The Philosophical Poem of the Truth of Mineral Physics

Clovis Hesteau Nuysement

1620

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Where are refuted the objections which can make the incredulous and the enemies of this Art. In which is naively and truly depicted the true matter of the Philosophers.

By Lord de Nuisement, Receiver General of the County of Ligny en Barrois.

Dedicated to the very high, very powerful, and very virtuous Prince, Monseigneur the Duke of Lorraine and Bar, etc.

TO READERS

Despite the waves stirred by ignorant rage, And the obscure whirlwind excited by envy, Whoever has the star of truth as his North, Will be freed from shipwreck by all winds.

If I saw by Vanguelle, with a grain of powder Twelve gros of quicksilver without fraud transformed into gold: Would the pride of vain discourses of naked reasons Make me resolve to deny my eyes?

Montdoucet, noble and learned, with remarkable probity, was an exact record of this divine effect; which was made by the expert hand of the old Girout without Vanguelle making any sign of it.

If from calcined lead, extracted from a good vein, I extract gold (but without profit) every day, Those who make so many insolent speeches against art Are they not convicted of vain presumption?

Bold speech that foolish thinking meditates, And that false opinion in public goes sowing, Since you affirm that the truth lies, Do you not start from an impudent and cursed soul?

Your Authors would do better from now on to keep quiet, Than to go blindly babbling about colors: They are true charlatans, since they go dressing In the purple of reason a popular error.

From impatient ardor comes their fury, For hoping first to satisfy their desires, First to conceive they want to give birth, Exercising practice before theory.

Our masters knew the work before having done it. The good Trevisan himself dares to persuade us that he had, through study before risking it, the space of two years perfect knowledge.

Even that in this space he had free acquaintance, At fifteen, placed in the rank of the blessed elect Who had accomplished it, and spoke with them As their companion, master in this science.

It is necessary that a reading similar to his own, Join by a single point the lines of the authors! Then comparing the sayings of the true and the liars Prudently discern the false from the true.

The noblest painting is that which in idea The learned painter sketches in the white of his mind. The poet has his poem written in the intellect, First that by his hand the pen is guided.

To see the image of the true, thus the truth itself, And the idol of the false, under various faces Opposed to each other, one must read these verses; For both are alive in the marble of this poem.

To the VERY HIGH, VERY POWERFUL AND VERY VIRTUOUS PRINCE.

My Lord the Duke of Lorraine and Bar etc.

My Lord,
If by some human consideration we have often excused those who have fallen in love with beauties unknown to them, by the mere account of their perfections, and if passion thus lightly conceived has little of a violent movement to carry these lovers to the extremity of lavishing their lives for the glory of such imaginary objects: Who can justly call me unworthy of pardon, if ravished by my sight I have fallen in love with an uncommon subject, indeed so admirable in all its parts, that it is indeed permitted by Heaven for many to imagine its excellence; but for very few to understand it? Now as these old Paladins would have degraded from the Order of Chivalry the one who had wanted to offend his Lady, without using his weapons in the defense of her honor, I would believe I deserved the same shame, if guilty of the same crime I had, by keeping silent, approved the blasphemies uttered in public against the Virgin whom I serve by a presumptuous Sophist, who, throwing to the nettles in spite the white and candid frock of the philosophers, wanted to acquire honorable rank among the learned, by counterfeiting Aristarchus and Ponce with certain meager and badly filed verses, trying to erase from the book of life the name of this Nimph and of all those who loved her. The strong resentment of this insult has thus so overflowed my gall, that in the excess of an impatient and too legitimate sorrow I have vowed to this beautiful one, and to the Manes of so many glorious Heroes who have idolized her, to avenge their common affront; and to oppose to the frivolous weapons with which they are ignorantly or maliciously attacked, the naked naivety of my conceptions; forged from the purest and best tempered stuff of a hundred illustrious authors, to whom I owe the honor of my painful apprenticeship. And since Apollo, as Prince of my birth, destined my age to the service of the Muses (who never denied me entry to their Sanctuary), I have been willing to request their blessing, and to take from their sacred Arsenal the same sticks that the enemy had used. With which I consider that I have reduced him to such a point, that he will never risk returning to the ranks, to quarrel with me for the laurels of this victory, nor for the honour of the good graces of your HIGHNESS, if by the price of a sincere and fervent devotion they must be acquired. She will therefore receive, if it pleases her,

My Lord, the history of this philosophical war, with the inviolable vow of perpetual fidelity, dedicated to him
by his very humble and very obedient servant,
De Nuisement.

SONNET

Above the double mountain consecrated to the nine Sisters,
The laurels, little picked, too thick with branches;
Now smother with a suffocating shade,
The perfume and the enamel of the immortal flowers.

A million lovers, aspiring to the flavors
of these nine Deities, go there to pay them homage;
Without hardly a single one touching this sacred foliage,
which they gave to the old as a reward for their labors.

This mob usurping the holy name of Poets,
(Name, no more suitable to the divine interpreters)
With a sterile Rhyme fills the whole universe:

The old ones sang to the Gods the pure essence;
The wonders of the Heavens; the secrets of Nature:
These sing nothing, do they then make verses?

PHILOSOPHIC POEM ON THE TRUTH OF MINERAL PHYSICS

I speak to those who have heard: go away, you prophets.

For my soul rises to the most secret arcana:
To trace with a divine hand humanly
A thousand lines that a thousand years will not be able to erase.

Daughter of this great King who tempers the universe;
Unique Queen of the world, universal mother;
Alme, and holy nature, animate the clamour
That in your honor I launch against a foolish rhymer:
Who with an envious nail scratching Minerva,
To dishonor Art, tries to make you a servant.
Daughter of the Ocean, fertile Deity,
Of Gods and humans the sweet voluptuousness;
And you King of Lemnia, help with vengeance.
And since this Impious in common offends you,
Let Apollo and his sister of mine not be distracted
Let one lend his bow, the other lend his arrows,
To shoot my wrath as thick on his head
As the grating tempest falls on the Apennines.
And you, courier with these Gods the care,
As their guidance assist them too.
Castalian sisters, learned and beautiful novena,
Of the Monarch of Heaven the immortal seed;
Leave to assist me against this proud one,
Of your sacred mountain the frowning summits,
The Aganipid source, and the living silver which flows
From Eurothe, Permesse, and Dirce which rolls
Its waves broken by the flowering meadows,
Each evening push back with your bouncing feet,
To the sound of the golden lute that your brother plays,
Companion of the accents of his deep mouth,
If I had had a share from childhood in your holy favors,
Breathe into my lungs your divine furies.
If he abounds in speeches, let me abound in sentences:
And if he blasphemes in verse, let me confound him in verse.
Thus with your laurels the august summit
Braves the years, the lightning, and fatality.
For although in my anger to attack it angers me,
A spirit so fickle, a courage so cowardly,
Who blaming indiscreetly what he has praised most,
Who dishonoring the Art to which he has devoted himself most,
As doubtful of the false as of the true,
Of his verses and of himself makes a meager fable.
Although the red paper in many places is stuffed
With his name that many a crime has badly blackened;
And that after the traffic of a confrontational life
Just fear forces him to shameful flight;
I want this rash man to call to combat,
And his presumption in public to reveal;
So that in the water of oblivion the lead of my words
Face shipwreck his frivolous spirits.
So, Marsye new, mad slanderer,
Ignorant despiser of Art and Nature,
Do you dare to sully with your barbaric verses
The candor of the writings of so many rare minds,
Who shine with the rays of divinity
Adorn like Suns the holy antiquity;
Hoping by your cries (victim hyperborea)
To abolish a thing honored in every century,
You are not a philosopher, and yet you want
This Queen of the Arts to enslave under your laws.
When you gave your course it was at full speed,
For you have no arguments neither subtle nor solid.
Your babble raised by an ostentation
Has for all foundation the blind opinion
Of the vulgar imbecile, to whom nothing is credible
Except what usage has proven true!
Overwhelming with the burden of impossibility
All that his incapacity has not understood.
You say that in the long circuit of a thousand experiments
You have lost your time, your trouble, and your expenses;
That you have seen a thousand and a thousand who their good
By a same disaster have converted into nothing:
Is it a firm argument, is it a consequence,
That of the ignored Art is false science?
How many have wasted their means and their days
In curiously seeking the unknown returns
Of the movement of the self? How many still seek
The shape of the circle? And if they are ignored
Is it a certain point for a received maxim That
Archimedes and Euclid ever knew anything about it?
We must not at the foot of human ignorance
Measure the secrets of immense nature.
It is so infinite in its diversity
That it takes an unlimited age to know it.
The years of Arthephius, or even of Pythagoras
The three centuries combined would not be enough.
But, say I, who would have moved so many illustrious doctors,
Kings, and holy men, to write as impostors?
Hermes the thrice great to whom is god the use
of the seven liberal arts guaranteed from shipwreck,
who first in his table has this art inscribed,
was he learned a pipper, or ignorant a pipper?
Geber of whom Arabia still glories,
who for his high knowledge is almost deified,
great king, great philosopher, would he have wanted to lie,
at the expense of his glory; and cowardly consent
to defame his scepter, and to soil his soul
with a wicked act, worthy of eternal blame?
Morien, whose austere life has deserved
the title that is given to his great probity
of good and holy man, would he have wanted
to obscure by lying the luster of his life?
and his learned writings cited in so many places
would they have really come from a malicious heart?
This great Thomas Aquinas whom we hold to be a Saint,
If others lied, is the master of liars:
For he writes like them that he has known, seen, and made,
This divine Elixir which perfects metals.
And so many other authors whose famous pens
Have written in this art a world of volumes,
Which you go, judge false, condemning madly,
Because they go beyond your weak understanding?
And that your frail skiff, where ignorance is painted,
Was never fretted to sail towards Corinth:
Supposing that these names of very renowned men
That have on their brows so many writings by the world sown
Are so much slime that human malice
Tends to spirits pipped with the whistle of avarice.

Pippeur, you did not sound this feigned song
When you proposed the work to the Grand Duke of Alençon,
As being able to claim the empire by it,
Making his footstools of England and Flanders.
What does the title of Beaune or Ay matter to wine,
When it is excellent? Is a book hated
For being without an author, when it is true;
And its truth is profitable to the world?
He who with a fixed eye and a tense mind
Penetrating their shell to their understood style,
Judges the truth of them and their science
By the blazing flash of their correspondence.

Now, let us enter the lists, and with method and art
To fight to the bitter end, let us raise the standard
Of this great prince Hermes, to see to whom glory
Has already consecrated the palms of victory:
My too just quarrel and my boiling desire
Under a happy auspice make me an assailant.

God, first essence, eternal, impassive,
Invisible, infinite, incomprehensible, inexpressible,
Was before all things. And in him alone was
All, by the ideal being that he alone projected.
For the actual principle of the building of the world
He made a substance in substances fertile,
Which pure and quintessential essence some go calling,
In which all nature he went concealing.
By him this substance in three was divided,
And from the purest part at the same instant drawn,
The angelic nature, and the glorious body
From the height of the empyrean Heaven, dwelling place of the Gods.
Then from the second part a little less precious
He made of the Firmament the spacious roundness;
The Moon, the Sun, and the radiant bodies
Which his supreme grandeur attest to our eyes.
And from the third part still less pure & world
He created four bodies for members of this World:
Where, for blood he slipped this fifth virtue
With which by them here below every body is clothed.
Then with his divine breath he gave birth
To the beautiful Nature infinite in power.
And to better exercise it in the production
Of the design sketched in his intention,
He understood all Idea in his first Idea:
By which the learned worker in her progress guided,
From this first object conceiving all objects,
To the paternal mold formed all her projects.

Nature obedient to the effect disposes itself,
And of these four bodies all other bodies compose,
By giving them vigor, & life, & movement,
By the spirit purified from the fifth element,
That of the first four artists she alembicates,
Principle & foundation of this beautiful Chemical art.
Beautiful Art which its mistress helps by surmounting her;
And its works of a century completed in an instant.
Beautiful Art which alone has given knowledge to man,
As one can reduce everything to this fifth essence.

God, Nature, and Art, with unanimous will,
Show the infinity of their triple power.
God commands Nature, and provides the matter:
Nature informs it and brings it to light:
And then Art, polishing what Nature has made,
corrects the vicious, and perfects the imperfect.
So much so that without Art, which illustrates things,
Their virtues would languish without effect and without luster:
For Nature cannot by simple actions
Accomplish as art by preparations.
And of Art, however, the singular virtue
Is only in the amendment of the proper matter
In which Nature has placed this affluent treasure
That in all composed bodies the Heavens flow in.

Nature is an infallible order and power,
Which the incomprehensible spirit of the incomprehensible
From the birth of the world to the world has established,
To see its ennobled design of diverse effects,
Producing, preserving, and increasing the things
Which in its foreknowledge it reserved enclosed,
From all eternity to all eternity,
Under the infinite progress of a limited project.
And what is called Art is an incredible act
Of the human intellect, which makes man admirable
In the imitation of natural effects,
Which it often corrects, and makes more perfect.

The earth with its broad sides, from the germ of its brothers
Who are equally fathers of all physical bodies,
Conceives, nourishes, increases, in its interior,
The universal spirit of the lower world;
Which in white and fine flower Nature brings forth,
And which in gleaming crystal Art makes appear to us.

In its simplicity, this general spirit,
Triple one, is animal, vegetable, mineral,
Beginning and end of all corruptible bodies,
Of which it is the substance and invisible balm.
But if it pleases its mother to build a body,
And that it goes sliding to vivify it,
It receives Nature, and the name of the thing,
Or by obedience it is metamorphosed.
It animates all bodies,; it makes them vegetate;
And according to its abundance, increases and augments.
It is the divine Apelles, the Painter of Nature,
Who variegates the flowers of naive painting.
Who without color produces a hundred diverse colors;
And preserves without odor a hundred diverse odors.
It is the Chameleon, it is the inconstant Proteus,
Who receives all form and color presented.
One would have beautiful without it the herbs to replant;
Sow the grains in the earth, and the trees to grow.
It is he alone who plants and vivifies the tree;
Who putrifies the seed sown in the earth,
Who causes birth and fertility,
According to heat joined with humidity.
In him alone the virtues of all bodies consist;
For those where he is more persistent the longer:
And those where he is less, as less animated,
More subject to death are sooner consumed.
Death cannot however destroy his power,
For the virtue of the bodies in him comes to be reduced.
He lives very salutary or very pernicious,
According to the instinct of the good or malicious body.
A grain of this spirit, of celestial origin,
Taken alone, has more effects than a pot of medicine.
For, although it is equally diffused in her,
The impure quantity makes his power confused;
And poor Nature struck and dejected,
Is combated by evil and remedy together.
So many doctors, laziness or pride, imprison
our bodies before the end in the coffin.

That which makes Fate exercise its power
In one rather than in the other, is the impure seed,
And the impure food; to which one goes by joining
The indiscreet disorder; Triple poignant sword
Whose pitiless sister piercing the weak weft
Of our ill-woven years makes passage to our soul.

We read of Artephius that he boasted
of being a thousand years old, and more, the Fate defied.
And Trismegistus writes that the frequent use
of his great Medicine accomplishes a long age;
preserving youth in its green vigor:
and repelling the importunate rigor of the years.
The insolent chatter of your enemy tongue
emblazons the escutcheon of this long life
with the colors of imposture: and disgorging its gall
says that it is blaspheming against the laws of Heaven,
which has limited our days to seven times ten years.
But with your unreasonable reasons brought forward,
I want to ask you why a thousand peasants
without any artifice have spent six score years?
Why the timid Stag, and the ravishing Eagle,
the useless Crow, the annoying Snake,
and the cursed Serpent, taught by Nature,
are thus only man with short days assigned?
Would God have made them from the paste of Angels
To announce his praises in the last centuries?
It is held that the Elephant adores the Sun;
And that the Eagle sings a hymn to it when it awakens:
But there is no animal, when this star lights it
To seek its usual pasture in the fields,
And warms the cold humidity of the air,
Who does not give a signal of his happiness;
For there is no creature in the world so discreet
Who stifles his joy by keeping it secret;
But when the sad winter bristles with icicles
The fields and the forests, we no longer hear these songs:
Each one reaches for mourning mutely laments
His ravished pasture and the absent warmth.

O Muses, what an absurd error,
To attribute to man a point of divinity,
And to proclaim him King of the earth and the sea,
If deprived of all goods he abounds in all evils:
And if the animals destined to his yoke,
With more frankness and grace were born.

Against our thousands of years (insolent Aristarchus)
You take the sharp iron of the ancient remark
Of the Egyptian years, woven from the few days
That the Moon remains to perfect its course.
But if of Artephius and the triple Mercury
The years were only months, as your imposture
Vomits against the honor of this unparalleled Art,
They would not have seen the rays of the sun a hundred years:
And puny too wrongly jealous of their fortunes
Would we anger the sky with importunate complaints.
Those of the first centuries who are said to have lived
Since Adam was convicted of sin,
Seven, eight, and nine hundred years did they count them by Moons?
Their blessings would have been common,
Since the more distant from being the happier,
There are some among us living as much and more than they.
I leave you (oh Zoille) with your lunar years,
To follow our majors crowned with solar years,
Who move by the miracle to admiration,
And then by the marvel to imitation;
Considering the effect of the natural virtues
That the root, the grass, and the flower have in them,
By which the animals of their instinct led,
Delayed the horrors of the eternal nights,
They made of Metals the true anatomy;
Vivifying by Art their sleeping vigor;
Vigor that the universal spirit takes from the sky,
Eternal in power; & in immortal act.
Who would have taught you without ambiguity their mystery,
Of which your ignorance alone is the worst adversary;
After you had been awakened from ecstasy,
You would marvel at having marveled;
For of the least craftsman the easiest work,
To him who is ignorant of it is also difficult.

What made them take to these ponderous bodies
Is the long action that the Stars have on them:
Making their elements so well glued together
That they resist all that disassembles everything.
There is no body so small where this spirit is not,
Which receives the influence of radiant bodies:
And so much the more the matter is tender and delicate,
And the more this influence infuses and expands.
But what lasts a short time cannot endure
What the body endures that can last a long time.
Grasses and flowers perish in a few days,
And the stars act on them for this short time,
They have material force, and very little form.
Much earth and water, very little air, no fire.
This is what makes them more suddenly perishable.
The bodies of animals are found dissimilar;
For much better provided with the noblest element,
As better animated live longer:
And longer satiated with celestial meats
Have their balm more suitable for fatal accidents.
Gems, for the great, of excessive value,
One for its hardness, the other for its color,
Receiving more the aspect of immortal flames,
To envy could be as good as beautiful,
But their balm of life where goodness lodges
Is extinguished and overcome by dryness.
Mineral means, abortions of Nature,
Abound more in salt, in soup, and in Mercury,
And these three Elements of which they are composed,
As by a long age exposed to the Stars,
Make against certain evils incredible effects.
Imperfect Metals much more venerable,
Aspiring to the State, like Princes of the Blood,
Seem to deserve to hold another rank:
However their power has certain limits,
By the impurities which infect their veins:
And because these fires which animate them
Influence in each one some effect only.

If the stars without more than the ordinary influence
Perfect in this spirit the supreme excellence;
The body which has been able to receive it for a longer time
Will consequently be more perfect in power.
And if from the brilliant Sky the smallest star
Has for its influence a power without limit;
The King of the bright torches who is well their departure
Must have the greatest and most precious share.

You cannot deny without the guilt of impudence
That each one gives gold a thousand years for its childhood;
And that during the course of its minority
Jupiter and Phoebus take the authority
To govern this pupil. Now wanting
their infinite power to be discovered in this little masterpiece;
They have made it so cheerful in all its elements,
That the impitent excess of the most vehement fires
Instead of destroying it is its sweet pasture:
That water, earth, and air, by rust or rot
And by any other effort, would lose their action
If they tried to make a breach in its perfection.
If then of the elements the best formed things
Are deformed by their progenitors except gold,
Who will dare to deny me that in precious gold
These Gods have not lodged the height of their best?
And that very rightly the voice of the philosophers
Has named gold without more, the fabric of fabrics
From which the wise man builds his secret building;
For the seed of gold is in gold alone?
Precious seed, incomparable spirit;
In which Nature imprints an incredible effect;
After the body dead by art is brought back
To the second principles from which it was first born.
If all nature is diffused in the Sun;
If all Nature has infused in gold;
Gold alone can therefore be a remedy for all ills,
Healing Nature in all animals;
Provided that it is reduced to such consistency
That it can be joined to human substance.
It will drive out all contagion from the heart:
It will prevent the blood from puttingrefying:
It will increase the balm and the radical humor:
It will maintain the heat in equal temperance:
It will consume the superfluity from the body:
It will purge the cold humidity from the brain:
It will rekindle the sluggish vigor of the senses:
And in short it will make us live a perfect life.

You say that we are born only to die;
And fleeing death, we never cease to run there:
In this place your sentence is full of ineptitude,
And for that you do not need the gift of prophecy.
Do we ignore that man is as if he were not;
And that the day of birth is the eve of death?
These are common words of the coarser souls.
Hermes, illuminated by the clearest lights
Of Heaven and Nature, did he ignore that one day
He would have to change his life and his abode?
He did not, however, cease to inquire and learn
This beautiful Art which could almost make him immortal.
If you are tired of living, lured by the hope
Of seeing a more beautiful day, hasten your last evening
As Cleombrote did; and your immortal soul
Leads to the field of Elisha a more beautiful life.
For me I love this world, and pray to the Gods
That I may happily live a poor century or two in it;
Then sing as I die some hymn of joy
At having fought old age so long.
Not yet that I hope to become immortal
Since this world itself must end once.
The years with teeth of steel will gnaw at my remains,
Since they gnaw at steel with teeth of rust.
But as steel can be maintained for a while,
My body can be maintained for a time by art.
Water falling drop by drop finally erodes the marble,
And rots little by little the heart of the largest tree:
But these are accidents that Art can delay
When one wants to carefully protect them:
For often from a great wall comes the entire ruin
By the unexpected misfortune of a simple gutter.
So much the more the well-born soul inhabits these low places
The more it flees the earth and approaches the Heavens;
For from the sins she unburdens her back
By a thousand charities that her broad hand exercises.
The fever of Tantalus is in the heart of humans,
They have rivers of gold that they draw with their hands
But when mortal ardor kindles its rage in them
They cry to their thirst a finger of this drink.
As if the ducats piled up by arches
Bought back from Pluto their deceased lords.
More than Royalty life is desirable,
And no treasure is comparable to health.

You want our doctors not to be ignorant
Of this exquisite remedy, since in their restaurants
They boil gold according to ancient usage.
They follow the letter and not the mystical meaning
Of their divine ancestors who did not understand
That gold is made drinkable by such broths.
It would be as good to put a marble or a porphyry in it,
As this body of which this water has no virtue attracts.
And they are no less frustrated by their intentions
When they mix its powder in their confections;
For what the heat of the stomach can cook
Can naturally be reduced in Chille:
But for human ardor gold is too hardened:
And just as one takes it, one puts it back.
Gold substantiates Nature, and gives it allegiance
When it communicates and adds its substance to it:
This is why the Alchemist, expert in his craft,
Returns this solid body to its first being:
For all excellent and praiseworthy medicine
Must be a fusible salt, or something similar to salt.

If the author of destiny, by moderating his laws,
Had at least allowed that one could be born twice:
But one blow and no more does man rise to life,
Which a hundred times every day is almost taken from him.
Ambition, pride, and temerity;
The hot desire to attain immortality;
The burning avarice, and the panic terrors
That many fools go grazing in melancholy moods,
Exercise against us their tyrannical effort,
And cause more deaths than ordinary death.
Goddess opinion, Queen of fantasies,
Who paints to dry brains your green frenzies,
Lodging happiness and honor in the most perilous places,
That you produce in us marvelous effects!
Hell has made you be born a second Atropos
To populate their deserts, and desert the world.

Wretched gouty man who lives worse than in Hell,
What use is this metal to you in an iron chest,
Or that its rich luster bursts in your furniture,
If you curse your life in a bed of scarlet?
Would it not be better for you to rarefy this body;
By the spirit to draw the soul and mondify it;
Then with the gentle heat of easy and possible art
To make of this mixture a fixed and fusible salt?
You would have this spirit which goes animating gold;
Of imperfect Metals the perfect food:
You would have gold reduced to the first essence,
Which never returns to its gross mass.
But you are fascinated by such enchantment,
That if someone offered you this holy medicine,
And your Doctor forbade you to use it;
You would rather suffer the Plutonic rage
Which holds you for your life in a bed tied,
Than see your Doctor angry when cured.

O dear son of the Sun, how could one do
To thy sacred lot worthily satisfy?
The Orpheus of the French on his Lyre sang
A hymn in thy honour; but he was content
To depict thy dress, and to properly speak
Thy common virtues which the common people admire.
May his muse forgive my temerity;
I wish to sing of thy deity in a louder tone;
And I must indeed oppose the powerful cohorts
That are armed against thee, with stronger legions;
So that the laurels for thy glory, ready,
May be brought to thee as a victor on the spot:
So that every adversary learning the manner
Of the Parthian who fights by turning his back,
Has hope only in flight, and fearing thy glances
Launches his useless darts with wasted blows.
Thy luminous father has filled thee with light;
Of Majesty, Empire, and entire power,
On the eye, soul, and mind, of greedy mortals.
As many as there are hearts, you have as many Altars
Where vows are added to you, where you are sacrificed,
Industry, labor, love, honor, and life.

Just as the Heavens have only one Sun,
You are unique on earth, like your father.
To seek your supreme power elsewhere than in yourself;
Is to seek the sun elsewhere than in the Sun itself;
From the serf, not from the lord, to want to take the Law;
And to place the slave on the throne of his King:
For on you alone depends their glory and their fortune.
By destiny, one of them always bothers you;
Weakens your strength, debases your beauty,
Exercising all efforts of ungrateful cruelty:
Without being able to destroy your Nature.
For your pious mother, when needed, knows how to reduce
your separated members to their original state:
Enriched and adorned with a more illustrious luster.
Although the good mother, in doing this office,
Faces the sacrifice of her son to her serfs.

But it is to enlarge you beyond infinity:
And to draw from death their immortality.
For if you did not die you could not be reborn,
To make them as great as you wanted to be great:
And to call yourself Monarch, Emperor, King of Kings;
Crowning your subjects, then giving them your laws.

I will therefore attack the common objection
That our enemy is steeped in the gall of his rancor.
He says that by miracle to God alone
Belongs the power to make change
From one species into another, and that the ancient Oracle
Of Aristotle, affirms it in his Methaphisique:
But he truncates the text, removing the exception
That instead he refers to the reduction
Of any body convertible into first matter:
And has never understood the ultimate intention
Of the wise inventors of the Art which is changing
Into vermeil and pure gold black and stinking lead.
If to make a means two extremes are arranged;
If the four elements one into the other change
Uniting in a body their contrarieties;
The Metals all alike in their nativity,
Although some accident makes them dissimilar;
Being the accidents of the subject separable,
Their natural defect by our Art reformed,
One will be transformed without miracle into the other.
The Glassmaker does much more, who is neither God nor Angels;
When in his furnace in shining glass he changes
The soul, the fern, and the fine sand,
Which by Nature never had become glass.
I can give an even more admirable proof,
To the vulgar doubtful and yet true,
So much nature plays in various ways:
A peasant showed me a number of snails,
Converted under their entire and apparent form
Into Marcasite of gold heavily dazzling.
And the famous Helvetian honor PLATERE,
Of his time the most learned and the most ancient,
Among a hundred rarities with which he confused
The souls who entered the abode of his Muses,
He showed a long massively espoused stake,
Of which the third was iron, the other third was wood,
The other third was stone; and of this strange case
He accused the place which changes the matter.
Thus the great Albert writes that some waters
Into stones transmuted branches, nests, and birds.
Many Prelates, many Lords, Illustrious of France;
Who for forty years have visited Florence,
Attest that the Prince has in his treasure
A nail that in his presence was changed into gold,
Dipping it (burning) in a Chemical oil;
Whose wise craftsman disguising the practice,
Persuaded the Duke that the trouble and the cost,
Should take away from him the desire and the taste for it.

Who has not known the disaster and the tragic story
Of the puny Bragadin steeped in vain glory;
And of the mad Paisserolle as windy as he,
Abusing the study and labor of others?
One was the astonishment of the wise Magnificents,
Who guarded ravished the famous relics:
And the other of wonder drew out of itself
During Charles the ninth & the Court & the King.
A sinister death was the fruit of their pomp;
Is he not truly deceiving, who himself deceives himself?
Believing that with powder they had the secret,
Their shame crowned their indiscreet pride.
How many men of honor would make solemn faith
Of the transmutations of the Belgian Vanguelle:
Of the Saxon Inderôure: and of the Cracovitan;
Who, masking himself with the name of Cosmopolitan,
Travels through the world, with honorable consequence
And to show that the work is his, and true
Joins to the divine effects the sublime discourses
That he devotes to the curious who in art have made their course?
I have seen from the first two the two first proofs
Which have illuminated my confused lights;
And bless the first for having advised me;
The second, and the third, for having opened my eyes.

O you, whoever you are, true Citizen of the world:
Who has given to the world the fertile wealth
Of your celestial spirit in your divine writings;
I confess you and name you a Phoenix of spirits:
Since in the purity of your supreme knowledge
One cannot equal you except with yourself;
Having not envied your nephews like the old:
Also you are the temple and the saint of my vows.
Which makes that today all Scotland admires
The valiant and learned Alexandre Napire,
Knight of the great King, Baron of Marquiston,
Whose first hair still gilds the chin;
It is that besides the virtues to which he succeeds,
(True son of a perfect father) it is true that he possesses
Like a paternal gift highly and in peace,
The Elixir, and the fire which never goes out.

I have seen Steel flow like a lively wave,
While sparkling through excessive heat
It was opposed to the ball of sulphur:
I have seen a compound saffron of this mixture,
Of which a weight put in water expands so much,
That it dyes a thousand weights in scarlet colour:
A colour that one does not see separated from clear water,
Nor even with time become less red.
If the imperfect tincture of sulphur and Mars
Joins so strongly to the water which is not of their nature,
Is it impossible for our exalted gold,
And made more than perfect almost in infinity,
To spread its colour in metallic bodies
To make them forever temples of its relics,
Since the patient is similar to the agent?
In its body willingly the soul goes lodging.

This rebellious doctor who with a cruel and
impious hand has massacred immortal Alchemy;
And tearing his side with nails and teeth,
Dyes his muzzle and moustache in the broth of his blood;
Whether as a Wolf or as an Ass, he howls and brays in vain,
Since the truth is completely contrary to him;
He must ask for his pardon and yours,
With you he confesses himself ignorant and impudent.
The universal goal of true Alchemy
Is to remove from Metals an impure cadmium,
Which prevents their pure substance by infecting it
From reaching the summit where nature tends:
Then join by helping their afflicted nature
To the very perfect sulphur their purged seed;
For the most precious is to the vilest metal,
In first seed and in birth equal.
A very healthy mother had six children from a father,
Whose birth is seen equally prosperous;
Each at the breast still made hope
To see their age prosper equally.
Against this hope one became pulmonic;
Another became gouty; Another became ethic;
Another was granular; Another was catarrhal;
And the other in his health perfectly happy.
Apollo was inquired from whence these vices proceeded;
He blamed the milk of impure nurses.
Thus, the difference and imperfection
Of metals, comes only from the infection
Of corrupting sulphurs; which pure Mercury drinks
In the impure teats from which it takes nourishment:
And as one can cure these afflicted children,
The metals can be accomplished and purged.

Lull wanted to prove by valid argument
that Alchemy is true, and holy, and venerable:
Saying that if the goal of this singular art
Is to make gold and silver and then to multiply them,
That it is necessary that in its subject one finds beforehand
Gold, silver, and Mercury, both lively and vegetable:
For, as the air on everything has the force of moistening,
And the fire of heating, the effect of vegetating
Is in the plants: and the supreme power
To make gold and silver, in gold and silver itself.
Now all this is found in the natural subject,
Which the expert Alchemist has for sole object.
Gold, silver, Mercury, live and vegetate there,
Under a vile skin which in growing they reject.
Gold and silver are true, true Mercury also:
The Art which makes it its basis is therefore true just as well.

If the water of a fountain, flowing in Hungary,
Without any artifice is so violent
That the iron of its form renders it naked,
Then by the sole casting into copper transmuted:
If the smell of lead alone arrests Mercury
In the form of metal which endures some casting,
After it has boiled nine times in Mars
With olive oil, or linseed oil, or walnut oil:
If sulphur arrests it in a reddening mass;
If Arcenic attaches it in a sparkling crust
With the aid of Tartar to the balls of Venus:
If its flight and its course are still held back
By the spirit of Verdet and couperose:
Why can't nature and art make a thing
Which more fixed, more pure, and higher in colour,
Arrests it and leads it to the extreme value?
Who doubts that if the soul in our living gold hidden,
Is torn out with art by a learned hand;
That she has done penance in the rigor of the fire;
Then be by her spirit rejoined little by little
To her body made celestial and clean of all filth;
That she has not exalted her tincture a hundredfold:
And that having had by Art such an increase
She does not distribute it in her projection
To her own, and to the author from whence comes their origin,
To perfect them in gold, or else in medicine,
Whose indomitable force, to all eternity,
Will multiply itself to infinity?
We see this miracle in another vulgar one
That the simple rustic is accustomed to do;
When in a bucket of milk he mixes industriously
A few grains of rennet, or of an old cheese,
That the heat assembles, and makes everywhere spread
In this milk, that in cheese one sees as soon taken;
What was this rennet, and this curd,
if not a curdled milk, no more and no less than gold,
a thickened mercury, and candied by nature,
with a scattered sulfur which serves as rennet?

Who would believe, without seeing it, that a point of a Scorpion
would combust an Elephant with its contagion;
And almost in an instant with a deadly swelling
Exceeded its natural size and thickness?
It is too true, oh how unequal
Is this little murderer to this great animal?
And what can be found even more admirable,
Is that the dead Elephant would have the similar effect,
Killing a thousand Elephants if they had eaten it;
So much has this point, this whole body, changed into venom.
Are the seeds of good in things
Like those of evil fatally enclosed?
And what a mortal body, of imperfect nature,
Either to good or to evil, without any help made;
The body that Nature alone wished to perfect,
More than perfect by Art could it not do:
Seeing that it is composed of spirit, soul, and body,
Equally united by different agreements?
The word of God is neither fable nor dream;
It is the truth itself, and the terror of lies.
He has as a law from the beginning
To multiply himself makes the command;
And has excepted nothing from this first law,
But diversified only the manner.
The rational animal, and the brute also,
Both male and female, have a common concern
To increase their species in their own seed;
Whose natural effect depends on their power.
Plants are good for their production
In fertile seeds, but they do not have the action
Of one in the other sex, and the fertile male
Never makes his sterile female bear.
The earth is the matrix where the grain goes germinating;
The Moon and the Sun give it nourishment.
But this King of Metals, unique in his nature,
Produces himself almost like the creature,
He has a female where all his love lies;
His female embraces him, he embraces her in turn:
And deeply enamored of a mutual love,
She slips into him, and he melts into her.
In the clear matrix in such a coupling
Of the two joined sperms is first made
A formless matter, and comparable to that
Which among animals is called Embryo.
This Embryo comes to life, and a child is formed from it,
Who is born King; then becomes a triumphant Monarch;
Whose exquisite wealth, extreme and durable,
The least of metals can make gold similar,
And make him wear like sovereign King
On his brow the diadem and the scepter in his hand.
But although he has in himself this supreme grandeur,
If he cannot put it into practice by himself:
He needs the help of an ingenious master,
Who knows how to correct what is vicious
In his weak half; and who dexterously knows how
to Extract the pure blood that he hides in his veins:
Who knows how to kill it, then revive it.
To make it immortal for centuries to come.
For if the ravishing flames of the last fire,
Can in some effect remain powerless,
Nothing should defy them except this King, who
holds the most precious of the Heavens And of the four elements.
Although he has deserved that this fire molest him
As a notable sinner, who commits double incest,
Abusing his mother and his own sister
When he perpetuates himself, and creates a successor.
It is true that he does penance for this crime,
While with his blood expiating all offence,
He sustains and nourishes, like the Pelicans,
His brothers, his nephews, his mother, and his children.

Those therefore who with you deprive you of knowledge,
In the blood of animals seek this science;
In spittle, in hair, in dirty excrements;
In herbs, in grapes, in salts, in atraments;
In the metals of the vulgar, although from Mercury
They have like our gold drawn their progeny;
In mineral means, are deceived, seeing this point
That no one can give the thing that he does not have.
The tincture of the wise is fixed, and permanent;
Which dissolved and recooked to infinity increases
In power and number, with the same milk,
And the same curds from which the dough is made.
What true tincture, and what permanence
Do you want to find in bodies that the flame has power
To reduce to coals, or to send to the wind?
But I want to more courteously esteem you more learned,
And make you a prophet among such heretics,
Tearing you from the quagmire of sophistical labors.

You have known that in gold lies the perfect sulphur,
But you have ignored how it must be extracted.
You have known the grain, but ignored the earth
Where the perfect artist in his season encloses it.
You have known the earth, and have not known how to find
The secret mystery to cultivate it well.
You have cultivated it well, and have not known how to conduct
The heat which can advance or destroy the work.
Observance where the worker needs to be expert,
For fire is all the Art that Nature uses.
You have known well how to conduct it, and have had no knowledge
Of the term at which the child must take its birth.
You have seen the child born, and have not learned how
Nor what meat is given to feed it.
Thus you are one of those who boast from winter
That they will fill their barn, and neither sow nor plant;
Or else if they have sown, hasten the time;
And they are dead-set in the harvest of Spring.

You say that without using a lot of parables,
One should write everything in express words;
For to open a path where one cannot walk
Is to give desire and to tear away hope.
Poor Thiresie, oh unfortunate Phineus;
What destiny would lead your fascinated soul?
Your reason enslaved to your brutal desire
Would want to give birth to a great evil from a small good:
For if the common tooth could bite into this fruit
One never saw on earth such a disorder.
Everyone wishing rich in gold and silver
Would become destitute of a hundred commodities.
Each, a new Croesus, would close his shop,
Stopping the traffic of his mechanical Art.
The puny woodcutter disdaining his faggots
Scythe and melted axe is turned into ingots.
The diligent fisherman has his nets destroying
To tear out the lead to reduce it to gold.
The Marshal would melt anvils and hammers.
The ploughman would like to unshoe his horses;
Disarm his plough, and Ceres abandoned,
Would no longer have blond spikes bristling her spine.
In short, the beautiful golden age once so admired,
Would be reborn here below madly desired:
For the acorn of the forests, with the water of the fountains,
Would be the sovereign sweetness of our feasts;
Serving them to us in gold which to the more laughing eyes
Would not make the morsel more delicious to the palate.
We should go naked: and like the savages
Oppose muzzles to the celestial storms.
Turn the medal then, and see (poor Midas)
The fruits of your wishes from which you would not live.
He would truly break the celestial ordinance,
And would impiously commit an execrable offence,
Unworthy of hoping for neither pardon nor mercy,
Who would thus divulge this divine secret.
The wrath that Jupiter conceived against his wife
Seeing Troy consumed in Greek flame;
Or against the attack of the landed Giants:
Who too drunk with rage, and with forced pride,
Desired to tear the immortals from their seats,
When the vain effort of their sacrilegious hands,
Working on the design of their rebellion,
On Ollimpe, and on Osse, had placed Pellion;
Would have been only a dream: And would now pardon
The thief that a Vulture devours on Caucasus,
To put him in his place; where his reborn heart
Would go Eagles, Vultures, and Crows feeding.
Or else reserving him as the butt of his thunderbolt,
(Phoenix of the unfortunate reborn from his powder,)
He would be struck down more times each day
That he would not have painted words with his iniquitous fingers:
And of all his torments the most importunate bitterness,
He would see himself masked in his sad misfortune.
Prankster, lift the mask, and with an open face,
Confess your design since it is discovered;
You would like to sing a palinode:
But the air of the holy melody that I now chant
Is three tones higher than is necessary for your voice,
And too sweet for the accent of your rough abbeys.

To make your crown similar to very high deeds,
You say that if this work had been true,
That among so many thousands of ambitious men
Who have become impoverished, and have become old
At this Calipson, enamored of a vain love,
Someone for whom the heavens would have blessed the pain,
Having Taprobane and Peru at home,
Head of a hundred Regiments would have made war on the King.
Beautiful catastrophe! O beautiful stroke of logic!
To want a Philosopher to have a tyrannical soul;
And to hold the first rank among wolves of wolves,
Shedding in his homeland a deluge of blood.
What is a Philosopher? A lover of wisdom.
Where do these treasures come from? From God alone, who directs
The upright and discreet soul to this desired goal,
Where many a great and many a learned man have aspired in vain.
Would you be considered wise, having this knowledge,
If at the cost of your life and your conscience
Aspiring to bring some people to your law,
He made you a slave and triumphed over you?
Against your arguments melted on ice,
I hold that the eternal immutable in his grace
Never abandons his beloved elect:
Whom he makes armed with love, fear, and constancy.
In the long course of their being he serves them as a pilot;
And their nerve assured in the storm floats.
For if the hot broth of an impetuous blood
Swells some young soul, it takes it by the hair
Like Palas Ulisse: and does not allow it to do
Anything that can kindle its anger against it.
One would have to suppose a vice in his goodness,
If he did not constantly exercise his free will.

Do you want to know the error that your peers overcome?
Who by means empties them and fills them with shame?
It is that hardly among a thousand one sets his eye and mind
On the various authors who have described this work.
One knows a practice with sulfur and Mercury:
Another a beautiful medium who endures Verdet:
One knows a weight for fifteen in white on Venus,
By whom two great Prelates have spoken:
Another in mining seeks a fusible white sulfur;
Another knows how to whiten it, but it is combustible:
One has the true secret of the operation
To lead the Moon to fixation;
Another knows the dyeing of it to more than twenty and four:
One hardens tin, but it cannot be beaten:
One joins the Moon to the ground inseparably;
And the other transmutes it into ground by Cement:
One wants only twenty days; the other wants only thirty:
Thus each flatters himself, and is satisfied with the wind:
Different in matter as much as in actions,
But equally foolish in their conceptions:
Since art like a monkey imitating its mistress
Has only the sole subject that she engenders and leaves to him;
Has only one procedure, one weight, one fire alike;
And makes in a vessel the work white and ruddy.
To do an apprenticeship in some Art one must be
Five or six years a slave to the yoke of a troublesome Master;
To get up early, and go to bed very late:
But to make a masterpiece in this precious Art,
One pities a year or two, one does not want to spend anything;
Hoping by miracle, or in dreams to learn it,
As on Parnassus at the expense of green laurels
While sleeping Hesiod learned the Art of beautiful verses.

He who has not sailed in the sophisticated seas
And passed the straits of a hundred foolish practices,
Does not drop anchor in the port of perfection
Except by a wind of revelation.
Were he a Pythagoras, a Pliny, an Aristotle,
He must run his fortune like an Argonaut,
Through this Ocean of vexations,
To discover the banks of a thousand obscurities.
It is indeed some advantage to him who sets sail
To have the favorable wind, and to see his star:
But in the Chemical wave there are many rocks;
Where often many excellent shipwrecks have perished,
For one sees his star (although among a thousand
Hardly one looks at it) and remains useless to him,
Because he is not expert in the operations
Which give us the entrance to the preparations.
Grow old who wants to lean over a book,
Deust he centuries for years, even years for moments to live,
And does not put or have the work put by hand,
He wastes his time, his oil, and torments himself in vain.

The poor laborer who is in transit or who sweats,
And whose hands are blistered while gripping his plow,
Then under a weak hope of uncertain profit
Feeds on wicker and sows good grain,
Badly dressed, badly bedded, often passes the year
Without seeing a sheaf brought to his barn again.

The winegrower, constantly digging in the hills,
Who has a bent back, neck and leaning head,
Works all year without being able to
make an offering in September to Baccus or Priappus from a single bunch,
Waits well for the next year, and not certain of the fruit,
Commits himself to the usurer who gnaws and destroys it.
But our little Croesus, whose insatiable soul
Idolizes the goal of this venerable Art,
Blinking with a mad desire, pricked with a vain hope,
Would like to receive our laurels without any risk.
If Hermes and Geber, whose ashes we honor,
were to be reborn as new Phoenixes now,
and stung by the desire to satisfy this hunger,
they asked them for nothing more than food and bread
for twelve or fifteen months, with a rare eloquence
they would answer that then one would not see
beasts or people living in the world, although these months had passed
one would see them only beasts enough.
Nature remains a thousand years in making gold,
and these calves would only want a month, a day, an hour.
O learned blind ones, is it not enough for you
that art, helping nature to advance its steps so much,
that in one year it makes a painful powder
that bruises Mercury like a thunderbolt?
A thing too true, and that the eye having seen
would nevertheless believe by charm to have been deceived.
This is why many a great man has learned this science,
Having had for his North the star of wisdom,
Who for lack of means in despair died,
Submerged in his harbor at the sight of the port.
For the rich and the poor have a similar design:
But very often the poor man, more agreeable to the Gods,
Takes away the crown by dint of staying awake,
Not the rich man at will snoring on the pillow.

Then, should we be astonished if many a soul hesitates,
And is vaguely irresolute in the double belief,
If with covered ambiguities and blackened words
The principles of Art are cunningly obscured?

One depicts a King drowned in his fountain,
To be reborn immortal in sovereign grandeur.
The other joins in the bed a brother with his sister
From which must be born a nephew of the world possessor.
One irritates a Lion against a flying Eagle;
The Eagle makes him fickle, and makes her constant.
The other paints two dragons who go devouring each other,
Of ​​which one with golden wings goes honoring his back.
Then giving a thousand names to the same thing
He hides more who more fully exposes it:
All to despair the ignorant vicious;
And so much the more to entice the learned ingenious.
For if they had no errors their work interwoven
The simplest in the world would have known it in an hour.
But let us see the fountain where those have drawn,
And how the inventor first disguised it.

It is true, without lying, certain, very true,
That what is below is similar to what is above:
To accomplish from one thing alone effects
That by secret miracle one would believe to be made.
And as from the only God the profound thought
Of one thing has produced all things in the world;
From this unique thing have taken their being also
By adaptation all things here.
Phoebus engendered it, and Phoebe gave birth.
The wind as a matrix in her sides carried her.
The Earth is her nurse; and of all the universe
The father of treasures is included in these verses.

With constant gentleness and rare artifice,
Without violence or haste, it is fitting that one separates
The subtle from hope, and the earth from fire.
Then it rises to Heaven and descends little by little
To earth, where it acquires the two virtues together;
That an indissoluble knot tightly assembles.
If one changes it to earth, its entire power is;
And nothing like it in strength can be seen in the world:
For with its odor alone it kills and overturns
All subtle things; and pierces the hard ones.
Thus was the world made, and to these actions
Admirable will be the adaptations.
Thus over all disasters carrying off the victory
You will go triumphant over the world and its glory.
I have the work of the Sun fully revealed;
Thus am I Hermes Trismegistus called;
As having the three parts of all wisdom.

This center is suitable to its circumference:
For this shadowy principle, black with ambiguity,
Is the obscure lantern where truth shines;
Which one can only discern by entering the sanctuaries
Of a million Authors who make its commentaries.
It is the fertile stem of all these great Branches;
And the immense Ocean of all these large streams.

Following the example of the father, listen to the words
of the sons whom Pithagoras enlists in his troops.
Take this and that, do this and this:
and you will have this. If you do not understand this,
join water and fire; sulphur and Mercury;
and always put Nature in its own Nature.
Or else join the Moon and the Sun in one body;
and then make bankrupt all other apparatus.
Make of two bodies a circle, and of the circle a quadrangle.
Bring this square back into the form of a triangle,
and then of this triangle a circle being remade,
you will have the statutes of this art satisfied.
Let your red whiten and your white redden,
and you will have of the work accomplished the artifice.
Make with its spirit your spiritual body;
and by the same body this corporeal spirit:
then in this spirit body, make their own soul merge;
and you will have a good that nothing can confound.
The body does not act on the body; there is no mind in mind:
Never form of form impression took:
Matter of matter: and nothing is more probable
Than a fellow man takes the law of his fellow man.
But one must expose oneself to the shock of a thousand evils,
To climb the ladder of labors.
Read a book a hundred times, by another understand it,
One's good, one's time, one's pain, advance and spend.
For nature and Heaven do not plant these laurels
For young Soldiers, as for old hands,
Not that all old men obtain the crown;
But those to whom God alone by merit gives it.

How many fine minds poisoned with abuse,
After the sandarache have I seen added:
Poison that they nicknamed the queen of mines,
Idolizing this name until the last hours,
Because the Sibyl in her verses prescribed
That the subject must be written in nine letters
Figure, enigma, ambag, true oracle,
For it is our Arsenic, which of marvelous Art
Is torn from the loins of the brother, and of the sister,
By the poignant nails of the ravishing Eagle.
One kept a lamp lit twenty years;
The other twelve; and both saw nothing but smoke.
These transcendent minds elsewhere are to be sniffed at;
But it is vice in this art to be too subtle:
Wanting to paint in the air many impossible successes;
And to clear paths in inaccessible places.
It is necessary by reasons, and with a sound judgment,
Considering Nature to imitate her design.
Flee the ruinous places, and the oblique paths
Where sophisticated labors lead us astray
We must walk without fear on the natural path,
Easy, common, certain, straight, and continuous.
Finally leaving Icarus, we must follow Daedalus;
Flying between two airs of an ever equal aile.
Whatever one can apply to the labor of father and son,
If one knows well how to explain their fable in the true sense.

Dedalle is the double body in its first mixture,
When the heavy earth in dissolving changes
Its gross nature, and rises in rising
On the aeons of water, not of air nor of wind.
This audacious young man, this insolent Icarus,

Who from a bolder flight near the Sun goes astray;
Who sees his Wax melt and his arms lose their scent;
Then in the sea that he names falling to be lost:
It is the spirit that abandons its body in the waves
Having ravished the soul: and does not cease to rise
Until little by little having reached the height of his Heaven
It falls back into the Sea from whence it came.
Fable that the great Moses long ago tinted
In the Hermionic purple of his Holy history,
When he says that the voice of the immortal Artist,
Building the universe his eternal masterpiece,
Separated water from water, to
make of the coarser one By thickening it the nourishing earth:
And that the more subtle one he put in the firmament,
Which forms into dew, and flows incessantly
Through the eyes of the night on the earthly mass,
Where the sponge of the shining sun gathers it.

But how many still worship antimony
as their chemical god; and keep ignorant
of that which does not marvel so rare,
to see that the sun calcines and prepares it,
or even increases its weight if it goes upon it darting
its rays inflamed by the burning mirror?
And when my memory of my errors bears witness to me,
I turn pale with sadness and blush with shame
to have so neglected the angel of good authors,
to believe in the false demons of traitorous impostors,
iniquitous and cursed race, brood of harpies;
infecting and stealing whoever trusts in them.
The universal spirit, where many a confused spirit
has been entangled with me, was my first abuse.
I have blackened it, bleached it, and reddened it in one hour:
but no impression on metals remains.
Whatever it be spirit, body, cooked and rubbed,
it remains powerless if it is not specified:
for proper to all species it receives all form;
And serf of all subjects he transforms himself in everything.
Leaving this mad design I have, a little cunning,
Amused myself for a long time with the metals of the Vulgar;
Defiling this sacred art with profane thoughts.
For I have put Sun and Moon in diaphanous liquors,
And cooked with Mercury at a very slow heat:
But this thankless work was of the same value;
Nature wants Nature, and the species the species;
Aborting in the congress the diverse seed.
He cannot make a country well populated
Who has male with male at coitus coupled:
Crime against Nature, and abominable fault,
That all the fire of hell is not capable of expiating.
Thus many travelers led astray by night,
Deceived by the madmen in a lake are drowned.

Now if you have believed the oracles of these false Gods
Who have made our miracles odious to you,
Hate the advice of these pernicious ones,
As an infernal plague and curse of Heaven.
Then you yourself, calling for your foolish sentences,
On your knees with me come to say these words:
O divine science, O supernatural Art,
May God as by grace take his elect away;
The unique and prompt remedy for the misfortunes of life;
How happy one can well say he who possesses you,
And who was seen by a good Star at birth:
Since so many treasures he enjoys
Come from his pain and his industry,
And not from oppression, usury, or deception.
If he is wise and discreet for the hidden cause
Of his contentment, nothing should upset him,
For he can go and live in all corners of the world
Carrying like Bias his fertile wealth.
If he finds a languishing man in danger of dying,
In passing charitably he can help him.
If he meets a widow with her sad band
Of orphans, who gives him alms at a marble request
(For many have a heart of marble in their breast)
He can make them full both hands.
The hoary ploughman, the honorable merchant,
Whom war or fire has made miserable;
He whom the usurer has eaten away like a canker;
The captive who laments in despair plunged;
Will be able without thinking about it and without it appearing
To escape by his good deeds from prison and anguish.
Who will be surprised then if the brave Jason
Despised the bazaars to win the Fleece,
Since he sees himself satisfied with wealth by it,
And return his old father to the flower of his youth?
Or that in the eyes of Charon, near the infernal water, Aeneas
went to pick the yellowing branch?
One will rather complain that the divine Muse
Who animated the breast of learned Salust,
Has drowned in Laethe this precious subject,
The most worthy ornament of his rich project;
Since he wanted to sing the wonders of God;
For that is enlisted on the brow of the peerless.
True, he has done better than Gamon, nor Linthault;
Who with such a brave speech and such a lofty stoicism,
The one like an Apollo Philosopher and Poet;
The other child of Aesculapius being his interpreter;
Have thought to guarantee their reputation from death
By teaching the public what they did not understand.
I want as witness only their vulgar Mercury
Whose Nature they think to correct by art;
Secret or both wander all astray,
Since Nature has prepared ours for Art.
They may sublimate and give it for soul
The spirit of vitriol, then amalgamate it
With cemented gold; this progress is worth nothing.
We must find conjoined by a natural bond
In our living silver the Sun and the Moon.
Not common living silver, common sun or moon,
But this twin couple that Jupiter inflamed
In the virginal belly of Latona formed.
It is our living Sun, it is our living Moon;
Theriac and venom of the living which enlivens them.
From these three thus joined the true Mercury is made,
Which by gold and silver is fermented and perfected.
It is our green Lion, it is our permanent water:
Of which the work is composed, and by which it increases.
It is the virginal milk; the animated Mercury;
Our leafy earth; and our sublime one.
Of the colors of Hyacinth and Narcissus capable
Transmuting all in itself, as in all transmutable.
Who becomes immortal when death he receives:
And bruises his children while he conceives them.
In the first place the artist needs to know
From what, and in what places, Metals must be born
How they are conceived, engendered, completed;
But not to the same honor by Nature raised.
Then, if he does not want to wander blindly at random,
Let him know where he must follow or leave Nature,
Who has for all design (working simply)
Of the two joined principles to make gold only.
Let him keep my word in Evangelical faith,
To never leave the Metallic species;
And yet not to take the common Metals,
Stripped of their life, and without any spirit:
For, although many Authors order to take them,
One should not so crudely hear their sentences.
One possible in his saying is superstitious;
And the other in his writings is perhaps boring.

Nature has composed of fire, air, water, and earth,
A principle to this Art which is Stone and not Stone.
Stone as to appearance and touch;
But as to the natural Metal entirely,
Metal which however no Metal resembles;
Although in it are all the metals together.
This indigestible mass with little action
Is easily led to perfection;
For in its elements nothing lacks or exceeds,
Thus all that it needs it embraces and possesses.
The fire which consumes everything in its greed,
Stripping all bodies of their humidity,
Is the only food with which it is sustained;
For the more it remains there the more is increased
Its radical humor; arriving at such a point
That the King of Metals does not compare himself to it.

Great King, who without other help took his origin
From this Hermaphrodite, or from this Androgyne.
From this Physical Chaos in which live hidden
Seven mineral spirits, by Art are torn
Their four progenitors, in the double seed
From which the Chemical Embryo must draw its birth.
The two are in Mercury, and the other two are
in Soup: and all together in dying are perfected.
Mercury is the husband, and Venus is the wife.
Art has made two bodies of them, but these bodies have only one soul.
Each suffers, then acts in turn,
Under the diverse effects of a mutual love:
Love which brings them together, and from the two dead gives birth
A third quite unlike those from which it takes its being.
Here is this mystical one, and this trinity,
Which includes all mystery in its triple unity.

Goddess begets-loves, germinous Citherea,
Who through the regions of the ethereal vault
Makes your eternal round in your radiant chariot,
Rising from sphere to sphere to the last of seven Heavens,
Then descending carefully, at our opportune wishes,
From the circle of Saturn to the circle of the Moon
Your genitrix virtue spreads equally
In the loving loins of each element.
As in the great universe your fertile influence
By the general spirit to all gives birth,
You produce the effects of many diverse acts
By the mineral spirit to the Chemical universe:
This is why our earth is called by your name,
For our Hermaphroditus is conceived and born of her:
After being annealed in the broth of her water
Of her fatal tomb she made her cradle.

Sweet Salmacis, how glorious you saw
To embrace the subject of your loving flame;
Bathing such a noble body and such beautiful limbs,
In the crystalline flow of your tearful waters!
Shameful adolescent, your happy misfortune
Gives you back by offending you this common glory;
Whether your double sex uniting with its waves
You are made to produce agent or sufferer!
But who is the doctor so subtle and so wise
Who proves by example, or shows by use,
That one can unite two bodies; of such different centers
That one aspires to Heaven, the other aspires to hell,
That by changing their Nature; and changing their substance?
A thing very difficult for human ignorance;
But possible, and required for perfection
Which this conversion produces in this Art:
Joining the agile mind to the heavy and stupid body;
The lively heat to the dull cold; and the dry to the humid; To make a compound, to which the discordant effects of counterqualities
are limited . Air is the support and life of all bodies. It substantiates fire; as water vivifies the great body of the earth, and water receives from the air this animating spirit; which it lets exude in the rays of heat, both celestial and central, to return to the air what descends from the air. Thus by the help of a continual loan each of the elements makes itself perpetual, in being, in action, in virtues, in power; giving what it receives, rich in its poverty. Otherwise this beautiful order would pass to nothing; and nature would be useless throughout. But this wise mother has by her providence obstructed this disaster, having made the order that circularly (excited by themselves) by communicating their own qualities, by their properly circular mutation. transmutations in all could be made, thus the earth lends its dryness to fire; Fire, its warmth to the air; air its humidity, To water, which goes lending its coldness to the earth; And all live in peace while making war on each other. See how these bodies miraculously Changing themselves change everything, and go reforming everything.


Learned Libavius, I admire your constancy
In proving and reducing this science to Art:
But in all your writings I have never perceived
That you have ever known this divine secret.
However I honor you as well as another Alcide,
Chassemal of your century, and valiant monstricide.
Do you think that all the old men who have attained this goal
Know nothing of the labors that you have described to us?
These are modern and frivolous inventions,
Contrary to the lessons of their true Schools.
Forgive, I pray you, the naivety
Which my frankness and my sincerity use:
I yield to you in doctrine and in grave eloquence;
But not in the secret and true intelligence
Of this rare mystery, where grace from on high,
Without which human study and skill are worthless,
Led me by miracle, while my courage
Overcome by so many errors renounced the work.

Those to whom this great God is extremely charitable,
For their perseverance and their fidelity
To this wisdom at the end of the game,
Want its mystery to abound in sympathy
With the most secret of divine mysteries.
That it has made the first foresee as soothsayers
The human ravage of the universal wave;
And the general fire consuming the world;
Then has ravished their senses in the happiness
Of the undeceiving hope of an immortality:
When the blessed the glorious souls
Will take their bodies purged by the Cement of flames.
And I following their trace recognized there enough
The effects to come by the past effects.
For if the water of the flood possessed the earth
One hundred and fifty six days; as much in our glass
A flood appears, and nothing is seen but water.
If Noah from the ark sent the Raven
Who stopped greedy for the dead carcass;
The blackness that rot brings to both bodies,
As a crow gnaws at them and leaves them with regret.
If the white dove announced the secret
Of future peace by the olive branch:
The greenness that shows itself to the clear and lively vessel
When our sun has drunk the humidity.
Comes to pronounce the decree of tranquility.
As in the sacred ark were male and female;
In our shining ark is the twin couple.
As the avenging water carried away the crimes,
Our water purges our bodies by infected blackness.
Now if one has been the other can well be believed,
Since God has dedicated one and the other to his glory:
And that without the action of this contrary effect
The projected work cannot be perfect.

Listen to a maxim not commonly common,
That in the night of the Sun is the day of the Moon;
And the solar coldness in the lunar ardor.
When the Moon obscures in its cold dampness,
Receives from the clear Sun the radiant heat,
The Sun enters into it and makes it luminous,
Heating and drying its cold humidity.
From the Sun in reverse the hot dryness
Slows down and moistens, and with an obscure cloud
Offusqué makes eclipse to our human sight.
Then as soon as the Moon returns to the Sun,
The Sun revives and relights the day,
Snatching from its sister its stolen light,
Who lives dark and desolate in clarity.
I have said a hundred and a hundred times, I say it again,
That the chemical sun is the living and pure gold.
Not this vulgar gold weakly of the martyrdom
Of the flames and waters which limit its empire.
Who has nothing perfect for others but for himself;
And who would become poor enriching others.
So is he whom Saturn in his sphere conceals;
Who is known to no one if God does not reveal it to him.
Verdant, vegetal, animated, animating;
Bright Sun, who appears Moon first.
And who will not have unraveled the ambivalences of the old
Will not know this Moon of the wise either.
Moon that a black valour infects and goes staining:
In her first crescent hiding her from our eyes:
Diana opens Phoebus, and Phoebus closes Diana;
Making the mind opaque, and the body diaphanous.
Remove then from the Sun the shadowy obscurity,
Then throughout the universe will spread its clarity:
But its bright splendor will not be departed
All in a moment of an hour to the dark Cinthia.
The cold Thitonides with the ruddy yellow complexion
Announcing to mortals the return of the Sun,
Telling them of her sister's setting and absence,
Who appears less and less, the more her brother advances.

Let these two twins settle their differences,
And let us settle other points, however indifferent.
They say that Heaven and earth must be one.
Tell me then if Heaven must descend to earth;
Or if rather to Heaven the earth must rise?
Every mind that leaves itself to reason
Believes that Heaven must descend to earth,
Then dissolve its mass and light return it.
Now it is held that the earth rises to Heaven
When with its spirit which dissolves it
It remains in it alive and spiritual.
That an ingenious and beautiful similarity
Can make you understand with astonishment.
When the son of God leaving the firmament
Descended into the Virgin, he took his birth there,
Joining our nature to the divine essence.
He was lively between us for our salvation
To prescribe charitably both the way and the goal.
Then enduring for us a voluntary death,
Immortal he returns to his paternal lair:
Raising the humanity of his precious body
On the circles of the world; Where he lives glorious
In the eternal palace of the holy Trinity.
Thus when Fate has extinguished my life,
My soul rising on the island of faith,
(By the infinite merit and favor of its King)
Will go to the sky from which it descended,
Having its frail rind returned to the earth:
To which, purged, on the day of judgment
It will come to join itself inseparably;
To rise together to eternal life.
But from a new doubt the new question
Formerly was put to me, to know if the spirit
(Who understood all the secrets of the soul and the body)
Ascends to Heaven with the soul, or remains with the body on earth,
To go to triumph or die in war?
I maintain that the spirit assembles them here below;
And during this life is third in their combats:
But the blackness changed into pure whiteness & world
There will be on earth a more excellent world;
Of which the spirit will hold justly the middle,
The body will hold the bottom, and the soul will go towards God.
Someone says that the earth is the true Heaven of the soul,
The soul that of the body, & that the spirit that one blames
For having soiled the soul in the solution,
Participates in the torments of its punishment,
In the sad dungeons of the shadowy purgatory,
Where the flame whitens the soul of black crimes:
Then, that the soul purged in Heaven rejoices,
And that with its sins the spirit vanishes.
For if he always made his abode with them
They would never have peace or constant alliance.
This fool said to the soul, in his perverse wrath,
I will lead you through the horror of hell
To eternal death, to the dark houses
Where Pluto goes to lodge his shadowy idols.
The soul barely drawing a sob from the depths,
In a broken voice while crying answers him:
Why, dear spirit, have you torn me away
From the pleasant bosom where I was attached?
I believed you were joined to me with a Gordian knot:
That giving myself to you you should be mine:
And your mouth today announces the opposite to me.
But I forgive the evils that your wrath pronounces,
As said by the tongue, and of the heart undictated,
And want on the contrary (equal to the deities)
To lead you with me to eternal glory,
Honoring our body with a more beautiful essence.
Let no one accuse me of having written this
To make the secret of this obscure Art:
Of body, soul, and spirit, the stone is composed;
And these three embracing make one thing;
As these three make man uniting their agreements.
The imperfect matter is taken for the body;
The ferment is the soul; and the water which assembles them
Is the spirit, chaining the soul and the body together.
The heavy and stupid body is vile and dead in itself.
The soul resuscitates it, and makes it lively and strong.
And the spirit which purges it at the end makes it worthy
Of the shining mantle, of the signal whiteness.
The body, the soul, and the spirit, which in number are three;
In their common kind are however only one.

For Sun, Moon & Mercury, in their entire substance,
Are different in form & not in matter.
How many high secrets of covered sophisms
Molder unknown in ancient verses?
The combat of Theseus and the proud Minautaur.
The rich golden thigh of the divine Pitagoras.
The incredible way of regenerating oneself.
Three times in three hundred years, being digested
In a bath of boiling water; & in a strange manner
For a hundred years to return to one's first form;
Are so many witnesses of the more than human effects
Which by this sublime Art were once made.

This courageous Theseus is the true philosopher;
Who, joining the one and the other fabric of his work,
Combats in the twists and turns of his triple vessel
The inaccessible pride of the monster Mytaurus:
Then triumphant victor
Makes the daughter of a king for a crown of glory the prize of his victory.
This King is the sun of the subterranean stars,
Who only engenders sovereign Kings and Princes:
And his daughter is the stone in dazzling redness,
Who pays for his labors, his expenses, and his wait.
If his beautiful eye deigned one day to shine in my eyes,
I would go, new Theseus, to the heaven of the demigods.
For it is the happy star in whose luster
From the pearly East like a new dawn
Came the Queen of the South, to hear, hear and see,
Of the great King Solomon the wisdom and the wealth.
As in a sister alas in her hands withdraws
Power, honor, virtue, and empire.
The royal diadem, specious ornament
Of her august brow, are the radiant fires
Of seven brilliant stars which illuminate the world.
Before her Majesty the greatest Kings bow.
And like a bride adorned towards her husband
With pompous vestments floating on her knees,
It is written in letters of gold Greek and Arabic,
I am the only daughter of the ancient Prophets.

Ignorance has made many a famous author say
that old Pithagoras was an enchanter
who secretly showed a naked golden thigh.
But this thigh was the unknown wealth
that by this high miracle he was going to possess,
and closely guarding the seal of silence.
The cauldron where his flesh was three times consumed,
is the secret vat in his locked room,
where in a bath of flowers preserved by Wine
he took (for a few days) of this divine sulphur
that the amorous Medea gave to the decrepit Aeson
, to strip her wrinkled old age.
Many a text is used on many a serious subject,
of which the author never had anything but this Art for an object.

The labors of Hercules, which are held to be vain fables,
Are true figures of this secret Art.
Gerion with three bodies, formidable and powerful;
Is the triple quicksilver embracing Sun and Moon.
The earthen giant, the impregnable Anthea,
Whose strength was not supplanted by any
As long as he touched his mother, is the spirit, and warm
Of our gold, which our water attracts and raises on high.
The Hydra, ever-nascent with seven horrible heads;
Is water, mother of gold and of all fusible bodies:
Water which does not wet, and does not extinguish fire:
Serpent which the sun must kill little by little.
Of the light Centaurs the monstrous species;
It is of the two sperms joined the hideous matter.
The traitor Diomedes and his cruel horses;
It is the Artist who lodges this chaos of Metals
In the secret chamber where its water devours it.
The shield of Hippolytus; is the Iris which decorates
This water of a hundred colours. The murderous manure
Of the stable of Augée, is the infected blackness
Which covers the dead bodies after their rotting.
The stinphaline birds ravishing the pasture
Of the disastrous Phineus, and infecting him;
Are the strong vapours which go from the bodies to emerge.
Of the foaming boar the pursuit and the capture;
It is then that the matter enters the grey colour;
And leaving to whiten its dark order
Gives a sign to the worker of his happiness.
The skin of the great Lyon which this demigod wears;
It is the red colour which carries whiteness.
The Bull which he tamed, the body which one goes to fix.
The Stag with golden horns; the fixed body yellowing.
Cerberus with three throats; the child born, who asks
That one goes and feeds him with new meat.
This is how the old ones went about this work, hiding
From the miser, the ignorant, the fool, and the wicked.

But what Thisiphon, with its red pincers,
Extreme in cruelty, gnaws the entrails
Of the haters of this Art, blinded by ignorance;
Who trouble with the vapors of their unruly senses,
Propose to us as laws their chimerical speeches
Wanting that we prefer them to the most beautiful relics
With which Egypt and Greece in their prosperity
Endowed the altars of their posterity.
To hate what one does not have, to blame what one ignores;
It is an evil that requires a hundredweight of Helebore.

Yet from your throne you have not stood up,
Fine Art, since there is nothing that someone has not doubted.
The divine mysteries often in controversy,
Yet do not allow the Church to be overthrown.
Jupiter never knows how to please mortals;
What makes one cry induces another to sing.

From the slopes of Montgibel the suffering insolence
So many tongues of fire with wavy folds do not spring forth,

Let the traitorous envy with fatal glances
Shoot out by a hundred eyes of Basilisk darts,
In the white of your honor (great Queen of wonders)
And all, without hurting you, pass into your ears.

Let this monster tear a smoky blower,
Who with strong water, sulphur, and perfumed orpine,
Resembles the blacksmith whom a green-blue flame
Makes a phantom to the sight under the dark night,
This is only to your glory, and I will pardon him.
But a legitimate son to whom you are going to give
Ariadne's net in this confused Daedalus,
Must be exempt from the thread of his infernal tongue.
And must a true Theseus, or an irritated Perseus,
Exterminate this Monster swollen with iniquity.

Will you not come from Heaven, beautiful Aurelian soul,
To freeze the magician voice of these Ravens;
And defend the honor of your beloved Pontiff,
Whom they have wickedly defamed to offend you.
With your beautiful verses gilded equally soft and serious,
Burins by which your glory on the brow of the years you engrave,
The precious fabric and the most exquisite work
Have no laurels for your required rent.
Their torrent more fertile than the rich Pactolus
Rolled too much gold hidden in its soft arena
For a single purse; where the purse would have been
As was the treasure great in infinity.

Gnaw Muses, gnaw the nail and the beak that pinches
Your opulent Poet and his illustrious Prince.
Borrow from Pallas the frightful shield,
From which the horrible Gorgon hurling many a lightning bolt
With her big fatal eyes stones ignorance,
Who with a pointed dart combats this science.
And advise those who blame such secrets,
To be a little more learned, or much more discreet.

END

---

Stances

At the graceful awakening of the vermilion dawn
His eye chases away the darkness of the aerial void,

Illustrating the outline of the earth's globe
With its brilliant lightning which recolors the sky.

Thus, when the splendor of knowledge adorns
Some mind purged of the ancient confusion
Of vulgar doctrine, he sees everything, and there is nothing
However secret there may be in the world, that he ignores.

The great mob flees from imposture and error;
(As the Owl flees from the shining Sun)
Unable to bear the brilliance of his science.

He walks in his right hand having length of days;
Riches and honors in the left; and always
Follows as lighthouse and as north the star of wisdom.

Muses, drive far from your sanctuary
All excommunicated and cursed impostors;
Who prophaning this Art, lying sacrileges,
Make of its sacred name a fable to the vulgar.

That these spirits, trailed by popular error;
And these Donkeys loaded with books and authors
Who by opinion despise our Doctors,
Do not approach your salutary altar either.

That with his sordid hand a miser,
That with his impious nail a vain ambitious;
Do not attempt to pick our precious roses:

But let the humble and the wise enter this holy place.
For for them alone are reserved by God,
And the flowers, and the fruits, of our metamorphoses.

Of these valiant champions contending for the prize,
Who in the field of Hermes make the dust fly,
Scarcely one among a thousand has known the matter;
From which the crown is made where they are contenders.

Some, more than necessary, subtle and transcendent,
Far from the fear of Nature, trying their career,
Abandon the course of this great warrior;
And open paths for hers, all discordant.

Such foolish spirits leave their good mother;
And they wander after many chimeras,
Which, feeding them with errors, leads them to despair.

Each has its object, each has its practice;
And there is only one subject and one unique way:
Which one cannot obtain or know without Nature.

A thousand and one before me, like me, curious,
Have spent their age, and their wealth, and their pain,
In seeking uncertainly, a certain thing,
And, to those who know it, always present to the eyes.

But a thousand and a thousand also (the most favored of Heaven)
Before me, like me, have known the fountain
Which pours its living water on a golden sand;
Water of immortality from which the Gods drink.

Some, as if blind, wandered in adventure,
Others, better learned, disciples of Nature,
Directed their steps to the Heaven of its secrets.

Those were shipwrecked, both in goods and in life:
Those guided to the port, free from fear and envy,
suffered all anguish, and almost death.

---

Hermetic Visions

Though our art consists of one thing only;
And in a vile garment our king is hidden:
See how he changes and metamorphoses,
Before he can be torn from the sepulchre.

I see by a strong eagle a venerable old man
In the bosom of a large cloud taken up to the Heavens.
Then turning in a globe in a frightful way,
Becoming very clear water, and very precious salt.

I see in our sea two admirable fish
Which without flesh and without bones cooked in their own water
And from their juices swelled the delectable waves
Which gave them being, and which are their tomb.

I see in a quagmire a wild mother,
Vileer than a boar sleeping in the mud;
Who, changing little by little her hair and bodice,
Turned into a white doe at the end transforming herself.

I see in the depths of our dark forest,
Near a Unicorn, a bold stag;
Followed by a hundred hunters, of whom only one, full of glory,
Makes a delicious dish of their golden flesh.

In a shady valley of this very forest
I see two proud lions, one on top of the other, fiercely;
Who, taken by this hunter with extreme labor,
Were brought under a yoke, even in triumph.

I see a superb dog and a wolf full of rage,
Grappling with each other; and both strangling each other,
Converting their blood and horns into venom:
Then this venom resolving into precious balm.

I see below another a great horrible dragon,
Vomiting its venom in the rays of the sun.
To any other fearsome and harmful animal,
For there is no basilisk in cruelty like it.

I saw him soon afterwards surprised in the rope
of the cautious hunter; where worse than enraged
he devoured his tail, and by his own outrage
his blood was changed into a fine Theriac.

In the same forest my sight was led
To a nest, where lay the two birds of Hermes,
One tried to fly, the other prevented its escape;
Thus one holds the other, and they never leave.

Above this nest I see on a branch
Two birds plundering and killing each other.
One of blood color, the other of white color;
And both in dying take a happier fate.

I see them transmuted into white doves,
Then both changed into a single phoenix.
Which, like the Sun, on its brilliant paths,
Freed from the park, went to range itself in the sky.

I see a proud monarch in his royal pomp,
Coming out of these forests where he called himself king;
To the four parts of the world to the beautiful sound of a trumpet
Calling his vassals to receive his law.

On his head shone a triple crown,
Where many a large carbuncle was sparkling.
And in his right hand blazed a beautiful scepter, where radiated
With precious gold an excellent enamel.

Of a waxy purple adorned with embroidery,
His imperial robe with wide and long lays
Over a harness rich in goldwork
Hung from his shoulder to below his heels.

Pompous in Majesty, with a severe and grave brow,
He said to a thousand Kings prostrated at his feet,
The most powerful of you is now only a slave;
For all are predestined for my trophy.

Over all my enemies I have gained victory;
And braved death even by breaking my tomb,
I am incomparable in power and glory;
Richer than Pluto and more beautiful than Apollo.

I raise the poorest to royal dignity;
I give all perfection to the imperfect,
And those whom I perfect are equal to myself
Giving them the effects of the same action.

I satisfy the most avaricious souls with treasures;
I fill the most dejected bodies with health;
I exalt crystal over rarer gems:
Universal in strength, and unique in virtues.

Who would not consider such a strange progress as a fable?
Seeing that a vile thing, despised by everyone;
Without work, without expense of oneself is changed
Into a triple treasure without equal and without price.

I am therefore the Phoenix which is reborn from its ashes:
The grain which rots in order to produce in the earth:
I am this Pellican; And this Salamander,
Which is born in fire and nourishes itself in fire.

I am so much that the earth in its flanks conceals me,
In unique trinity or trine in unity.
And would come of myself in great authority,
If the envious miser did not separate me from it.

Everyone buys me and possesses me at a low price:
But it is after my death and when I am alone,
Whoever takes me alive, and knows what I can do,
Can say that he succeeds to the treasure of the elect.

Wish for fortune

O princess of Antie, invincible fortune;
Opportunistic at some hour, importunate at some other,
Incomparable goddess, demanding from mortals
Souls for victims, and hearts for altars,
On the greatest palaces you make herbs spring forth:
Changing sad tears to superb triumphs.
The Monarch follows you: the Emperor and the King
Bend their victorious leaders under the yoke of your law.
Those whom Mars and Bellona animate to war:
Those whom Ceres destines to the labor of the earth:
Those whom the God of gain, at the mercy of the waters
Bury alive in their frail vessels:
The warlike Dacian: the fiercer Gelon
Than the Bear aborts on the banks where the Sun sets:
The annealed Libyans: the transient Scithians:
The cautious Parthians: and the light Getti:
Fear the reverse of your powerful right hand;
And the uncertain turn of your inconstant Wheel.

Strength with points of steel accompanies your steps;
Which shows the power you have here below,
On the globe that it carries as a sign of conquest;
Where is painted the horror of an obscure tempest:
Of bronze is its Cuirace, and its deep Helmet;
Whose point descends to the middle of its forehead. With
large sharp nails, and strong copper hinges,
Its left hand is adorned: and proudly makes itself followed
By Saturn chained; who carries suspended
A pot of baked clay filled with molten lead.

Faith walks at your side, covered with a white veil
Hope follows you under a green robe;
Eyes sweet and laughing, face all feigned;
Head covered with flowers; & around the neck girded With
precious collars, mouth & hands full
Of abusive words, & vain promises.
These three escort you, and are cherished by them
As much people as Kings, if they are your favorites.
But if the most illustrious is affected by your wrath,
This troop leaves them, & as for you withdraws
The disloyal subjects, & the limited friends,
Who love only the honor with which the great are adorned.

Receive my humble wishes, O powerful goddess,
So that your dear favor does not leave me in need.
I do not aspire insolently to pompous grandeur
Nor to the government of Kings or Emperors.
My desires have only the pen and the book;
To pursue the labors of Hercules and Jason.
Your eye be my holy Herm, and my lighthouse and my north.
And to guide my boat to the salutary port,
Let in the midst of the waves, for assured observation,
Some young Triton on his azure head
Raising a greening lawn out of the wave,
Testify that the Gods are blessing my course:
As with their flavor and your worthy help.

Then, as a just reward for this remarkable achievement,
I will gild your wheel; and the rolling globe

Let your immortal feet tread on the ground.