without there being any need to write more at length here, except that on this assured and solid basis is properly founded the principle and the artifice of the stone of the wise, the beginnings of which are found in the center and the perfect body of Nature, which does not depend on any living being; and from itself also we see it borrow the only means of its perfect form and the greatest satisfaction of its final perfection.
I call you all, Darlings of Nature,
I call you all to the sweet sound of my voice:
Come, with a discreet eye judge the painting,
That I give you here as I see it.
If it were better (better cannot be
another's enterprise), you would have it with a good heart:
let a theater of love make this play appear,
modestly sucking the flowers of my humor.
You will be able to pick a few grains of verjuice from the golden vine
of my sacred orchard:
but if the vine is prepared long in advance,
these bitternesses will never go away or return.
I will not prevent the world from slandering,
rather I want to evoke this cause near them:
I take them as witness that I do not want to say anything
that is not in good taste, and not to provoke them.
Whoever does better must publish it
and give this treasure to posterity:
but discretion does not say that it does not combine
a slanderous vice full of temerity.
To take it back is easy, the best is difficult,
and always the censor holds some passion.
But all things considered, let them bite file by file;
firm, I will appear of good intention.
OF THE ORIGIN OF THE STONE OF THE WISE
AND HOW WITH ARTIFICE
it can be reduced to its perfection.
FIRST TREATISE
This Stone of the Sages draws the pure Elements from its essence by the assured way of a fundamental nature, in which it does not amend, according to what Hali reports, when he says that this Stone does not influence and imbibe entirely on growing and deep things, conglutinating, freezing and resolving on nature, which makes this thing better, more perfect and more effective, according to their order and the time ordered. On the way and model of such an artifice it is necessary that each one does not apply and rest on these natural principles nor desire to receive help and aid in its operation by the art of Nature, which maintains itself so long and preserves itself from itself until by its natural art time comes to perfect the right form of its intention. Now this artifice is nothing else than a single operation and perfect preparation of the materials, which wise and provident Nature in the mixture of this work has made: to which also suits the mediocre proportion and assured measure of this operation with a mature judgment and a considered prudence. For although art can attribute to itself the Sun and the Moon before a new beginning to make like gold, if it is not necessary that of the art of the natural secret of mineral materials, and to know how they have in the entrails of the earth the foundation of their first principles: but it is very certain that art observes another way than Nature, having for this purpose a quite other and diverse operation. It is also fitting then that this artifice coming from the preceding natural roots at the beginning of Nature should produce exquisite things, which Nature could never of herself procreate: for it is true that it is not in her power to be able to engender the things of themselves by which the metals of Nature come to procreate themselves almost as imperfect, and which nevertheless immediately after and as in less than nothing can be perfected by the rare secrets of the ingenious artist: that which comes from the temporal matter of Nature, and which serves the artifice of men when she relieves them of her free means; then again the artifice helps her by its temporal operation, but in such a way that this accomplished form can then after correspond and make itself suitable to the first intentions of Nature and to the last perfection of her designs. And although with great artifice it must be kept silent, that the Stone above-mentioned returns to the proper point of its first form, the being from which it draws treasures from Nature, also that all substantial forms of each thing grow in two different ways, brutally or by metals; if they all come from an interior power of matter, except the soul of man which is in no way held and does not arise, like other things, from this earthly and temporal submission.But take good care also that the substantial form does not relate and cannot condescend to matter, were it not to be made by a certain operation of some accidental form: not however that this happens from its particular force, but rather from some other operative substance, as is fire or other similar heat answering to it, perfectly adjoined, which must operate there.
We will take the similitude of a hen's egg, to explain ourselves better and make our proposition more intelligible, in which exists the substantial form of putrefaction without the accidental form, namely is a mixture of red and white, by the particular force of an internal and natural heat which operates in this egg, as for brooding hens: but although this egg is the matter of the hen, the form nevertheless is not substantially or accidentally included therein, but only potentially, because putrefaction which is the principle of all generation does not engender with the help and by means of heat. Calor agens in humido efficit primo nigredinern et in sicco albedinern .
All the same, it is the case with the natural matter of the above-mentioned Stone, in which neither the substantial nor accidental form exists without putrefaction or decoction, which render it potentially what it is afterwards in effect. It now remains to hear and make known what habit this putrefaction, so necessary for procreation, can have and from whence it principally draws its origin.
Rot or putrefaction sometimes does not engender by an external heat, preserved in a certain place of its warm nature, or by the heat which is attracted by some means making humidity. This putrefaction is similarly made by a superfluous coldness, when the natural heat comes to waste away and disperse, weaken and corrupt by a superabundant coldness, which is properly privation, because each thing does not abstain from natural heat, and certainly such a rottenness is made in cold and humid things. The Philosophers do not treat at all of this putrefaction, but rather of rottenness, which is nothing other than humidity or dryness, by means of which all dry things come to resolve themselves joining fire with water, as the Trevisan says, to return again and resume their first being, on what they claim, then after according to the proper of their nature to stop the perfection of their final form.
In this rotting, humidity is united with a dryness, not however so arid that the humid part does not preserve pell-mell that which is dry as to itself, and yet it is properly a compression of spirits or a certain congealing of matters. But when the humid comes to disunite and make an entire separation from the dry, it is immediately necessary to distract the driest part and reduce it to ashes. Thus the Philosophers understand that their rotting, dryness, disruption or dissolution and calcination are done in such a way that the humid and the natural dry come to join, dissolve and reunite together by an abundance of humidity and dryness, and by an equal proportion of temperature; that the superfluous and corruptible things may not more easily evaporate and be drawn out as useless vapors and fuliginous excrements: neither more nor less than meat taken into the stomach properly assimilates and is converted into the same substance of the nourished nature, when it is there by a digestive and praiseworthy concoction seasoned, and that from the preparation and digestion made in the ventricle it attracts a certain substantial virtue and suitable humidity. Now by means of this radical humidity nature is preserved and increased, their superfluous and superabundant fuliginous parts like a corrupted sulphur, rejected from them. But it must be noted that each of the said parts wants to be nourished according to the proper of its nature, in which it does not rejoice and desires to remain and preserve its individual in its same species. Which we must also understand of the Stone of the Sages as of the human body, which changes into the purity of its substance the inferior forms and of different condition, by means of this natural and temperate fire, which is the true governor and the only conduct of our great vessel, minor ignis omnia terit . It is the pilot and the radical humidity where the diverse natures live peacefully, where several contrary qualities and different discords compose agreements of harmony, assembled by the industry of a necessary concoction and a humid heat, which act in an equal proportion on these metallic bodies.
The body disguises everything in its own nature,
What we want to give it serves as food:
Our work thus makes them imperfect metals,
That it equals to the equal of its more perfect kings,
SECOND TREATISE REPRESENTING THE WORK OF THE PHILOSOPHERS
By means of two figures.
It is necessary to know, said Morien, that our operation and the Art which we wish to treat of at present, are divided into two principal doctrines, the extremities and the means of which do not attach closely, nor adhere so much to one another, that the immediate end of the first does not ally itself with an indivisible link to the beginning of the posterior, and do not mutually succeed one another, the last being amicably provoked to the imitation of the same actions which it has been able to notice and attentively consider in the preceding model of that which has preceded it by some space of time; and then the whole magisterium is entirely made and perfect, but they cannot accommodate themselves in any other body than in their own matter. Now, to better and more assuredly understand this, it is necessary to remark in the first place, that Nature, according to Geber, comes from the first essence of metals composed of Mercury and Sulphur: which opinion is followed by the authority of Serrarius in his question of alchemy cap. 25, namely, that Nature proceeds from the source and pure essence of natural metals, which takes from the fire a water of putrefaction, which it mixes with a very white and subtle stone, reducing and resolving it like a broth into certain vapors raised in the veins of the earth, which it beats by dint of continual motion to make it cook and vaporize together with humidity and like dryness, which reunite and coagulate, so that it produces a certain substance which we commonly call Mercury or Quicksilver, which is nothing else than the source and first matter of metals, as we have already said. And for this the same author certifies again in the 26th chapter that those who wish to follow Nature as far as it is lawful and possible, must not help with quicksilver only, but with quicksilver and sulphur all together, which again must not only be mixed, but also prepared as and when and seasoned with prudence what Nature has produced and reduced to perpetual confluence. Now it is that with such a kind of quicksilver, Nature begins her first operation, and ends with the natural of the metals with which she is not content for the entire perfection of her work, because she has completed what was her duty and conceded everything to artifice, in order to be able to accomplish her intention to perfect the Philosophers' Stone and form it entirely of its last period and most perfect luster: thus in fact it is certain that we begin the work on the places where Nature has placed her goal and the last glory of her ambition. All Philosophers hold the true principle of their operation from the last end of the sun of metals, all freely confess that he who claims something to the knowledge of this work, or who perfectly desires to proceed to the height of this natural art,must absolutely and without scruple begin with the end and cessation of Nature and where finally she rests having acquired the perfection of her pretensions, renouncing the final enjoyment of her ordinary actions. It is therefore necessary to take this sulphur and this quicksilver that Nature will have reduced to the number of a very pure and very clear form being accomplished and endowed with a reunion so subtle, that no other could so naively prepare it, whatever artifice he brings to it, although Nature, as is said, finally possesses this matter by the formal generation of metals. Now, this matter thus informed by Nature will lead the worker to the perfection of his point, and the artifice by this means will succeed in carrying out the salvation of his designs, by the force that it receives properly imbibed and applied in such matter; to which the Alchemists add the Sol to make it dissolve and distinguish from the elements, until it has acquired a subtle and spiritual nature, in the purity of quicksilver and in the nature of sulphurs: so that this one then is the closest matter, and which draws the most by its proximity and neighborhood with gold, to receive the pure form of this occult Stone, which matter we callMercurius Philosophorum , since the two above-mentioned are joined and closely allied to each other.
The opinion of Aristotle is not repugnant to this, but is at all in conformity with it by the advice he gave to the Great Alexander. Will you, he said to him, add gold with the other precious things, with which kings are usually adorned and richly crowned, to the merit of our Peter? I warn you that this Mercury is the only material and unique thing to perfect our science, although the means of the operation is wrapped in so many knots and diversities that very few people can be sure of having a safe-conduct from our King to reach the center of this labyrinth stretched by the favorable net of a sweet Ariadne. Now, this obscure diversity shaded by a thousand ambiguous paths, and veiled by an infinity of thick clouds is a true stroke of the hand of the Philosophers and very expressly wisely disguised: thus hold it Rosin, the Count of Treviso, and all the others unanimously, so that each one by the facility of the work does not arrive indifferently at this supreme step, and does not come to despise such a precious jewel, having acquired it so easily, and as without difficulty reached the honorable period of our work perfect over all the other works, which we call for this purpose a collection, because of the multitude put together, and a firm representation of all the things that Nature includes. This is why the Philosophers speak thus: Sublimate what may remain of it, then being distilled and communicated, make it rise and fall again, drying it out from outside and from inside, and other infinite doctrines interwoven with the same ambiguities and amphibological figures, which must however all be together and by conjunction followed and absolutely accomplished to finally gather the nectarine fruit of our golden harvest: although it seems that Alphidius does not want to oppose it in these terms: "It must be known that when we weld and congeal, we also sublimate and alchemize without intermission of time, joining by this means and purifying our work. " being thus sublimated and dissolved with the spirit, it purifies itself which is a principle and origin very worthy to be compared to all things in the universe, which have life, or soul, spirit or not, whether living and nascent minerals, elements and their compositions, cold and hot things, birds, and summarily everything that can be produced from the earth to the sky, is contained and cooperates in power with our Art. These two doctrines above mentioned signify according to the Philosophers this black and obscure woman who serves as a key to all the work, and who must dominate in the force of our Stone, namely in blackness, assured base of all the foundation, or else this man who is the form of our matter, which we very aptly compare to the sun. This is enough said for a beginning of the first doctrine of this Art. And more clearly still in what follows:"When our body is cast into the water and comes to be redeemed it will immediately be rotten, black, shadowy and darkened, then it will not vanish and become like lime which sublimates and exalts soon after" being thus sublimated and dissolved with the spirit, it purifies itself which is a principle and origin very worthy to be compared to all things in the universe, which have life, or soul, spirit or not, that is to say living and nascent minerals, elements and their compositions, to cold and hot things, to birds, and summarily everything that can be produced from the earth to the sky, is contained and cooperates in power with our Art. These two doctrines above mentioned signify according to the Philosophers that black and obscure woman who serves as a key to the whole work, and who must dominate in the force of our Stone, namely in the blackness, assured base of the whole foundation, or else that man who is the form of our matter, which we very aptly compare to the sun. This is enough said for a beginning of the first doctrine of this Art.
FIGURE TWO
DECLARATION OF THE WORK,
How it must be carried out to the final perfection, by several Similarities, figures, colloquies & interpretations of the Philosophers.
FIGURE THREE
THIRD TREATISE
Of the said Work
This great genius of our science and father of the highest and rarest philosophy, Hermes, raising in himself, and maintaining his mind on the operation of the work of the Philosophers, finally hatches these words: "This can be said as an end of the world, in that heaven and earth produce well together, but no one can by heaven and earth know our two preceding doctrines, veiled by so many hieroglyphs." Many also arrived at the work have sweated much before catching this perfection, which having reached, they explain after, but with more amphibological ambiguities, and so confused that one cannot understand them, by their shadowy figures and similitudes, but too obscure for those who think to follow their steps, embracing curiously this same fortune, to be crowned with a similar palm, since they want to run a similar risk.
The first similitude shows us that God by his omnipotence and the infinity of his goodness, created the earth all equal, fat and fertile, without sand, without stones, without mountains, without valleys, by the influence of the stars and operations of Nature, and nevertheless we see now that it retains nothing of this ancient luster, but so disfigured of its perfection that one can hardly know it any more from what it wanted to be, changed into various forms and figures, externally, of strong stones, high mountains and deep valleys, internally, of terrible things and colors like bronze and other metals. Although all these confused and diverse things are now found in the body of this earth, if it comes entirely from its first form, when from very wide, big, deep and long that it was before, it is reduced to a large and vast space by the continual operation of the sun and that the heat is not always preserved there vehement, ardent and vaporous, mingling confusedly to the bottom of this large mass with the coldness and humidity that it encloses in its body, from which do not sometimes raise cold, nebulous and aerial vapors, which are born from the mixture of these two contrary regimes, from which enclosed and stopped in the earth, several other consecutive vapors are born by the length of time, so strong at the end, that it is often forced to make way for them to let them exhale through the opening of its belly, giving them free passage in spite of itself, when it would have really desired to be able to retain them in the natural dungeons of its deepest caverns, where several the long one finding itself together pell-mell, sometimes caused several parts of earth to pile up in one place by the assembled force of its exhalations, and several others in other places. But as the mountains and valleys have been reduced to their certain end, there mainly is also found the earth at the best temperate point of the four qualities, heat, coldness, humidity and dried decoction, boiled or in no way diminished; now in these places one sees the best and purest bronze. For this reason it is easy to believe that in places where the earth is leveled, there is not so great a quantity of vapors nor so many sulphurous exhalations, which keeps it more calm and at rest. That which is fat, muddy, and where the moisture from above withdraws downwards and within, becomes more tender and soft, changing into an extreme whiteness, by means chiefly of a dryness caused by the heat of the sun, which renders it stronger, more baked, and more hardened after a long space of time. But a corruptible, frangible, sandy earth, and which yet in no wise tender hangs piece by piece like clusters of grapes, is commonly leaner, and consequently having less nourishment for the maintenance of its substance,is later and has received too little moisture or nourishing vigor, which makes it much more difficult to cook, maintaining itself only as if by the form of rolls or other poorly arranged matter. Now, this earth cannot easily be reduced to stone if it is not extremely vaporous and filled with great humidity, but it is very necessary that with the drying of the waters which comes from the vehement and continual heat of the sun, the humidity of the earth does not always maintain it: otherwise this Earth would remain as dull and corruptible, and would easily come apart in pieces. What however has not yet been hardened in it at all and perfect, can in the long run become and reduce itself to hard and strong stone by the continual operation of nature assisted by the heat of the sun and long continual decoction and without intermission. Thus the aforesaid fumes and vapors enclosed in the pores of the earth, when they come to join the aquatic vapors with the substance of some very subtle earth, digested and well purified by the virtue and influence of the sun, of the other planets and of all the elements together, can be reduced and put into operation quicksilver.
But as much as he could draw from some subtle and flamboyant hardness, one can well use the sulphur of the Philosophers, from the force and energy of which this great Hermes concludes very well, when he says: "that virtue will be received from the superior and inferior planets, and that with force, it surpasses and penetrates all other force, even to precious stones."
FIGURE FOUR
ANOTHER SIMILARITIES
Hermes, the greatest worker and the first master of this art, says that the water of the air, which is between the sky and the earth, is the life of every thing, because by means of these two particular and natural qualities, hot and humid, it unites these two contrary elements, water and fire, as a necessary medium to accord these two extremities. And the sky begins to lighten immediately on the earth, that this water is not infused from above serving as a second seed introduced into the neck of its belly, from which it has conceived a sweetness like honey, and a certain humidity, which make it produce diversity of colors and fruits, from where is not raised again and grown as by succession of lineage in the vestiges of their secret ways, a tree of admirable height and thickness with a silvery trunk, which does not extend amply and widely through the places and cantons of the world. On the branches of this tree rested various kinds of birds, which all flew away towards the day, then appeared there crows in abundance, infinity of other and rare properties still found there, for it bore many kinds of fruits, of which the first were like small seeds, and the other is called by all the Philosophers Terra Foliota , the third was of the purest gold, intermingled with many fruits which are called of health, warming what is cold, cooling what is hot, and what has contracted by an extraordinary bad weather some excessive heat, making the dry moist, and the humidity dry, softening what is hard, and firming what is soft. Now, all these conversions of contrary essences are the most assured pilotis of the hope of our work, nostra operatio est naturarum mutatio , they commonly say.
Make the body spirit and the spirit make body,
The living make die and the dead live again.
This is the Stone of Lozenges, the perfect circle where rests as a guarantor the point of the magisterium, and the beginning of the supposed end of all our artifice. This maxim is true, that the assurance of a good principle does not serve a little to console assured minds, who nevertheless embark for fear of not being able to emerge at the haven of salvation of a good hope, seeing themselves assailed by so many hard reefs that they most often make the best sailors abandon the prize. If however we envisage some sweet Alcyone in the midst of our storm, we at least assure ourselves of having still remained on the true road of our intentions, and by this good omen we begin to recognize ex ungue Leonem , the Lion with the paw, as they say, breathing under the hard burden of our greatest works cheerfully overcome by the hope and the assured aspect of a good, happy and favorable beginning.
Dimidium facti qui bene coepit habet
The black key of the reciprocal mutations of these various forms opens the cabinet of natural secrets, to probe the sweetness and maturity of the fruit of the Colchicum Island, which the Dragon and the devouring Lion guard, compared to the continuation of our work.
To reach the goal of our sacrifice,
we must follow the lists step by step,
advancing little by little.
Salienus speaks sufficiently of the variety and difference of this fruit, making us quite ample mention of an herb which he names after several Lunatica , of a stem quite different from the common ones, and which draws its root from an earthly metal, reddening in part, but surrounded by a black color, or properly spotted, easy however to be corrupted and disfigured, as if wanting to abandon its ordinary forces to be reborn much more beautiful and more perfect, at the renewal of its richest flowers come to just term, which seventy two hours after meeting under the angle of Mercury, changes itself to the perfect white of a very pure Moon and converted again, letting itself boil a little longer by decoction, into gold of such alloy that it changes into its nature the hundredth part of mercury; but gold much more perfect than the force of the earth can produce in its metallic ores. Virgil says as much in the sixth of his Aeneids, speaking of a tree with golden branches which he makes his Trojan prince encounter during his long navigations; a tree of such excellence that it never died, without another, continually being reborn from it, and succeeding the first by multiplying itself like another Phoenix, returning to its place.
Figure 5.
Third similarity
Avicenna, treating of humidity and all its effects, says that one perceives in the first place some darkness, when heat does its work on some humid bodies. This is why the ancient sages without further developing the ambiguity of their enigmatic figures, say that they have noticed from afar a fog which was rising, surrounding the whole earth, and making it humid; they also say that they have foreseen the great impetuosity of the sea and the abundant concurrence of the swimming waters on the whole face of the earth, so that the form and matter deprived of their first force and filled with putrefaction, will see themselves among the darkness even shaken even to the King of the Earth, whom they will thus hear cry out and lament in a pitiful voice and full of compassion. He who redeems me from the servitude of this corruption, must live with me forever and very content, and reign glorious in clarity and brilliant light above my Royal seat, surpassing even in price and honor the precious splendor of my golden scepter. The headband of the night ended its complaint with a charming sleep, but at daybreak a very resplendent star was seen to emerge above the person of the king, and the light of day illuminated the darkness, the sun appeared radiant between the clouds adorned and embellished with various colors: the bright stars penetrated, with a very odoriferous odor which surpassed all sorts of balm, and came from the earth a beautiful clarity shining with brilliant rays; all that can finally serve as contentment or pleasant pleasure to a great king who wants to delight in rare novelties. The sun with golden rays, and the silver moon surrounding this excellent beauty made many spectators admire, and this king, delighted in the contemplation of a sweet resentment, made three beautiful and magnificent crowns, with which he adorned the head of this great beauty, one of which was of iron, the other of silver, and the third of gold: then one saw in his right hand a sun and seven stars around it which gave off a very clear light; his sinister hand held a golden apple, on which rested a white pigeon, which sparkling nature came to further embellish with silver, and decorate its wings with gold.
Aristotle says that the corruption of one thing is the life and the renovation of another: which can be understood on the art of our Magisterium and preparation of corruptible humidities, renewed by this humid substance, to aspire always to more perfection, and to the continuation of a longer life.
Figure 6.
Fourth similarity.
Menaldus evidently demonstrates the necessity and close communication that living things have with the dead, in these words: "I want," he says, "and I hear that all those who do not devote themselves to our serious study, and who desire to follow absolutely the same order and the path that we have held there and duly observed to our satisfaction, make it so that spiritual things become corporeal, and that corporeal things also become spiritual by a reciprocal conversion and dissipation of their first forms, in order to acquire a more excellent one, rising from this death, which is putrefaction, much more glorious than before by a light and only decoction."
Several other of the best Philosophers, unanimous in this proposition, pay us all with these or similar words, Solve et gela , dissolved and congealed, or of,
Si fixum solvas faciasque volatile fixum,
Et volucrem figas, faciet te vivere tutum .
said the Fountain of Lovers.
Make the earth light, and give weight to the fire,
If you wish to encounter what is rarely encountered.
As already said above we have shown it in various places: imitating Senior again in this who invites us as all the others do to the necessary nuances of contrary matters: "The spirit," he says, "delivers the body, and by this deliverance the soul is drawn out of the bodies, then these same bodies are reduced to the soul: the soul therefore changes into a spirit and the spirit again becomes a body." For if it does not remain firm in the body and make the bodies of themselves terrestrial, massive and gross, spiritual again by the force of these spirits, this is the aim of our work: that if the same does not happen to these metallic bodies, that they do not lose their first and natural being, to take up again more luster and perfection in our work, the first matter destroyed by introducing another by generation, it is in vain to work and dissipate its watches and its oil to bark after the wind.
Figure 7
An unfortunate man, deprived of the sweet zephyrs of his happiness and sent back to the cruel tortures of a very filthy cesspool, appeared as black as a confirmed Moor, palpitating in his illness, and out of breath, for the harsh efforts he borrows from himself, sparing nothing of his strength except to use them for the salvation of his life, and the deliverance of his body relegated to the infected prisons of this muddy quagmire full of filth. But his too weak power not being able to support the wish of his desires to get out of this place, and seeing himself in vain having importuned Heaven with cries, and the help of his industry to develop himself from such an ugly dungeon, he had all the leisure to await in his misery the last blow of a cruel death, without begging further the favorable help of some benevolent soul full of charity to draw him to the pitiful compassion of his pitiful disorder; also he could well resolve, although by force, to sadly end the summary of his days fatally followed by darker misfortunes of this filthy and tenebrous sewer, since everyone became deaf to the baying of his complaint, showing towards him a heart more hardened and full of felony, than an insensible rock would have made.
The hope of a desired salvation being vain,
His goal aspires only to the inhuman Fate,
When just in time a young beauty,
Came to his aid full of humanity.
This lady was beautiful par excellence in body and face, enriched with superb clothes of various colors, having beautiful white but variegated feathers like those of a peacock which did not extend equally on her back, at the mercy of a benign wind and favorable zephyr, the fins were of gold interlaced with beautiful little seeds. On her well-arranged head, she had a very beautiful crown of gold, and on it a silver star; around her neck she wore a gold collar, in which was richly set a precious ruby of excellent artifice, the most just price and the value of which would not have been able to pay the greatest income of some powerful king: she also had golden shoes on her feet and from her spread a sweet and very fragrant odor. As soon as she saw this poor desolate man, with a cheerful countenance and a joyful aspect, she held out her hand to him, and lifted him up from his extreme weakness, already so deprived of his first strength, that he could no longer bear himself, nor protect his pusillanimous body already smelling of the earth: at the eminent risk of the salvation of his life he hears and expects nothing certain except the true refuse of miserable misfortunes,
--- --- --- --- nullam sperare salutem .
Which being acknowledged to the imbecile actions of our languorous one, this lady does not advance moved with compassion, and benignly removing him from such an infection, she cleanses him pure and clean, presents him with a beautiful purple garment, and takes him up to heaven with her. Senior speaks of it all the same, treating this subject, or even in much clearer terms: "There is," he says, "a living thing which is no longer mortal, having once been confirmed and assured of its life by an eternal and continuous multiplication."
Figure 8
Fifth similarity.
The philosophers, in order not to leave anything behind that which they honestly ought to discover of this art, attribute to it two bodies, namely the sun and the moon, which they say are the earth and the water. These two bodies also call for man and woman, who engender four children, two little men whom they call heat and coldness, and two little women signified by dryness and humidity: from these four qualities there comes forth a fifth substance, which is white Magnesia, which bears no wrinkle of falsehood on the forehead. And Senior, pursuing this same figure at greater length, concludes it in this way: "When," he says, "the five are assembled together, and come to be one and the same thing, the natural stone is made during all these equal mixtures, which is called Diana." Avicenna on this subject says that if we can reach the fifth we shall obtain what all authors call the soul of the world. The philosophers explain to us under the bark of this similitude of the essence and the model of their truth by the demonstration of an egg, for that in its enclosure there are four things assembled and joined together, the first of which is the top which is the shell, signifying the earth, and the white which is the water; but the skin which is between the water and the shell is the air which divides the earth from the water: the yolk is the fire and has a very thin skin all around it: but that one is the most subtle air, which is here in the most interior of the very subtle, because it is more adherent and closer and neighbor than is the fire, repelling the fire and the water in the middle of the yolk which is this fifth substance, from which will be formed and engendered the chick which grows afterwards. Thus are in an egg all the forces and vigors with the matter, from which perfect and accomplished nature comes to be exhausted: now it is likewise necessary that all these things be found perfectly in our operation.
Figure 9
Sixth similarity.
The speeches of the most discreet are always ambiguous, and their serious writings always interspersed with some obscurity, not understanding all so well in this solemn oath, that their will is not better expressed by the first than by the others. And this is even why Rosinus in this point in accordance with the Philosophers, explains in the following enigma the operation of the work, only by the face which he says he saw of a dead person, mutilated in several places of his body, and all the members of it divided: but the bulk of the mass and the trunk of the said body which still remained whole appeared white as salt, its head separated from the other parts of the said body was of a beautiful gold, near which was a very black man, badly composed of his members, haggard to the eye, and rather frightful to the sight, who stood upright, his face turned towards this dead body, having in his right hand a cutlass sharp on both sides in no way mixed with blood, from which, as cruel and always nourished by carnage and the effusion of human blood, he took for his greatest frolics and for the most voluptuous delights of his pleasures, the violent murder and the voluntary assassin, even in cold blood of all sorts of people. He showed in his left hand the form of a bulletin on which these words were written: I have bruised you and torn your body to pieces, in order to beatify you and make you live again with a longer and happier life than you felt before death had conspired against you by the edge of my sword; but I will hide your head so that humans cannot know you, and no longer see you in the same mortal outfit that you were before, and I will mix your body in an earthen vessel where I will bury it, so that being rotten there in a short time, it can multiply more and bring forth a quantity of better fruits.
Figure 10
Seventh similarity.
The works of one Ovid, a most excellent poet and grave Philosopher, make us judge sufficiently of his capacity and of the great experience and true knowledge that he had of the marvelous effects of our magnesia, putting forward to us the prudent foresight of those old sages, who wisely curious about the renewal of their outdated days, did not virtuously oppose by a sovereign antidote and antidote of death, to the envenomed darts of those proud Eumenides, cruel plagues of life, and of the preservation of the human race, voluntarily having their bodies dismembered into many and many pieces, which were thus boiled, until a perfect and sufficient decoction, to change the weak consistency of their feeble age into the natural state of strength and vigor, making themselves rejuvenated in dying more robust, and their members scattered and put into so many pieces, more closely joined and united together.
WHAT IS THE PROPERTY OF
Nature by which it takes its operation
FOURTH TREATY
The prince of peripatetic philosophy and grand inquisitor of natural researches and curiosities, says in what he has treated of generation, that man and seed produce another man, being more than certain that each and all things engender their like by the animated and secretly particular force of each seed, which makes every form living each in its essence by several and diverse means, but principally by the operative and temperate heat of the sun, without whose infused aid and immediate assistance this vivified operation would have no effect. Philosophers, also regulated on the perfect mould of a wise nature, are forced and constrained to beg for a favourable aid to their designs and in the research of their work, at the discretion of some other support, and of a borrowed aid.
No thing was ever perfect in every way,
Without the support of others, and was never seen to be well done.
So says nature in her complaint.
If you help me, I will help you,
As you do, I will do.
If the artist does not second the designs of Nature, although she is full of good intentions, if she cannot nevertheless bring to light and make visible the will she has to relieve men, and to render them in every point at the summit of their perfection: all our artifice also cannot prosper in its vain researches, but remains fruitless and useless without the favor that Nature gives it. Which shows us well that they always need mutual assistance, and that our art must govern heat with the temperature of the sun, to produce this aforesaid Stone: but the pursuit and good success of all these things must be considered by our wise emulators in seven different ways, which will open the door to us to introduce us benignly to the necessary prolegomena of perfect heats.
Figure 11
First, it is necessary to practice such heat, that it can soften, soften and melt the strongest of the earth, cooking together both the thick and the hard by the tempered fire of a corruption, which is the beginning of all the work, confirmed by good authors. If putridum non fuerit, fundi aut solvi non poterit, and if solutum non fuerit, ad nihilum redigitur , says Morien very well. Plato, Nota quod sine corruptione penetratio fieri non potest , this is what, he says, you must strive to achieve, but putrefaction. After which the philosopher says he has never seen an animal grow without putrefaction: and opus Alchymicum , he continues, in vanum erit nisi antea fuerit putridum . Parmenides also says the same thing: "If the body is not ruined, demolished, completely broken and corrupted by putrefaction, this occult and secret virtue of matter will not be able to draw itself out or to be perfectly united with the body." The great Rosary holds this opinion of so many good authors very assured, supporting it as infallible by this metaphorical figure: "We hold it to be a true maxim, that the head of our Art is a raven flying without wings in the darkness of the night as well as in the light of the day." But by what means it can be done, Socrates gives you a good advice, speaking thus of the first heats suitable for corruption: "The slits and small holes which are the meatus and pores of the earth, will not open, so that it receives in itself the force and vigor as much of fire as of waters."
Figure 12
Secondly, such heat is necessary for us there by virtue of which darkness is expelled from the earth, the whole referring to the proverb of Senior. Heat, he says, makes all things white, and all white things afterwards become red: water likewise by its virtue also makes things white, which fire afterwards illuminates, but the colour then penetrates and translucents the subtilized earth, like the ruby by the dyeing spirit of fire. To which also fits the authority of Socrates in these words: "Rejoice when you see a wonderful light coming out of the dark darkness."
Figure 13
The disposed heat brings back every thing to its greatest perfection, by the secret force with which it can animate bodies by means of an agent of putrefaction. This is why Morien says that nothing becomes animated except after putrefaction, and that all the force of the magisterium can do nothing if this corruption has not preceded it, as the Tourbe des Philosophes certainly affirms to us, which by common consent attributes to this heat the jurisdiction and power of rendering bodies animated, by giving them a living essence, after this putrefaction; of making full of humors and aqueous what was previously firm and solid, or other similar and contrary operations, because heat contains this property of fixing and resolving, and that in this is the knot of matter, in which certainly consists the perfection of the worker. In this connection we must closely observe as a precept of assurance to conceive a sweet apprehension of being able to obtain the precious and premeditated salary of our black earth, the Solve et gela , which good authors say so often, and already sung to us so many times. It is not a little thing to know the fire which makes this putrefaction and several beautiful diverse effects on which depends all the entry and conclusion of our Saturn.
If you want to shorten this work quickly,
Make soft what is hard, and make it light,
Because the essence of our work draws its strength from perfectly united opposite qualities. Rasis says as much in the treatise on enlightenment, speaking of the necessity of this metallic mixture. No one, he says, can make a heavy thing light without receiving the help of a light thing, nor can he transmute a heavy thing into a light essence without the intervention of a heavy body.
Figure 14
In the fourth, heat purifies, driving from its hearth the least object of some impurity. Calid, on this subject, says that it is necessary to wash the matter by a hot fire, to make an apparent mutation: also it must be known that minerals assorted and allied together promptly fall from their first habits by the reciprocal communication of each of their own influence in the infusion equally dispersed by the total mass of their community, stripping themselves of a particular garment to make then after an equal and measured proportion to the whole bulk of the mineral, and leaving the bad odors of their infection by means of our renewed Elixir, of which Hermes treats very aptly, when he says that it is very necessary to separate the bulk from the subtle, the earth from the fire and the rare from the thick. It comes to me appropriate to report here the conceptions of the treatise of Alphidius which in no way contradicts what we say about it. You will know, by the exact reading of his learned writings, the same opinion that he has of the whole, similar to so many good and renowned authors, who have all left us hesitating on the same path. The earth, he says, comes to melt, like water, from which comes a fire. Yes, since the earth contains fire in itself, as well as air is contained in water. Rasis also warns us that certain softnesses of art must precede the perfect operation of the work, which we ordinarily and very aptly call mondifications, for what must first be melted to make the thing more manageable, and that the matter be reduced to water which is soft and principle of all things, Ex aqua omnia fiant , which is done by putrefaction: for from the beginning of this mondification one can draw some good prognosis and firm resolution from the Stone of the Sages, if the most filthy and deformed parts, like excrements harmful and superfluous to the purity of this beautiful work are entirely excluded and separated from it.
Figure 15
In the fifth place, the heat does not raise by the virtue of fire, and the hidden spirit of the earth will be returned to the air. This is what Hermes says in his Emerald Tablet in these terms. He rises sweetly from the earth to the sky, and again from the sky he descends to the earth, where he then receives the force of all force. Then in another place: Make the gross subtle and the subtle thick, and you will have glory. And Ripleus, in his Twelve Gates, says no less under another figure: "Draw the birds from the nest, and then put them back in the nest: which is to raise the spirit of the earth, then return it to the earth." On this same subject say the Philosophers, that they recognize as a master of science he who can draw some light from a hidden thing. Morien confirms this opinion as a scholar, and falling into the same cadence as the others, to the sweet chords of which our column is strengthened and does not accord, he draws from the brains of so many different and elevated minds, the strongest indication of a pure truth: "He who can give relief to the soul, drawing it out of putrefaction, knows one of the greatest secrets of the work." The advice of Alphidius has here fallen on the same encounter in these terms: Make, he says, that this vapor rises to the top, otherwise you will get nothing from it.
Figure 16
In the sixth, when the heat is not so much and potentially multiplied in the earth, that it has reduced the strongest parts united together and made lighter: it surpasses in purity the other elements: but it is necessary that this heat be increased to the equal and proportion of the coldness of man. Calid authorizes us in this opinion, and gives us assurance to maintain what we have judged of it: "Extinguish the fire," he says, "of one thing with the coldness of something else." However, it is not necessary that the frigidity exceed more than one degree this natural heat, for it would suffocate it altogether, as Raymond says very well on this subject in the Theoretical of his Testament.
Figure 17
In the seventh, heat kills and deadens the cold earth. To which Socrates' saying may well be appropriate:
"When heat penetrates, it makes gross and earthly things subtle and spiritual which do not accommodate to matter, not to the final form, not ceasing to operate with it by means of this aforesaid heat. What the Philosophers call, more openly, to distill seven times, meaning the seven colors which are made by the continued decoction in a single vessel and without touching it, leaving Nature to do what it does, which unbinds and mixes them of its own accord by its natural weights."
-- -- -- -- For Wise Nature,
Learns her weight, her number and her measure.
Wherein may we say thus by the sacred oracles of their true mouths. Thou hast then divided and separated the corrupted humidities, the whole being made of a single decoction.
Figure 18
Actor, in the fourth of the Proverbs, gives another teaching, to know well how to regulate and temper the opportune heat and the fire necessary for our operation in these terms: when the sun is retrograded, which means debility and returned to its first matter it demonstrates the first degree which is to us as much as a true signal of infirm and imbecile pusillanimity, mainly because of the diminution of its natural heat, when it is in the dark: then there is an order of the air to the lion which corrupts this first natural heat, increasing it with a burning fire and more digesting than common fire, and this excessive ardor demonstrates the second degree, which comes from the too great heat of the fire, by which we understand putrefaction, which is the deprivation of the form; and again another certain order of the guardian air of the third degree follows closely the other two, no longer burning, but of temperate quality, with a mediocre constitution of the air and a better regulated order, changing its violence into rest and tranquility. This is the true means of putting an end to the work and the path assuredly paved to cultivate the vine of hope, and to complete with good success the path already beaten of a delicious air and prosperity.
VARIOUS OPERATIONS OF
all this work in four brief articles which are quite easy to understand.
FIFTH TREATY.
Article 1.
The first established step of the Alchemists to reach the golden summit of our beautiful work, calls for the most expert in this Hermetic art, Solution, which requires according to its very nature, that the body be boiled until perfect coction. All our magisterium is only to cook, Coque, coque, et iterum coque, ne te taedeat. The more you cook, the more you dissolve; the more you cook, the more you whiten and the more you cook, the more you redden: finally cook at the beginning, cook in the middle and cook at the end, since this art consists only in cooking: but in a water must perfect the coction of the materials, that is to say in a quicksilver which serves us as this matter, and in the sulphur which is the form: wishing more clearly to give to understand that the vital silver which freezes remains adhering to the sulphur which dissolves and is annexed to it. Junge siccum humido et habebis magisterium . Convert water into fire, and dryness into humidity, finally the Elements one within the other, and you will have a sure plank of what you must claim from the loving skiff of our present work, Couverte elementa et quod quaeris invenies . The most learned promise you all favor, and will sign it to you when you want, if you know the means of joining Mercury and Sulphur together. Now this solution is nothing other than a certain order of some humidity joined with dryness, properly called putrefaction, which totally corrupts matter and makes it completely black. Morien gives it a similar effect with a similar necessity of its coming, to hope for something of the work, of which it is the key and the leaven of the Philosophers. If it is not, he says, rotten and blackened, it will not dissolve, and if it is not dissolved, its water will not be able to glide through the whole body as it must necessarily do, nor penetrate and whiten it. One must die in order to live again, like the grain of wheat which never produces and germinates profitably, if it does not first die and rot at all.
Figure 19
Article Two.
The second rank is called Coagulation, which however can be said to be the same thing with the solution, producing the same effects, the diversity that can be interposed between the two being caused only by the small distance that there is in perfecting the mutations of the first essences into diverse natures, which are qualified by diverse names only to oppose the confusion of the first intentions and to deprive the ignorant of it and to bring the children of our science to its true knowledge. This coagulation therefore puts water back into a body, for in freezing it dissolves, and in dissolving it freezes, to show us that quicksilver which is a solvent of metallic sulphur, and which it attracts to itself to be frozen, desires to join itself again to the radical humidity of this sulphur, and this sulphur again does not ally itself in its Mercury: and thus from a reciprocal friendship they cannot live one without the other, nor stop amicably together, as being only one nature, as Calid very learnedly publishes under the name of all the philosophers in the secrets of his Alchemy, saying: "Nature does not approach nature, nature makes itself similar to nature, nature does not rejoice in its nature, nature does not amend in its nature, nature submerges itself in its nature, and joins itself in its nature, nature whitens nature, and nature reddens nature. " Then he adds, generation restrains itself with generation, and generation is victorious with generation. With good reason then do we say that our aforesaid Mercury always seeks the alliance of this sulphur to serve as its form, from which it would have been separated with so many unspeakable regrets, as not being able to suffer the dissolution of two lovers so perfect, that this sulphur which serves as form to Mercury makes it return to itself, and attracts it from the water of the earth as soon as it is not separated from it, so that from this body composed of matter which is Mercury, as we have already said, and of form which is sulphur, we can draw a perfect essence, in which we recognize the diversity of colors which it is necessary to see there, so that the property of operating things does not begin to change rather, than the pure conduct and the sure mediation of these living and animated things are not prudently governed and learnedly conducted by the hand of the most learned who have already governed the helm and the oar; it being no small thing to know a good pilot to cross this sea safely, who is provided with a good ship, that is to say working on the true matter and knowing the scope and measure of the operative things; because by the solution, the mercury is made similar to the operatives, instead of in the coagulation the thing is tolerated, in which the operation will be done. But it must be represented that this science is very aptly and par excellence compared to the games of little children, because every art is rightly called play, but mainly that of letters, ludus litterarum, in which good minds take pleasure, and the learned as much contentment without any boredom as children take a liking to frivolous things according to their scope, and which makes them pass the time at ease and without apprehension of any inconvenience, as the present figure naively represents to us the object and the portrait.
Figure 20
Article Three
The third degree of the Naturalists is Sublimation, by which the massive and coarse earth is converted into its humid opposite, and can easily be distilled after it is changed into this humidity: for as soon as the water is not reduced and arranged by its influx into its own earth, it already retains in no way the quality of the air, not raising little by little and swelling the earth retained until then at the small foot for its gaping and immeasurable dryness, like a compact and very pressed body, which nevertheless regains its spirits there, and no longer extends to the wide by the influence of this humor which does not imbibe in it, and does not maintain by its infusion in it this solid body in the form of a porous cloud, and similar to this water which floats in the egg, that is to say the soul of the fifth substance which we will call, with good reason, tinctus, formentum, anima, oleum , to be the most necessary and most approaching the Stone of the Sages: inasmuch as from this sublimation there come ashes, which properly (but especially by means of the assistance of God, without whose goodness nothing will succeed) do not attribute limits and measures to the fire, which it is closed and as if by natural ramparts enclosed. Riplée speaks of it thus and in the same sense as we: "Make," he says, "a fire in your glass, that is to say in the earth which keeps it enclosed." This brief method of which we have liberally instructed you seems to me the shortest way and the true philosophical sublimation to arrive at the perfection of this serious labor, very aptly compared for its admirable purity and candor, to the ordinary trade of women, that is to say to the wash-house, which has this property of making infinitely white what in fact previously appeared dirty and full of filth, as the following figure will make you perfectly familiar with. But first of all I want to admonish you that I am not the only one who gives the same effects to our work as to the craft of women, there being nothing so common in the best authors as this true similarity. Ludus puerorum calls it woman's work and child's play , because children soil themselves and wallow in the filth of their excrement, representing this blackness drawn from the natural mixtures of our mineral body, without any other artificial operation than its hot and humid fire, digesting and vaporizing; which blackness and putrefaction is cleansed by the whiteness which comes after taking its place there, making itself a clean house and purging of all filth this first imperfect layer, just as a woman uses a lye and clear water to give her child the cleanliness required for its entire preservation.
Figure 21
Article Four
The last of our articles warns the reader that the water must now separate and divide itself from the earth, then rejoin and put together again, so that these two closely united bodies may be one homogeneous one, so tight and allied together that separation can make no more: Such must also be the intention of the workman, otherwise his vainly undertaken labor would never end, but remaining always in the same state, would leave nothing to its author but a regret full of troubles of being a slave of ignorance, not having had the power to reduce his work into the natural union of a single body composed of different things, of which necessarily one is not served in the construction of this rare edifice: neither more nor less than the wise architect who erects a building of diverse materials, to which nevertheless so many varieties give birth in the idea only one and principal end, which is the building, and a whole assembled of diverse parts closely united in a body measured by several instruments.
What can therefore be said of our composition and the proportions that must be observed in it, is succinctly understood in the brief method of these four preceding articles, without otherwise convoluting the mind, made confused and misguided by the intertwined paths of ambiguous vestiges and hyperbolic discourses of so many authors who speak of it only gropingly; so that they make the others less wise wander under the ignorant veil of many an obscurity, retaining in their brains those who are thirsty, and who throw themselves headlong into the fountain without knowing the bottom, as soon as the shining sun makes some surface shine with its rays; so that already promising themselves at least golden mountains since it laughs at them thus, they work after all panting to think of surprising it, and taking the moon in the teeth, of which they repent at leisure, and of the little foresight of their boiling temerity.
Odi pupillos precocis ingenu . Patience comes to the end of all things even the most arduous, which are usually more of a quest and research, because difficilia quae pulchra .
Therefore the Peat says: Patiently and continually: the others, nec te taedeat . And Augurel,
Then patience as a faithful companion,
Always follows you and always accompanies you.
Figure 22
Article Four
From the government of fire.
After all these articles we have to treat of the true manner of well and methodically governing fire in the proportion of its degrees, the knowledge of which is so necessary to us, that without this science all our operation would be rendered useless: assured even of having chosen the real matter and of knowing the means of sowing it in the desired earth, that is nothing, since,
Who lacks a lack of everything.
Uno avulso non faute alter .
A single leek with a deformed face.
especially since we spy more closely on the slightest vice, which is enough to tarnish and hold in check all the glory of some generous man, than we praise him for all his virtues, which are not acquired by his serious merits. This is why.
The wise inquisitor must doubt nothing,
And who does not know everything, does not know how to taste the work.
A regime of fire perfects the economy,
Which regulates the errors of a wandering Alchemy:
He is the faithful agent who disposes of everything,
And who, firm, supports the siege to the end:
He is the only key-bearer of our Citadel,
Who to guard his king makes a good sentinel.
Pontanus knows well what to say about it, when he wishes to make us wise in his own Epistle (if the faults of others can stop us), who by this single defect did not stray far from his designs, nor did he advance his work in two hundred different times that he began it again, nevertheless attached to good and due matter, that he would never have done anything. This ignorance cost him dearly in time and expense, although he was only too well equipped with the fine patience required in this work: but the natural fire necessary to this beautiful body not helping him with its favors, he was disgraced from his prosperity, as many times as he wanted to persist in his first decision, so much can this governor and father of a family with the regulated helm and the springs of this rich vessel: very appropriately can we therefore speak of it here, and discover in a few words what we will be permitted to write about it. When a thing is not prepared for heat, it must be in such a way that no perceptible emotion can be recognized in it, but only a change of its natural order, like that which is appropriate to the Sun, to which this heat must at all refer; which is as much as if we were to tell you that an earthly and spiritless thing can be made animated by means of a natural heat and conformable to that of the sun and moon, not excessive or burning, but only moderate, and equal to a well-tempered body. Now of what qualities are these two principal celestial bodies, Senior demonstrates, when he says that the Sun is of a moderate heat, and the Moon cold and humid, but as less perfect it rises on high aspiring to its good and borrowing from the nobler part what it lacks, so long as in the end it appears as much in force and virtue as he who has favorably communicated them to it, so that they act then after equally on the bodies of their celestial influences and fill them abundantly with their gifted lights. Now as heat and humidity make generations, and are therefore necessary for our end, say all the authors, on which Flamel is not certain in his Philosophical Summary.
For heat and moisture
Is food indeed,
Of all things of this world
Having life, on this ground,
As animals and vegetables,
And similarly minerals.
Heat of wood and coal,
That is not too good for them,
They are things too violent,
And are not so nourishing
As that which comes from the sun.
Which heat maintains,
Each corporeal thing,
As far as it is natural.
Thus we attach them so closely to the magisterium of the Ancients, that by the renovation of these two means, we hope to bring forth the all-brilliant rays of our beautiful sun, coming to refresh its loving ardor in the silvery bosom of its purified moon, from which we see a thousand little suns spring forth, that is to say infinite, and which can endlessly multiply; now this is the true Stone of the Sages. The ladder of the Philosophers to ascend to the knowledge of this glory, discovers entirely what the fire of our magisterium must be, and to what extent the Soul of the Philosophers wishes to be maintained, we will produce some diversities of opinions as in passing: it is well said in this above-named place, that the heat or fire required for this work is comprised in a single form, but it is too succinctly to say what it is, dum brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio.
When my speech too short serves brevity,
I come and become a slave to all obscurity.
We will clear up this doubt, and say now that some of the Peat want the Heat of the first apparatus or of the first regimen to be in no way related to the heat of some brooding hen; others want it to be similar to the heat of the human body, and such as the perfect coction or digestion of meats sent to the stomach desires, to convert into substance of the body and into nourished nature, the necessary quality and quantity of nourishing things; others again want to make it equal to the heat of the sun which according to the objects produces contrary effects, although immutable in its nature, as does our aforesaid Stone, who without any operation can be perfected, changing his first being and letting himself die to live again, with the help of him who caused his death; for that the fire of the Philosophers retains the effects of the scorpion which brings death and life, killing by its venom the one to whom itself applied on the wound gives the healing dittany. Too violent a fire ruins what it encounters, the mediocre refreshes, and insensibly dissipates what it wants to maintain and raise with its humidity. Thus says Calid: minor ignis omnia terit . It is the means of hoping for a praiseworthy end from the beginning of the labor undertaken, to give it temperate heat, which without burning penetrates so quickly into the entrails of this massive body that it softens its hardness, and makes it bend to all its wills, like water which causes in the long run and by the continuity of its patience the firmest rocks, what it would never do by open force. The altered and calmly heated matter no longer retains its luster except in power, and changing its beautiful complexion, it covers itself with an infinitely black obscure veil, which makes it as if leprous and rotten throughout the body; thus the Fountain of Lovers calls it then: Mixed Gold and Lead of the Philosophers.
Quantum matatus ab illo
We know it more in its diformity.
But time brings all things, dissipates the shadowy darkness to changes, and withdraws in its season its lukewarm body from the black dungeons of its long prison, giving it a new form freed for this blow from this rottenness, from which cleansed it resumes more brilliant than it was, the pleasant face of its plumpness.
And from a perfect Moor he becomes a White Swan.
The true heat required for these effects must be neither more nor less ardent than that of the sun, that is to say, mediocre and temperate, for the slow fire is hope of salvation, and perfects all things, says the Peat: but this heat necessary for the alterative principles of our operation is in the sign of Gemini and when the colors have come to white the multiplication must appear until a perfect dryness is known to the Stone. Now, can we not better judge if this good-natured sign dominates there, than when principally the heat of our fire is in no way different from that of the sun, for it is that which is required there above all others, for the great sympathy that there is between the two, contrary in themselves and changing according to the more violent or more gentle signs which govern them, naturally however and without any artifice. But as soon as the Stone is dried and can be reduced to powder, the fire, hitherto mediocre and temperate, must regain its strength and act more ardently on this body, so that by its increased ardor it can make it change its clothes and mutate its white robe into one of higher color, more showy and more ruddy, which are the ordinary liveries and rich garments of our great King, delivered from his prison in which so long he was not seen tight and in great suffering, by the diligent pursuit of his faithful governor who took him out. The last degree of its heat is such as that which reigns under the fiery sign of Leo more brilliant and furious than all the others, for it is then that the sun is most vehement in his highest degree of heat and that he is raised to the highest dignity of his celestial abode. This is a sufficient treatment, for the brevity that we seek from our Philosophical Institution, of the means that must be held and closely observed in the government of the fire of the Philosophers, without which you will work in vain, whoever wants to try the last piece, to gain the best perfection of this work: it must nevertheless suffice for you what we have told you about it, more clearly than if the discourse were wrapped in longer words; if you hear me I reveal enough to you, by the paw one knows the lion and the workman by his work.
NECESSARY COLORS
which are demonstrated in the preparation of this Stone.
Several authors of our work seem to contradict and destroy each other in the diversity of their opinions, and who would not closely probe their common intention, or if the most learned did not foresee better the purpose of this variety, they could sweat for a long time to extract an essence of spirit from their subtleties, so much the knotty bark of their doubtful writings is hard to prune in all its parts, and especially when they want to treat of the colors of our work, of which we will say something succinctly; not having undertaken however to deduce them all, and to remove from their dungeons one after the other to bring them to light, but only we will believe to have freed ourselves sufficiently from our promises, if we draw from them the most apparent ones and which retain the others in order to use them lightly in matters of simple consequence in their government, to establish the secret of these more mature heads and which entirely lead the economy and the important state of their lord, by the intelligence of which we will certainly know what is even reserved for the most sacred and most internal cabinet of a king so provident to use it for us when necessary, without seeking from the least offices of his court, the charge and the qualities that the officers of the middle colors can obtain there. Miraldus, one of those of the Philosophers' Tourbe, says on our subject, having collected in this question the consent of all the other good authors, that our metallic body blackens twice, whitens twice, and also reddens twice, bis nigrescit, bis albescit, bis rubescit, which are the permanent and principal colours, changing as the heat increases or decreases: for it is very certain that an infinity of others are recognised there, but for what they are accidental, we do not take them into account, for fear of confusing light brains as well as paper, and that so many colours that you could imagine, depend entirely on these three specified above, and finally return to the proportionate symmetry of one of our sovereigns. And it is not without reason that authors, through the inspiration of some holy enthusiasm, shorten this diversity to the ternary, mystical and deified number where the glorious term of all happiness does not end. Among these three, however (not to conceal anything from you of our brief method) which are the principal and permanent of the terrestrial and metallic king of philosophers, we can well discern some others different and intermingled, which nevertheless we industriously and deliberately keep silent, for being only imperfect colours and not of such a nature and consistency as to be worthy, even given our compendious intention, of being placed in the rank of our three permanent ones, black, white, red, to name them according to their rank, which absolutely and immediately include all the accidental ones which can happen there: therefore is there no need to write anything else about it, except that for the satisfaction of the most curious, we produce the causes which can honestly move us to pass over in silence the general number of those which appear one after the other among the principal ones mentioned above, for what their effects are of so little effect, at least with regard to the permanent ones (our natural work acting nothing in vain) and their colours so little appearing, that flowing as if insensibly and almost out of sight, we leave them more suddenly than they themselves leave us, for they stop there with such a light step that barely the shadow of their substance appears there, and they immediately disappear into the vessel with a step equal to inconstancy. Wherefore to stop no longer to discourse of each species and their particular property, would be to have nothing else to do, and to take the uncertain for the certain thing, for of all these colours which come with late steps and with so much slowness that one cannot easily discern them, we do not wish to sit our pen there, attentive to more elevated designs, but only on a yellowish and light colour, but which withdraws almost on the perfect whiteness before the last redness, for that one remains long enough visible in the matter, comparing it to the lightness of the others, and for this reason the Philosophers make it hold the same place of principality as the others, holding it in the rank of necessary colours; not, I say,that she does not stop in the vessel so long as the three, which remain there permanently in the matter for the space of forty days each, but insofar as after these others, she does not hold there the most: which ones have compared to the Four Elements which influence and dominate on the bodies as much human as mineral; the blackness to the Earth which is the lead of the Philosophers and the firm base to assure the load of the others; the whiteness to the water, which serves as sperm to the woman of the sky for the generation; the yellowish to the air, which is the father of life, and the redness to the fire which is the end of the work and its last perfection. The black one, which does not appear twice as well as the red one, is much in credit among the most famous, for what it carries the key to open the door to whom it pleases of the colors, having a fire which administers all its necessities to it, and from which alone it also depends, holding the others under its law, because without it one cannot hope for any happy effect from the whole enterprise: its humor is not so fierce nor so hard to bend as redness, but much more manageable and easy to treat, requires for all dishes only a gentle heat which can open the corrupted leaven, letting itself be conquered by patience and humidity rather than by the rigor and violence of a rough governor who would dissipate everything instead of amending it. Senior serving as a law to several good authors who all approve his will on the point we are treating, does not grant in our opinion, when he shows in his writings, that the perfect decoction of matter must maintain a temperate heat as long as the rotten crow has vanished and yielded its rank to another dye. Since then it is fire (according to the Complaint of Nature speaking thus: Fire is noble and over all master, And is the cause of giving birth, By its heat and giving life, etc.) which holds the hand to the work takes language of the path which it must certainly take: I am no longer surprised if the doctors of the great Peat have announced by the doctrine of Lucas, one of their associates, that they have great esteem for the worker who knows fire and the seasons from violating it: "Beware," he says, "of a fire which is too strong for a beginning. "That if before time, it is too violent and out of its measures, it will burn what it should rot, principle of life, and the useless pain would bring us only an extreme confused regret and unspeakable displeasure of a salary vainly awaited by an illicit way of violence, cause of rebellion and obstinacy. This is what Mary the Prophetess says very aptly: "Strong fire, guards from making the conjunction" and the true dissolution of nature. And in another place she says again: "Strong fire dyes white in the red of the country poppy." To which the Trevisan does not agree when he says that gentle and temperate fire perfects the work, whereas violent fire destroys it.If therefore in all things the end of every enterprise is to be considered from its beginning, in this one principally must one be more attentive, because if you do not know the rule of your fire in each season, which is the greatest happiness of your pretensions and, which leads the work entirely to its perfection, it is done with your labor, because in the knowledge of the order of colors consists the whole point of a great science and of the tree of Hermes, according to the Philosophers who so often enchant us with this divine lesson.
Aes nostrum si bene scis, sufficiet tibi mercurius et ignis .
Black is the first to breach the vessel,
White follows closely, damp as water,
And red in color holds the last place.
Balde, in Peat, speaking of the same colours which we must closely observe, warns us to cook our composition until we see it become white, which afterwards must be extinguished in vinegar, by which he means the mercurial water of matter which is fire and the philosophical water. Et aqua est ignis comburens solem magis quam ignis , say the great Rosary and Peat; Aqua nostra fortior est igne quia facit de corpore auri merum spiritum, quod ignisfacere non potest , says Geber again to the same end. It is also necessary to know how to separate black from white, because whiteness is a sign approaching fixation. Now can they not be better distinguished than by a calcining fire, since without the addition and multiplication of heat on the gentle temperature of that which preceded and dominated the blackness of a corruption, the division of our degrees of colour cannot be easily made. Which having finally obtained by the industry of such a fire, there remains to us a lump of earth, which many have called the father of matter, in the form of a black and rough earth which they call their Saturn, terram leprosarn et nigram , a leprous, rotten, and black earth, which some others call the inferior world, which can no longer mix with the pure and subtle matter of this Stone, because it is necessary to separate the gross from the subtle, and the thick from the rare; which is done by unglazing without touching it with either hands or feet, for that opus magnum semetipsum solvitseparates and divides itself, say Raymond Lulle and the Trevisan: The Hortulain on the Emerald Tablet says the same: "You will separate, that is to say dissolve, because dissolution is the separation of parts" and who knows the art of dissolving, he has reached the secret, according to Rasis. Now this is the refrain that all good Philosophers sing to us incessantly, when they advise us so often that red and white must be removed from black, and then in it one no longer finds anything superabundant having resigned all its force to the aforementioned colors, and is no longer so subject to diminution, but the whole afterwards conforms to the most perfect red; and this is why they want to draw it with force and vehemence of fire, according to the very words of the healthiest part of the learned of the Peat. When the colours, they say, come more and more to change and alter, the fire must increase more violently than before without fearing henceforth that it can spoil anything, because matter does not strengthen on the white, at the time of which the soul is inseparably joined with the body, and the spirits descended from heaven to this earth do not depart from it any more. Thus the words of the Philosopher Lucas certify to us: "When our Magnesia," he says, "is not transmuted to white, it calls to itself the spirits who had abandoned it, from whom it no longer separates." The Master of the Philosophers Hermes goes further, and says that it is no longer necessary to perfect the white Magnesia, until all its colours are accomplished, which are subdivided into four different waters, that is to say from one to two and three to one, the last of which parts is suited to heat, and the other three to humidity.
Also remember for certain that the above-mentioned waters are the weights of the Philosophers, and these same weights are the colours of matter, and the three principal colours are the three fires of the Philosophers: natural, unnatural and against nature.
The comparison that lovers of the science of our Work make to the vine is not too out of place, I will propose it succinctly so as not to bore the benevolent reader. It must be known that the vine shoot or vine which is its juice and like the white color of the matter, will be drawn out of its quintessence, but its wine will be completed to the third degree according to the true proportion, because it increases in decoction and is formed in pulverization, which are the only means to understand in oneself the beginning and the end of this natural nursery. This is why some of our doctors have left us in writing that the philosopher's copper will be completely perfect in seven days by which we mean the seven metallic colors, of which perfect redness is the last; others do not extend its term of perfection further than four days, which can be related to the four principal colours that several attribute to it alone, and on which the whole work mainly depends, others give it only three days, which are terms attributed to the three strongest and most necessary permanent colours in the matter, and some others still less sparing time and giving it to good measure charitably assure it a whole year to get out of guardianship, and to be able absolutely afterwards to use all its rights, without any other governor than its discretion capable of maintaining a world of its benefits and liberalities: This term of year to go out of page, can still be accommodated to the four seasons of the year, and to the Four Elements, which have no little right over our matter. To which is at all consistent the judgment made by Alphidius, followed by several others of the same society, judging the end of the work by the end of the four times of the year, in spring, summer, autumn and winter, for that again the year is composed of the four seasons; several others shorten it to a day which is the time of the perfect decoction, metaphorically speaking, for a philosophical year is all the pre-finished time of the decoction, some in a week, some in a month. Arnauld, Raymond, Geber, Hortulain and Augurel speak of three years, because each color is included for a year. All which diversities relate to the same end and the same meaning, by the doctrine, experience and dexterity of the most capable who know it, but who always conceal in their back room time, names and matter: which the ignorant cannot understand, to whom wisely by this means the Sages forbid the venerable entrance of their mysterious Schools, as Plato absolutely forbade the communication of his divine eloquence to those who had no knowledge of mathematics. Practice closely observed by the Philosophers in the administration of their painful work, communicating it by their ambiguities only to the capacity of the sons of science,and to the diligent probe of spirits raised and understood in such things: that if they are not such, they must not interfere, but rather not move away from the threshold of this door which is unfortunate for them, for fear of stumbling too heavily and hitting the ground.
Procul hinc, procul este prophani .
OF THE OWNERSHIP OF ALL
the work and of the entire preparation of the Stone.
Treaty Six
Calcination or dealbation among the Philosophers will hold the rank that a good father of a family makes in a lineage, to which he provides for its necessities, also they make him hold the first degree of his Economy from the beginning of the work, and continuing to him the principal honor of this charge on the entire administration of our metals, until by his provident discretion, his vice governor, established to arrange each one in his duty, has reduced them to the honorable end of their perfection. Now having here subject to treat of this dealbation and the leisure to say something about it, he makes us notice that the Philosophers establish it in three ways, of which the first two belong to the body, the third to the spirit. The first is again a preparation of cold humidity which preserves the wood from the injuries of fire, which they call their Saturn, because Saturn makes the congealing of sperms: and from this preparation duly made, we conceive in the soul the good success of a happy beginning. The second is a fatty humidity which makes the wood susceptible to fire, and combustible, which is said to be the viscous oil of the Philosophers, and which comes after corruption; now this oil is that which gives the tincture, and the first philosophical menstruum and their first vessel. But the third is like an incineration of dry earth, which is white, endowed with a pure, true, fixed and subtle humidity, which gives no flame, nevertheless leaving to form a clear, transparent, shining, and diaphanous body like a glass, which is the pure and perfect whiteness, and the daisy of the Philosophers, and their white gold, and half of the work: also that calcination is nothing else to them than purely whitening; Quandodealbatum fuerit aurum, post denigrationem ejus, nominatur aurum nostrum, et calx nostra, et magnesia nostra, et aqua permanens, said Morien subtly. This then is the manner of calcining according to the Philosophers, by means of a permanent water or a strong vinegar which is the quintessence of matter and the soul of the Stone. But let us note in passing that metals all participate in this radical humidity, which is nothing but a beginning of all soft things: also it is why we certainly hold the calcination of the philosophers to be nothing else than whiteness and purgation and the restoration of natural heat: or a perfect index, perversion, disturbance, and expulsion of superfluous humidity, and an attraction of an igneous humidity, which is that pure whiteness which we call the internal sulphur of the Philosophers, separating the accidental and superfluous sulphur which is corruption; otherwise a sweet liquor, from which comes the animated substance of our work, the sovereign quintessence of all happiness, the best spirit and life, from which is drawn the perfect redness, and the happy end of the work. Now this liquor is ordinarily made with the water of the Philosophers, which is properly the sublimation or resolution of the Sages, or the exaltation and whiteness, and their permanent water: but of such particular force, that it soon changes the hard dryness into a supple and manageable softening, drawing out the quintessence, which is the admirable Stone of the Sages, the vegetable Mercury which separates and conjoins the elements. Which happens principally because the part which the violence of the fire has consumed and compressed together is become subtle by the spirit, which is a resolving water and humidity of corrupted bodies with a heat amassed and annexed with the spirit and radical humor; all which things are a root of all the philosophical elements, which must be remade again after corruption, which are these four perfect colours, of which redness is the last.
And then it suits you by common sense
To separate the four Elements,
Which you will make all new,
And then put them into practice,
wisely says the Fountain of Lovers of Science. Now sublimation is called a coarser earthly vapor, but subtly made into a humidity of water, and inflammation or humidity of the air, with the heat of well-tempered fire, which heat absolutely causes the mutation and necessary changes of the elements: and whoever knows this mutual conversion of one to another, he is assuredly on the perfect path, in which he will find what he seeks there in the exhausted quintessence of the entire elements, and no longer retaining their superfluous filth and dirty refuse. Now, this quintessence is an operative humidity of excellent nature, which gives luster to all the four elements without being compressed, transmuting them into its own nature of quintessence, and this does not call the soul of the world included in all things, which we also call the fire of the Philosophers. This is still the true fixation of which Geber speaks. Nothing, he says, will become firm, whether it receives some light, or becomes a beautiful and penetrating substance, for from there comes the sulphur of the Philosophers, and the ashes which are drawn from it, without the moon which is all mastery and of very great effect, for in it is preserved a water of metals, which rejoices in the body which it animates and makes alive: which is a mixture of white and red tincture, and a figurative spirit, for the Moon obscurely contains in itself the tincture of the Sun, which it produces in the form of red sulphur at the end of the decoction, all by means of the soul of the world and the fire of the Philosophers which makes everything of itself. Several blacknesses and corruptions are also found in this ablution, by the hot fire which purifies all things, and whitens the black things, which once dampened and reduced to nothing, at the same time restore life to matter, in which one knows a pure and entire heat intermingled with a soft humidity of the metals, from which the dyed matter receives strength and vigor.
The putrefaction so desired by all Philosophers, as the first Soul of their best study, will be perfect and accomplished, when it will be manifestly broken and destroyed from its first form and from a black color, which becomes white attracting the secret outside by corruption, because what was hidden before it shows itself in evidence and redeems itself from death, so much power is given over our work to the black essence of the sulphur of the Philosophers. This is also what Arnauld de Villeneuve says in his Rosary: Hujus operis perfectio, est naturae permutatio , the whole consisting only in the conversion of diverse natures. Raymond in the Theory of his Testament is of the same opinion: "The art," he says, "of our magisterium depends on corruption." Et dissolvimus , he adds again, cum putrefactionibus . And in another place he says that whoever knows the means of being able to destroy, that is, to dissolve gold, he has arrived at the secret. And our stone, he continues, is never found except in the belly of corruption: lapis noster nunquam invenitur nui in ventre corruptionum . The Philosophers' Peat also contributes these same words. Rottenness, they say, is the first ascendant and the most beautiful hope of the whole work, which discovers and brings into view the highest mystery of this operation. Which is mainly a certain distinction and true conversion of the elements,
In their essence and first matter,
From where the entire work is collected and can be seen.
It is of this change of which those of this learned Peat so often warn us after so many other Ancients: "Change the elements, and that which is humid make it become dry and firm" who going even further, assure that the matter and that which depends on it is, as it should be prepared when the whole is duly pulverized, and makes only one body together; which for this effect also is very aptly named conjunction of the philosophers. Consider then once more that the calcination is done in vain, if some powder is not drawn from it outside, which is the water of the philosophers, called ashes of Hermes or powder of mercury, according even as Augurel shows us in these terms.
The water that I hear externally,
Of a powder of the species properly.
Decoction is also one of the principal and necessary parts that must be sought by those who know how to use the flower of their best vacation on the tests of our magisterium. Albert the Great is indeed of this opinion among the other Philosophers who make no less of a state of it, but since he is not the first presented before my eyes, I will report his words. Of all the arts, he says, even the most perfect, we do not know one that more closely imitates nature than that of the alchemists, because of the decoction and formation which are cooked in a red and fiery water of metals, drawing closely the lively qualities of the sun and a little of nature, also it is an assation and common dissolution of the Philosophers, whose humidity will be consumed little by little with the clear fire: but we must take good care, that the spirit, which is thus arid and dried up from the body, will either no longer correspond to the said body, or it will still not be sufficiently purified and perfect.
The distillation of the Philosophers, otherwise called clarification, brings a great advancement to the conclusion of our work, which we say is a certain purification of some matter with a radical humidity, which joined together make the wise hope for a desired end of the whole work; by means of this coagulation, the perfect alliance is made and the conception of non-vulgar sulphur, and of the Raven or Falcon of Hermes, which always stands, he says, with the Trevisan, at the end of the mountains, that is to say on the surface of the metal, when it is spiritus niger non urens , the black and non-burning spirit, crying incessantly: "I am the white of the black and the red of the citrine." The encounter that I had with a beautiful enigma on this bird made me collect it, finding it quite sortable to our subject, in memory of which it was learnedly composed; since the modest curiosity of our mystical work is included therein, I will liberally share it with the memory and merit of the voluntary reader.
Enigma
I live in the mountains, and among the grass.
Father before son, I have my mother engendered,
And my mother without a father in her womb bore me,
Without having any need of any food.
Hermaphrodite am I, of one and another nature,
Of the strongest, the conqueror, of the lesser overcome,
And there is nothing under the vaulted sky,
Of so beautiful, so good, and perfect figure.
In me, in me, without me, is born a strange bird,
Or without wings flying, dying is revived.
And of nature art by following the law,
It is metamorphosed in the end into a king,
Six others surmounting with admirable harmony.
The Rosary also speaks to us of coagulation, which it compares to the raven that flies without wings, which is done principally by the dissolution caused by heat, and by the congealing caused by coldness, which are the two means of perfect generation. Hermes, speaking of the heat by which the whole work can be maintained, says in his Emerald Tablet, that the Sun is its father, the Moon is its mother, and the third fire its governor: showing us that its force,
Is all perfect and whole, When he returns to the back land.
And when by degrees this Elixir comes to change into firm earth, which then afterwards can serve for so many diverse operations that one cannot number them, on whatever propitious body one wishes to apply it. And for this reason we can also compare it to a well-stocked threshing floor, which surely preserves all the grains that one presents to it, and makes profit from all things, as our art being perfect converts everything that yields and approaches its nature into its same nature, and makes, being helped by sufficient materials, admirable buildings and worthy of a perfect architect of the sun.
OF THE DIVERSE OPERATION
of the Work, of the Variety of names and Similarities which the Philosophers use in this Art for the preparation of said Work.
It is a common saying among Philosophers that he industriously knows an excellent masterpiece of metals and makes himself one of the greatest masters in this art, which can extinguish and dampen the vivacity of mercury: if we must not nevertheless dwell on this letter so crude, that there is no need to gloss over any meaning in it, because they all treat their mercury differently. We will put forward for the entrance of their mercurial controversies, what Senior says about it, by the preference that his name gives him over other authors: "Our fire," he says, "is a water, but when you can appropriate a fire to another fire, and a mercury to another mercury, this science will suffice you for the glorious end of your pretensions." You see how he calls this quicksilver a fire and a water, and that it is necessary that this fire be made by means of another fire. He says again that the soul will be drawn out by the rottenness, (which is the blackness, and the first colour of the perfect Elixir, which does not again influx into this dead body to share its spirit with it), and to revive and resuscitate it, to what the Sage philosopher possesses then after, and the spirit and the body peacefully together of his perfect work. This is what the Peat also says speaking of their mercury which they call their fire: "Take," she says, "the black non-burning spirit, with which it is necessary to dissolve and divide bodies: this spirit is all fire, dissolving all sorts of bodies by its igneous property and dividing them with its like in essence."
Many others hold that this mercury is properly called quintessence, the soul of the world, spirit, permanent water, menstruum, and an infinity of other names which all relate to it according to the diversity of its effects, to which they give so much force and virtue, that without the assistance of this vivified soul, the body of our vessel, that is to say the black matter which they call the Dragon devouring its tail, which is its own humidity, would never obtain life, and would not show any sign of good effect. Take, they say, this quicksilver, and this body of black Magnesia, or some pure and unburned sulphur, which you must pulverise and compress in a very strong vinegar: but you will not recognise there any appearance of change or mutation of the permanent colours, which are black, white and red, all three very necessary, if fire is not of the part which comes to whiten it, and does not approach this composition, because it is it alone which reserves this property for itself, and which knows how to govern it well, making it receive a redness within, which, says the Tourbe des Philosophes, can become gold, transmuting itself into a certain Elixir from which one exhausts a water, which serves for several dyes, giving life and colour to all those which are related to it. But as blackness is the first thing that must be known in the work, and which serves so much as a stepping-stone to the others, that they can firmly establish there whatever their entire steps may be, for since that one has preceded it, all the others can certainly come there, also it contains them all in potentiality. Quicunque color , says Arnauld, post nigredinem apparebit, laudabilis est . And when you see your matter blackened, rejoice, and console yourself in yourself, for that is the beginning of the work. In the Great Rosary of the Philosophers, he also says that all the perfection of this science consists in the change of nature, which can only be done by the path that this much-desired black board fortunately clears for it, without the vestiges of which it would be, as they say, to reckon without its host, with which it would be forced to begin again another time, and to consider the other as a thing that has not happened. But if you can perceive in your vessel the black sulphur of which we are here treating, est nostri operis perfectio, and an infallible expectation of the other necessary ways. This is what this great and provident Peat considers, namely, that the citrine and red colors which appear externally, the black having already passed to open the way to those which follow it, are extremely good and full of good success, after which another very precious and highly hoped-for purpure color comes, which makes the happy event of the triumph or of the magnificence promised to our king quite certain: and this color is the best and purest mercury which provides us with the most exquisite tinctures of our magisterium all filled with a very sweet odor. Now all these beautiful and excellent properties justly granted to this worthy mercury clearly demonstrate the esteem that wise philosophers must have for it, who also attribute to it with one voice not only the honor of a good and favorable beginning, but also believe that it happily presides over the perfection and total conclusion of the work, drawing from its essence a true remedy for all languor, and the glorious regulator of human felicity, supported by the firm piles of its rare power and cemented by the subtle vivacity of this flying spirit.
Hermes, this great prince of philosophers, not ignorant of the natural things that can be learned, has recognized so many properties that the excellence of this mercury has carried his mind beyond all the praises that one can modestly give to a mineral body, to favor it with a glorious eulogy corresponding to its own merits and marvelous perfections. Wishing therefore by a metaphorical summary to describe succinctly the particular properties of this aforesaid mercury, he uses these words: "I have given myself," he says, "the guard of a bird, calling it thus for what it is spirit and body, first born of the earth."
Very common, very hidden, very vile, very precious,
Preserving, destroying, good and malicious,
Beginning and end of all creatures, etc.
for corruption and blackness are the beginning and the end of all things. Which Augurel in his Chrysopoeia confirms again very aptly when he speaks of this black bird dissolving bodies in these following verses.
And what is more, this nature strives,
Which does not strive to soften these two metals,
In all things is natural,
By giving it end and beginning.
The axioms and natural principles assure us that universal corruption is the common sperm, the cement and the seed proper to all generations. But finally to return to the nature of our bird, we must notice in it and recognize such foresight, that it has the industry to dodge and foresee what is contrary to it, taking its flight sometimes in the sign of Leo or Crayfish, and sometimes in the sign of Chariot and Capricorn. But if after so many subtle escapes, you can stop it and correct its frivolities holding back the course of its speed, you will be able to obtain rightly perpetual emphyteusis of very rich minerals and enjoy for many years many precious things, the exquisite value of which had not yet come to your perfect knowledge. Having finally stopped it, you can divide and separate it into various parts, making sure that you can reserve some of it somewhere, which you will lower to its dead and rotten earth, as long as this volatile spirit comes to help it get back on its feet by its strong nature, decorating it again with a variety of beautiful pleasant colors, which are very certain indications of its clarification: and when all these returns have come to it, good authors call it the earth and lead of the Sages, which one can happily use, having acquired this property of heating the vessel of Hermes, that is to say of Mercury, and distilling in time and place, by number or certain distribution of the part, calling this spiritualized earth by various names according to the succession of colors and the various operations of this spirit flying without wings, by sublimating and rectifying to the bottom all the mass which decreases, then purifies itself, and makes its complexion more and more beautiful, until it has attained the first white perfection with which it undergoes death another time; to return again, and soon after, to a more glorious life, which is of a red tincture. Putrefy this body again and pulverize it until the occult and hidden which is the interior red comes to demonstrate and manifest itself visibly: then divide and dissolve the elements, in such a way that you can join and reunite them according to the occurrences, and pulverize the whole again so much that the corporeal and material thing becomes in its animated and spiritual essence: which being conveniently done, you must still remove the soul from the body which you will gather and rectify to its spirit.
This gentle messenger of the gods, Mercury, full of inventions and subtleties thus turned on all sides, is not acquired force luster, of which he freely and largely gives equal portion to his associates and nearest neighbors; as to Venus, to which he gives a whiteness, to Jupiter too violent he moderates and diminishes the forces, makes Saturn hardened, and makes Mars not soften, gives to the Moon a citrine color, and resolves all bodies into a perfect water, from which one exhausts the true source of an admirable virtue; which the Trevisan declares openly in the practice of his book of the Natural Philosophy of Metals, so that it will suffice for us to send the readers to what he pertinently describes of it, without dwelling on it any longer.
The Philosophers also teach us on the finger the necessary means of arriving at the preparations of black sulphur, up to the first nature of red, which they call distillation, as long as it arrives at an oleaginous and aquatic gum, incombustible, very penetrating, and at all similar to the body, which for this purpose is by many called the soul, for what it vivifies, conjoins, inserts and makes natures into spirit. This sulphur thus reduced surpasses in excellence all the prices and values that one could give it, so they have greatly prized it and qualified it with a eulogy of honor, when they have prerogatively attributed to it the rare name of virgin's or maiden's milk, lac virginum , which in no way returns to the form of some red gum, all of gold, and resembling the water of the Philosophers, very resplendent, which must be coagulated, commonly called by the Sages tinctura Sapientiae , admirable tincture of Wisdom, or the lively fire of permanent colors, a soul and a spirit which does not extend far by its virtue making itself volatile, or withdraws and restricts itself when it pleases, from a fixed tincture in its individuals, that is to say in its own and homogenized nature.
This non-vulgar Mercury is also called red sulphur, golden gum, apparent gold, desired body, singular gold, water of wisdom, silver earth, white earth, air of wisdom, (note that the child of the philosophers is born in the air) especially when it has received a remarkable and perfect whiteness. The whole host of Philosophers, determined on the circumstances which must appear on the surface and on the entire body of their fruit, has bequeathed this judgment. It is necessary, they say, to know that one cannot return gold to red until it has first passed to white after corruption, because there is no way to the two ends of the work except by the whiteness which is the middle; so that you may observe all the rules that must be kept in this method, since the disorder and the center of confusion which is rather followed by the stalkers of desolation than by the forerunners of consolation raised under the prudent discipline of an order necessary for this operation. Now all these colors, although they are of the same nature, and are found successively in the same subject, if they nevertheless drag different effects, for it is true that white will be made black by red, and that from pure water the crystalline color will appear citrine red, all separated by some particular virtue. Morien shows you on the folds of his book, treating of the transmutation of metals metaphorically, the proportion and the degrees that you must seek in the composition of your labor: fac , he says, ut fumas rubens fumum album capiat, ac deorsum ambos effunde et conjunge, the red smoke must include the white, and join them both together. The code of all truth also says on the same subject: "Whiten the red, and redden the white, for that is the whole art, the beginning and the end." Senior speaking again of this variety of colors, gives us to understand in the following words, the great profit and necessity of them. It is an admirable thing to consider the beautiful functions and noble factions of this mercurial spirit, which if you happen to throw over the three other failings, it brings aid and succor to the white, and over the citrine and the red, it makes it as perfectly white as a lily or silver color, then it helps and gives color to the red over the citrine, making it like alabaster. Morien forms and conforms his judgment on the faithful report of the most expert in this science, authorizing by his opinion what they have treated of it, the sentence of which has then after gravely passed into the judgment of an irrevocable maxim. Beware, he said, of the perfect citrine which develops little by little from this citrinity, to give itself and acquire a more ample and raised increase of redness, not being previously removed first of a strong and powerful blackness which it had obtained in its first season, to serve as earth, base and assured foundation for the seed of the whole work.
From all these theorems, irrefragable, firmly welded in the idea of the most famous architects who have happily undertaken the industrious manufacture of this excellent Stone, and chiseled by their workman's hand into a cube of Hermes, we can easily understand that the gold of the Philosophers is quite other than common gold or silver, its nearest follower and its first emulator of its perfection, although the similitude given to it by the Wise children of science, seems nevertheless to have some communication and familiar conjunction with common gold and silver, as well as with other metals, which indeed lack the same purity and perfection of the highest in colour, but similar in power, all rendering themselves with time and the provident care of nature to the same favour and degree of supreme quality of their most shining king, although several authors are of opinion that impure metals always remain such, without ever arriving at a higher lustre, and that lead always retains lead, nevertheless we see that the excellence of the work is often compared to these inferior and imperfect metals, for the reciprocal affinity they have together, if not of effect, at least of hope and expectation.
Consider what Senior very aptly reports to confirm our writings, speaking of the imperfect, who nevertheless claim some day to become equal to the most perfect, being preceded in their nobler essence, only by primogeniture and time, having formerly been inferior in decoction, of extraction as vile, and of substance as abject as the natural composition of the imperfect, the most perfect remaining original and without any difference of nobility to the common seed and universal principles of these abject and sordid metals: "I am," he says, "an iron (using a prosopopeia to make him speak in a jargon more than metallic) an iron, I say, hard and dry, but such in power and virtue, that nothing can equal me, for I am a coagulation of the quicksilver of the philosophers. "The Peat also says that copper and lead will become a precious stone, even calling the noblest and most perfect color of the work and the work itself the name of copper; also they say that lead is the beginning of their true magisterium, and without which nothing can be done. As much have they expounded of a red lead made into a white or a Venus of Mars. And of a white lead (they continued) you will make a white dye, which is the lunar sulfur, and then your labor will have already passed from blackness and arrived at white, the second livery of the officers of our king, and the proportionate middle of artifice. And this is why the Philosopher has taught us that there is nothing closer or which approaches more to gold and its nature, than lead, in that in it consists life, and that it attracts to itself all secrets. But we must not take these beautiful qualities so literally, nor seek in common lead these rare preeminences, in which these virtues and properties cannot be found, but only in that which is called of the Philosophers, inasmuch as by the ease of its putrefaction and the infection of the stinking earth, it obtains an advantage over other metals: this is why they have all said with Raymond Lulle, that without putrefaction the work cannot be done, which is water, fire and the key of perfect magnesia. To this same end Morien has learnedly compared it to arsenic, to orpiment, to tutia, to rotten earth and to stinking sulphur, to all venom, poison and rottenness, for the correspondence which it has with these things; then again to other bodies which are not however of the number of minerals, but which retain only some complexions, as to blood and several other similar ones of such quality; and finally to various mineral matters, as to salt, alum and others, all these varieties being attributed to it for the great and apparent diversity which it holds in its effects, properly related to each particular species of these above-named bodies. This is why Geber says, that their Stone is extracted from metallic bodies prepared with their arsenic,that is to say with corruption. And Calid in his Mirror of Secrets:ange folium toxico : anoins, he says, the venom leaf, which still denotes this aforementioned putrefaction.
But above all things Alphidius warns us to take good care to maintain and prudently govern an animated body, and an almost dead Stone, which is this blackness, because in them as such, we will find no way, no proposition or deliberation of our inquiry, because their forces do not increase at all, but on the contrary do not annihilate perceptibly without any fruit, not being weakened and annihilated, as is said, by the privation which happens to them of their natural heat, which diminishes until death deprived of all its first functions. But if you think of giving them too great a fire, to prevent the heat which nourishes and maintains them from perishing, your matter will become red before blackening, which is the deprivation of life, and in doing so you will have lost all your effort: this is why you must help yourself with a very slow and naturally well-disposed fire, in order to revive what the deprivation would have weakened by its damaging violence. For as Ripleus says in his Twelve Gates, one hundred and third chapter: "Always guard that by too great heat, your bodies are not incinerated into dry, red and useless powder, but try as much as you can to be able to render them into black powder similar to the beak of crows, in a hot bath, or else into our filth, holding them before all things in humid heat until eighty nights have passed, and the black color appears in your vessel, which is this first salt of the Philosophers, and a dye attracting like certain alkali salt and other brines of bodies, which subtly transmuting itself into attracted things, it will become similar to the natural essences of metallic natures."
Now, authors treat differently of the variety of both their Stones and their salts, especially since the greater part of them constitutes three kinds in the perfection of the entire work: I take as guarantor and as assured testimony of my thesis the proposition described in the Great Rosary in this way: Tres sunt lapides, et très sales sunt, ex quibus totum magisterium consistit . Lucas Rodargire treats it again quite extensively in his philosophical dissolution, stopping on this same ternary number. But we must not forget that Raymond Lulle calls these three salts, three menstrua, three vases, three quicksilver, three sulphurs, and three fires, which are nothing else properly speaking, and no more hyperbolically as an obscure philosopher, than the black color, the white and the red, which are drawn from the natural essences of the matter due. The above-mentioned salts have so much power over the perfect essences of our magisterium that Senior says in these terms: "Our body will first become an ash, which will be reduced to salt, then finally will arrive by its various operations at a very perfect measure and degree of the Mercury of the Philosophers."
But among all salts it is to be noted for the instruction and total fabrication of the work, that the armoniac principally holds the first place there, surpassing in excellence the impurity and the less noble essence of all the others, which for this purpose are found much less suitable for our work, as Aristotle assures us in several places of his works, inducing us by his eloquent pen, to use only the armoniac salt in our operation, especially since the art of dissolving bodies, softening them and animating them is not naturally acquired. Now nothing is animated, neither born nor engendered, except after corruption, as Morien says, which is this black color, or this armoniac salt, and the black spirit dissolving bodies. La Tourbe adds to it abundantly still these words, confirming our affirmative. It is necessary, she said, to hear and perfectly know, that the bodies will not take any dye, that the spirit first hidden in their belly which is still this black spirit, was not drawn out: which being done, there will come from it a water and a body which is similar to the human and spiritual nature, because it then contains body, soul and spirit, which being of a delicate essence and color, cannot perfectly dye this terrestrial mass, if it is not subtilized by this spirit and made similar to it, but the spirit of an aquatic nature is dyed in Elixir, which for this effect will produce a white, red, pure and entire fixation of a perfect color and penetrating dye, which mixes between all the metals, as the celestial mercury joins with each planet and makes itself of their nature, not being approached by any of its associates, noble or imperfect.
But it is still necessary to know that the perfection of all mastery depends on this point that it is necessary to draw the sulphur out of the perfect body having a fixed nature, because sulphur is the very ancient and very subtle part of crystalline salt, of sweet flavor, delectable to the taste and of aromatic humidity, which being by the space of a year in the fire, would always appear as melted wax, and therefore does not hold some part in the quicksilver, dyeing it into a very pure gold, and for this the humidity or water which one draws from the bodies of metals does not call the soul of the Stone, hidden in the said humidity, because this water is called spirit, and the virtue of the said spirit is called soul and tincture, which dyes and fixes all the said water into pure gold. But mercury or the force and vigor of it is also called spirit when it has drawn to itself the sulphurous nature and the arid earth is the body, and the body of the quintessence, and the extreme and absolute tincture which is the true essence and perfect nature taking possession of all forms. Now although these three come from only one root, they nevertheless have different and indifferent operations, the names of which are infinite, according to the colors which appear, and if the whole returns to one, namely to this final redness, serving as links attached so artistically to each other that no absolute end can be recognized in it, but one finishing its ordinary action, the other begins it again, because prima forma destructa introducitur iterum alia , says Raymond on this subject, who also calls it in his Testament: catena deaurata , which is the society of the visible with the invisible, and which binds together all the four elements.
This is the beautiful golden chain,
That I have decorated circulating,
says the Complaint of Nature. For which reason Jean de Mehun in his Romance of the Rose calls it bawdy, because it is indifferently combined with all forms one after the other.
THE ADMIRABLE VIRTUES
and superhuman strengths of this noble Tincture succinctly reported in the last part of our brief and easy to understand Institution.
Of the dyes, the most exquisite are willingly the best received, according to the custom of the seasons which gives them vogue and the course among men, by the desire not contemptible, but rather very praiseworthy of minds modestly curious about the inestimable price of some honorable novelty, as much for the emoluments which closely follow this curiosity, as for the premeditated honors and the decorum becoming and suitable to their honesty which finally spy on them of a good success in the entire possession of the sweet fruits full of happiness. These are the two strongest springs and the most apparent means to tickle to the quick with a sweet hope and a calm goodness the airs of Favon and at all favorable to the peaceful promptitude of our sighs, that the profits and the contentments of savoring to the full depth some object maturely proposed, in the idea of our conceptions, first meditated than fixedly attached to the clasps of happiness and the honor of this delectable enjoyment. Now if naturally we sigh after the thing so lovable as worthily loved and desired for the causes principally mentioned above, with much more reason must we aspire to the perfect possession of our marvelous tincture. But because with difficulty we can carry ourselves to the painful search of an unknown thing, seeing mainly that real and actual knowledge must first be occupied in the winding detours of a lively imagination that it may be firmly held and stopped at the griphes before couriers of an honest friendship, and that the common senses are previously diverted to know well the lovable thing before it is loved, I will treat in a few words and according to our scope of the delicious dishes of our work woven of natural science, issued and fomented in the pure and clear conscience of the ancient sages, whom I would willingly say Magi elected to this office by authorized preference of the divinity, and to the sacred conceptions of the mysterious tree which has favored them with such a sovereign balm: so that by the true knowledge of its rare rarities and particular qualities, each virtuous soul gloriously moved by reasons elevated under the advantageous flight of this glorious tincture, makes itself at once the spirits lovingly enamored of its admired grandeur, that the wings debonair of a courteous reputation retains the ordinary pledges of her fidelity, to announce to all the wise the esteem that she herself has for the excellence of her objects, at all times venerable to the more clear-sighted and better judging eyes of the very suave odor of such a harmony: the sweetness of which changes the undulating waves of such a doubtful shipwreck, subject to the mercy of many fearful irresolutions, into a phrase of assured joy, by the nautical needle of their dexterity, as soon as the tournament of this fragile skiff, but of the entire vessel, many times stranded,finally arrives happily at the port of salvation and consolation under the smiling sails and learned conduct of the famous pilots and benign Alcyons of the Jasonic Islands: which makes their hearts already all ravished by the sweet attractions of such a memory, make smoke the altars of their ardent devotion in the temple of honor and recognition by a benevolent act of a pious humility, in sign of joy completed by their ecstatic contentment, celestial and surpassing the apparent surface of human contemplations, whose serious ideas are only capable of being able to raise to the frowning summit of the highest open-heaven mountains, the formed essences of their intelligence, by the lively effigy and naive representation of an earthly sun radiating here below as much as the celestial, compared to which even its brilliant flashes carry little light in the hearts of humans, who make it to whom better to appear the homage that they owe it, representing them with lively impulses of its moist ardors the universal atoms of the image of its glory, in the delicious angles of the terrestrial mines by the deep perspectives and sublime proportions of a mystical, philosophical and altogether admirable art. I will say therefore of our dyeing whose animated spirit is in no way made perfect, that it entirely perfects the most perfect colors,
And that other similar to itself,
Cannot be found of alloy,
Except in its own essence:
Happily surpassing
Of its effects even,
The pure excellence.
From this lively source the ancient sages have prudently drawn four remarkable points, extracted from a greater number of his own virtues: but what? virtues so raised with infallible maxims, that Nature herself bearing some envy for them, seemed almost to form a shadow at the difficulty of signing for approval to him in so many acquired qualities,
By free and voluntary acquiescence,
This power in all things out of the ordinary.
It is true that they are such that most people, not being able to understand them well, refuse this belief, as something impossible and beyond a natural conception: so that the gross ignorance of these light heads, not wanting to recognize in others what surpasses their common opinion, think to hold in check the superhuman minutes of these perfections, and to rivet to them the nail of such a great privilege by the decrees of some incredulous soul,
Under the weak compass of a vain appearance,
If the effect of happiness, and if experience
Did not point out this presumption to them.
Or did not raise their noses of presumption at these bizarre souls, poisoned by a fickle scruple, and by an error more than panic and profane, to the great contempt of our magisterium; but what am I saying, not, but rather to the confusion of the frenetic censorship of so many brains lightly stamped on the poorly polished anvil of an entire world of jealous Zoiles,
who hold no other life
Than detraction:
But holy affection,
Of which this divine art I envy,
Consents that without passion,
I love it without loving envy.
PRIVATE EXHIBITION
Of the marvelous effects of the True Medicine of the Philosophers written in four general remarks.
The first point of its perfection is to preserve the person from any illness that may befall him in his entire state and healthy convalescence, communicating this good and perfect disposition to some number of the descendants of his posterity, and entirely driving away by its provident operation the threatening causes of our ills that could daily overwhelm and subdue our fragile infirmity, without the prompt remedy and sovereign precaution of this singular dyctamus. Calid, in his Mirror of the secrets of alchemy, says that it mondifies the bodies of their accidental illnesses, and preserves their healthy substances in complete prosperity exempt from all imperfect alteration.
The second accomplishes and perfects the body of metals, according to the color of the medicine: for if it is white, it will transmute them all into a fine moon, and if red, into a very perfect sun.
The third changes all kinds of stones into precious stones according to the decoction that our aforementioned medicine will have acquired, perfectly decooking it.
The fourth is to extinguish all glass and also to make it into a precious stone of whatever color one wishes, according to whether the medicine has been more or less extinguished, as in the other preceding points, it is already noted.
The mystical work of our Peter being perfect and completely accomplished, it is a gift of God so precious that it surpasses in its wonders the most admirable secrets of the sciences of the world: for this reason also we call it after so many other good authors, the incomparable treasure of treasures. Plato has prized it so much that whoever, he says, has not acquired this gift from heaven, he holds all the best of the world in his possession, having reached the height of riches and the treasure of medicines. The philosophers give it the virtue of curing all kinds of people detained by languor or other diseases whatever they may be: taken as a drink a little heated and mixed with wine or with water drawn from some simple and which has the property of helping with every evil, one will be completely cured in one day, if one has been afflicted with it for only a month, in twelve days if one has been afflicted with it for a year, and in one month if the evil is inveterate; whose dose should not exceed the weight of a grain to use it usefully, because a larger quantity could harm more than benefit. The dropsical are cured by it, the paralytic, leprous, icteric, apoplectic, iliac, etic, demoniac, insane and furious, those who are subject to tremors of the heart, fevers, sickness, quivering of the limbs, stomach pains, defluxions both of the eyes and of all parts of the body, internal and external; this medicine makes hearing good, strengthens the heart, restores imperfect members to their entirety, drives out of the body all apostasy, fistulas, ulcers; finally, to be brief, it is a true balm against all sorts of evils, and a singular preservative of bodily infirmities, rejoicing the spirit, increasing strength, preserving youth, driving away old age and demons, tempering qualities, the blood no longer being subject to putrefaction, phlegm having no power over other humors, anger without violence or passionate promptness, melancholy dominating only in its place and ordered receptacle of nature: in short, in this work we see completely accomplished the great secret and the incomparable treasure of the rarest secrets of all the Philosophers. Senior says that this projection rejuvenates man, makes him fit and joyful, maintaining him in perfect health up to ten ages. This is why and not without reason, Hippocrates, Galen, Constantine, Alexander, Avicenna, and several other famous and celebrated physicians preferred it to all their medicines, calling it perfect medicine and universal balm.
Secondly, we hold it to be a maxim established by the experiments which authors have made of it, that it changes imperfect metals into pure moon and very perfect sun, even making silver into beautiful very pure gold, higher and more whole than the natural, constant and permanent in its color and weight.
For the third, it is very certain that this powder makes and engenders other precious stones by its projection on the common liquefied stones, making them more excellent than their natural ones bear, such as jaspers, hyacinths, white and red corals, smaragds, chrysolites, sapphires, crystallines, carbuncles, rubies, topazes, chrysoprases, diamonds and all other different kinds of precious stones, which it makes much better and surpassing in strength and virtue the natural ones, which this medicine can all liquefy by its property.
And for the fourth and last point of our magisterium, it has this virtue that it communicates itself to animals, vegetables and all tiny bodies to make them perfect, there being not even so simple reptile here below that does not serve as a resonant clarion to announce the glory of this excellent price, of which even if you apply even a little on some broken and fractured glass, it is cut, and immediately leaves in all sorts of colors, which it purifies according to its decoction, because when it is permanent in green, it will make emeralds, if it reaches the color of the rainbow which appears to the vessel before the white, it will make opals, if in Saturn, it will produce diamonds, and if in red, carbuncles.
But lest the wise should bear any envy to my pen, for having so naively, and perhaps too much in the light for their liking, painted the picture of the Philosophers, which they have so shaded with obscure landscapes, that the interwoven paths of their hieroglyphic figures can only be discovered by the stale senses of our prudent Oedipus, whose science, bridging the jealous enigmas of this Sphinx of ignorance, too ambiguous for lesser brains than our Daves, so subtle and sly in the science of a true philosophy, has happily delivered them all from the cruel miseries of necessity, peacefully enjoying the perfect kingdom no longer of Thebes only, but of the king himself and the powers of the universal earth, by the dissolution of a truly Gordian knot, proposed in cartels of defiance of this importunate monster, and by the honorable foresight of their minds, rewarded with so great a prize as to possess all that the world holds the most dear in his treasures, in whose place Plato's wish is fulfilled, to have in his republic philosopher kings and philosopher kings to reign peacefully; to avoid, I say, the just reprimand of our grave doctors, I will end this discourse, since also the rule of the proportions of our geometrical square, dismisses this easy instruction to speak longer, allowing us to impose silence there, and to close our writings by the authority of the very shining mirror of the secrets of Calid: "Whoever has had it, he says, knows it and whoever has not known it will not be able to know it. "We therefore believe that we have sharply enough engraved for the present the lively outlines of this brief method, at the discretion of the most learned, to whose prudence I freely entrust the censure of my defects, if they recognize any mark described, nevertheless praying them by the ordinary means of my simplicity, to take in good part the intention of my pious designs, which would never have any other desire than to be able to always benefit the public.
CONCLUSION
The most perfect, most commendable and most requested work is that which fills its worker with the enjoyments of what he can wish for his utility, and which fights for the defense of his provident master against the importunate attacks of poverty, the mother of inventions, which men use only to reduce to a small scale this public plague, the conjured enemy of all human happiness. Now, if by the strong antidote of this homicidal venom, man happily dissipates and exhales the vapors of his sufferings, to savor at leisure the goods that the labor of his household hands usefully suggests to him, by the industry of a fine mind, curious to render and testify some benevolent duty of charity to the need of his companion of coarser fabric, and consequently of more dazed sense and heavier judgment, so that he can raise him from the doubt of succumbing to the languid snares of necessity, by the excellence of some art chasing care: each person overcome by a daily experience of the artistic effects of so worthy a workman, reveres him in himself, and praises in what he can the author of this invention, which preserves the maintenance of human life; Would we remain brutalizing without seeing smoking from the ardor of our hearts victims consecrated to the living memory of our admirable dye, which makes its possessor beyond the peer of all men, raising him to the summit of felicity? Would we become in this happiness stupid and insensitive to the honors due to this sublime Work? Seeing that the unseemly and too ungrateful silence of our indiscreetly mute mouth, would have bad grace in this place; if by chance this defect were not intended to purge on the reasonable and apparent fear of having a less eloquent tongue than the subject could provide us with material in abundance, or if the displeasure of discussing it too little did not restrain our stammering lips to the specious terms of a modest taciturnity: for in this case the excuse of a supposed insufficiency would find place in our writings, although with difficulty the ingratitude so visible of the ignorance of an artifice so great and so perfect, which there is nothing in this sublunary valley that cannot equal it, can honestly be covered under the shelter of some vain reason before all the judicious who will always condemn with public anathema those who blaspheme against the true essence and real nature of this admirable Work,
Most perfect image of the divinity.
That heaven has blessed for humans,
Of beautiful, precious, rare and excellent.
But because it is not proper to profane daisies, the wise and very wise philosophers have also treated them only by enigmatic figures, in obscure words, hyperbolical colloquies and dialogues or shady similitudes, in order that so beautiful a pearl could not be contaminated with the impure holocausts of abject and unsanctified persons according to the requirements of this most sacred mystery. Pusillanimous souls do not dare to undertake to sweat for a long time after the steps of virtue, for seeming to them of difficult access and painful conquest, whereas the generously born spirits and not degenerating from the legitimate eagle, which looks with a sure sight at the rays of the sun, however brilliant they may be, never retreat for any apprehension from the thorny paths. So honour, taking pleasure in this lively pursuit, leads them by the hand after many crossings and does not leave them until they have arrived at the top of the world of their felicity to triumph happily over the fertile harvest and the labours sown in the soil of their perseverance, which finally comes to the end of the glorious palms. The valour of the Argonauts cannot be diverted from their famous enterprise by the perilous Syrtes who wanted to frustrate them of the happiness of their conquest, unless they pursue it at the point of constancy, under which their virtue was made immortal: so they were not disappointed in the sweet fruit of their hoped-for glory, since time brings everything back to their hands in the long run the precious jewel that a homebody soul would not have dared to promise itself or set sail to the wind under the uncertainty of the senseless waves for the honourable spoils of such rich booty. As far as we can judge of our work, the choice is made of the sailors elected to this affair in the council of heaven, yet they only approach it and prevail after a long work, supported by patience to soften the heart of our Peter, who knows well how to divide from the common and confused economy of this large universe, those whom she wants to retain in her wages and give herself to them after having first and maturely examined their consciences and prudently drawn the worms from the nose of their discretion, to make of it a leaven propitious to her greatness: for she takes her time to let herself be conquered by the faithful perseverance of these wise horsemen of the Golden Fleece, to whom alone she communicates herself, not indifferently to all, and not always yet, but in a certain season, since she waits her time, and that the blond ears turn to maturity, that the fruit of the earth has already been preserved several years, and that the settled brains of her co-heirs are capable of this nuptial dowry:
For Geber says that old were
the Philosophers who had it:
And yet in their old days,
They enjoyed their loves.
At which age chiefly prudence and true prudhommie, or never, become familiar to men, who must in this graying time have bankrupted the garments of too hasty youth. And this is why Senior says that the man of wit and good judgment can easily understand the true means of approaching happily at the cape of hope of this art, when he will give himself entirely and without interruption to the reading of good authors, by means of whom he will be enlightened, and will find the easy entrance to arrive at last at the true knowledge of this divine secret: thus holds some modern author in this following quatrain, in conformity with all the good essays of true science.
Often the gray hair frees the birds,
That the Saturnian lodges in our vessels:
And the vivacity of the fickle Mercury,
Is never tamed except in the mind of the wise.
END
Splendor Solis - The Splendor of the Sun - English PDF
1582
written by Salomon Trismosin
Salomon Trismosin have two more books called: "The Golden Fleece or Flower of the Treasures", and "Salomon Trismosin's Alchemical Wanderings"