transcribed from the Manly P Hall collection
Take, in the name of God, of the purest Mercury sublimate, sublimed three or four times, and revive it with an equal weight of quicklime and half as much crude tartar, distilling your quicksilver over her retort.
If it should not prove perfectly pure, bright like the firmament, purify it further by washing it with sea salt & vinegar, and with water. then dry it and strain it through leather.
Take of this pure mercury 3 parts, and of fine, pure gold in leaves 1 part: put them together into a glass mortar and grind them well together for as long time until the whole is become a soft āāā. [n.b. symbol for Amalgam]
When you have done this (in a warm glass mortar) then add nine parts more of your purified mercury and put all into such a vessel as you have seen with me. Put the āāā at the bottom and pour the remaining mercury upon it. Place the glass in sifted ashes so that the globular part may be buried in them.
Place the whole in a moderate heat and let the old man (☉) sweat in the bath until the, at first, visible ☿ disappears, and the hidden [sulphur symbol] (of the ☉) becomes manifest in black, white & red. And all this is but one labour, one regimen, one vessel and one oven.
If your warmth is sufficiently moderate in 40 days there will appear on the top a blackness resembling pitch, which is the caput corvi and the mercury of the wise. God be praised and thanked! Amen.
Absolved by me Johannes Gier, born at Rodenbergen (in Holland),
but at present living in Cologne, in the year of our Lord
1512.
Finis.
Quote of the Day
“When this mass is thus blackened, it is said to be dead and deprived of its Form: The Body is also said to be dead and removed from its attraction, its Soul being separated from it. Then Humidity manifests itself in the color of Quicksilver, black and stinking, which before was dry, white, very fragrant, ardent, purified of Sulfur by the first Operation and it is necessary to start purifying it again by this second Operation. This Body finds itself deprived of its Soul which it has lost, of its splendor and of this marvelous lucidity which it first had and now it is black and ugly: which causes Gebert to name it for its property Stinking Spirit, Black White occultly and obviously red and still Water, living dry. This Mass thus black or blackened is the Key, the beginning, and the sign of a perfect way of operating in the second Regime of our precious Stone. So Hermes, he said, seeing this blackness: Believe that you have operated in the right way.”
Bernard Trevisan
Verbum Dismissum
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