TREATY OF HARMONY AND GENERAL CONSTITUTION OF TRUE SALT

SECRET OF THE PHILOSOPHERS, AND OF THE UNIVERSAL SPIRIT OF THE WORLD

FOLLOWING THE THIRD COSMOPOLITAN PRINCIPLE.

work no less curious than profitable, dealing with the knowledge of true chemical medicine.


Collected by the sieur de NUISEMENT Receiver General of the County of Ligny en Barrois.

IN THE HAGUE
From the printing press of Théodore Maire .
M.DC.XXXIX.

By Mr. Clovis Hesteau de Nuysement.




A VERY HIGH, VERY POWERFUL, AND VERY VIRTUOUS PRINCE ,

Monsignor the Duke of Lorraine and Bar, etc.

who, judging him by his entrance, considered him a dream made for pleasure. Those by impatience, and those by inconsiderate contempt, unfortunately deprived themselves of the usufruct of this inestimable treasure: and made us partakers of their damage without this new Hercules, who passing the Archeron and the Cocith went in spite of Cerberus pull him out of the black river of oblivion, into which ignorance and envy had precipitated him. He therefore brought it back to us moist and dripping from this long shipwreck, and restored it to such luster by the brilliance of the precious stones with which he enriched it, that among the creation of the world one clearly sees there sparkle so many brilliant rays of the secrets wonders of God and Nature, that this first ignorantly aborted obscurity, and this faintly esteemed abhot fabulous are today admired and cherished by all: to see confessed of the most enlightened as pleasant and mysterious as if they had been produced by one of the Prophets: giving cause to many to add faith to the historians who hold that Hermes was the father-in-law of Moses named Gétro, and that divinely inspired in all things more hidden, he taught him the Kabbalah, and the occult Philosophy to his sister Mary, called the prophetess, of whom there remains to us as an irreproachable witness certain fragment, which all those who have written of the truth of this Art, reverently allege.

And it seems that most still want to assure us that it was he who, after the flood, entering the valley of Ebron found the seven marble tables, on which had been carved by the first sages the principles of the seven liberal arts, in order lest they perish with them: and that, having alone a perfect intelligence, he taught them to the people, and gave them that clarity which still enlightens us today. The dream of Scipio, that of Poliphile, and of Plato's Lisias, notwithstanding this title, brought as much praise to these authors as all their ancient writings: and were no less esteemed for invention than the work. Considering that to treat with dignity such lofty matters it is very necessary that the soul escaping from its prison go freely to visit the supreme regions, and to confer with its fellows: which it could not do, always having at its feet the importunate against weight of this landmass, which she shakes and leaves as the graceful spells of body-aggravating sleep leave the doors open to her. Now it was this powerful Athlete (Monseigneur) who first opened to me the strong barrier which defends the entrance to this ample Philosophical list, where so many valiant champions have run and debated the price offered by the three great Mercurys. And who obliged me to follow his steps (although slowly and from an infinite distance) by the encouragement and the precepts that in favor of the Prince to whom I had the honor to be; he deigned to give me from my youth; after having made me, by his humanity, not common to those of his rank, partaker of what he held most dear; communicating to me works without paragon, and designs that smacked of nothing human. If by chance he is therefore noticed in this bouquet, from which he presents your Highness, a few flowers from his parterre, he must be forgiven me; since Plato himself, to whom we give the nickname of divine, was not aware of displaying as his own in the eyes of his posterity the sacred relics which he had looted in the temple of Socrates. And then one must also accept for a legitimate excuse, that my purpose is so concatenated and dependent on his, that if death had had eyes and judgment to see and consider the wrong it was doing to mortals to extinguish them before the time such a beautiful and useful light, or that the wishes and the clamors of curious scholars could have bent the impity of this indefatigable deaf person, and still obtained for her some respite; it is indubitable that he had with the same hand enshrined in the Gold of his second mine, the rich tablet of emerald in which this old Egyptian Philosopher, in imitation of his wise predecessors, engraved the double mystery, or the unique two-way mystery, which the Hortulain and some others have entirely applied to the effect of their metallic transmutations: as I have endeavored to tie him with an indissoluble knot to his Pimandre; with whom he has so much conformity and sympathy, that they seem to have been composed for each other.

For if the first deals with the Creation of the universe, the second naively depicts the Universal Spirit which gives life and movement to all the members of this great body. General Spirit to which are occultly enclosed the living seeds of the three genera: from which all things are produced in the world: by which they grow, persist, and multiply: and in which they must all be reduced when they have reached the limit that Nature sets them. has planted. All that I must more accurately apprehend, Monsignor, this is the reproach that your Highness can make of me for using his greatness and his name so recklessly to protect my labors, unworthy of so illustrious Patron. And that I should at least content myself with having audaciously profaned them once by placing them at the front of the verses which I will present to you some time ago; without once again abusing your august patience. But I am resolved to say to whoever would blame me for it, and were your Highness even, that I would much rather be considered insolent than the desire that I have to acquit myself in any way of what I owe to your generous generosity, than to deprive me of the continuation of your benefits by a cowardly and shameful act of ingratitude. Apart from the fact that it is my destiny which naturally carries me: for Heaven gave birth to me only to die,

My lord,

Your very humble, very obedient, and much obliged servant, De Nuisement .

---

Preface.

I do not doubt that this book arriving in public will be rejected by many, and received by few: for human minds being commonly offended by the fog of ignorance, and the multitude of the blind greatly exceeding the number of the clairvoyant, the rarest sciences have always been the least known and the most despised; either by negligence, or by greed for gain, preferring the useful to the honest. So that such people, believing that they were born to have, not to know, devote themselves entirely to the pursuit of lucre; and differs very little from animals which care only for food. But if they sometimes returned to themselves, illuminated by this divine ray of knowledge, they would find that food is given to them for the support of life; and life to employ themselves in the inquisition of truth for the respect of which they are endowed with ratiocination.

Foreseeing therefore that the same cause which bastardizes them, and causes them to degenerate from the glorious destiny of their birth, might produce a contempt of this mine labor, to see some ray of Chemical Art sparkle therein, (although that is not my aim) but because I dare to undertake to decipher what the thrice-great Hermes taught so covertly in his table, that several excellent minds found themselves confused there, I wanted by this Preface to admonish the curious that they do not seek here the Golden Fleece, or the apples of the Hesperides: But only a naive description of the first principles of Nature; in whose rich bosom lie all the treasures of the world. Truly priceless treasures; and exceeding by an extreme distance all that the vulgar admire and idolize the most.

That if it happens that some leave this book and become disgusted with it, to abhor Chemical things; Neither he nor I can deserve the blame, since the appetites are different; And let their palates impregnated with the dregs of a popular error prevent them from savoring these exquisite meats: which, on the contrary, are the dearest delights of fine understandings; who will willingly confess that man does not absolutely deserve the title of Scientist, if he is not a Chemist: because the natural principles, nor the true universal matter, will never be perceived except by the experience of the Chemical Art: as this father of the Philosophers has clearly declared; when having shown by whom, how, and of what is made the first subject of things, (that is to say, this general Spirit of the World), by what means it is embodied and specified in various forms and genera: and how from him everything low and high arises, perfects, maintains, and increases; it still opens the way for the wise to enter by a deep consideration of the secret effects of nature into the research and invention of the means by which, with the aid of fire, they can achieve the perfect mondification of this spirit infused in all the body ; to extract a very pure essence, capable of producing incredible effects; and as infinite in wonders as in number.

What I do not say here to try to move men to cherish my opinion, although they must not rashly reject it, without seeing if I speak with probable reasons, supported by ancient authorities. It is therefore to those who, separated from the vulgar, have some feeling for true Philosophy, that I entrust the judgment of this labor, and to whom I dedicate this fruit, if they can gather any from it.

---

His Highness.
Prince, whose beautiful august and magnificent soul;
In all its movements shines its splendor:
Splendor that serves as a luster to illustrious candor,
Who prepares a seat for him in the Angelic conclave;
Deign to see this portrait where with a rustic hand
I painted the immense Spirit of the lower world;
Which produces in the center, and on the exterior,
Three different genres, whose essence is unique.
I would have hidden my shame by veiling my picture;
But I fear your eyes; penetrating the curtain,
Disdained in me the cunning of Timanthe.
Grand Duke, be like the divinity;
Excuse the faults of my debility;
It is my everything, and my best, that to my everything I present.

—–

COMMENT
or exhibition of the Hermès Trimégiste table. Dealing with the general spirit of the world. The text of which table is contained in the sonnet below.

Sonnet.
It is a sure point full of admiration,
That up and down are one and the same thing:
That to make one in everyone enclosed,
Wonderful effects by adaptation.
Of one alone mediated it all,
And for parents, womb and nurse, we ask her
Phoebus, Diana, air and earth, where rests
That thing in which lies all perfection.
If we turn it into earth, it has full force:
Separating by great art, but easy way,
The subtle of the thick, and the land of fire.
From earth it ascends to heaven; and then on the ground,
From Heaven she descends, Receiving little by little,
The virtues of both that she encloses in her womb.

—–

SONNETS CONTAINERS
The arguments of this book.
Of the adaptation of things Divine, Natural and Artificial.
Sonnet.
God, Nature and Art, Incomparable Triad,
Ravish every mind in admiration
Of design, of labor, of perfection,
Where shines the incredible power of Tous Trois
Although in his high plans God is inimitable,
Nature in her progress follows her intention:
And then the Art that adds to the simple action,
Makes you admire Nature and makes yourself admirable.
Who contemplates, and understands, with deep judgment,
God, Nature and Art see and know how they do
Ordering, producing, and perfecting things:
For God, Nature and Art, of a divine Triangle,
Are the beginning, the middle and the end,
Of all ; holding in them all the virtues enclosed.


—–

DESCRIPTION
Of the universal Spirit of the world.
Sonnet.
He is a first spirit body of Nature;
Very common, very hidden, very vile, very valuable
Preserving, destroying, good and malicious:
Beginning and end of any creature.
Triple in substance it is, of salt, oil, and pure water;
Which coagulates, gathers and waters in low places
All par dry, unctuous, and moist; from the high heavens
Able to receive any shape and figure.
The only Art by Nature, in our eyes, shows it:
It conceals in its center an infinite power;
Garnished with the faculties of Heaven and Earth.
He is Hermaphrodite; and gives increase
Asset where it mixes indifferently;
With reason that in itself all germs it encloses.

—–

THAT THE WORLD IS

Full of the Spirit by which all things live.
Sonnet.
This great body, of the great first creature God,
Was filled with a Spirit from the beginning,
Omniform in seed; and lively in motion,
Of which he animates everything, and brings everything to light.
Of the earth and the Heavens it is the nourishing soul;
And of all that lives in them alike.
On earth it is vaporous, in heaven fire properly;
Triple in a substance and first matter.
For from three, and in three, by Nature comes,
And returns every body, whose balm it contains;
Originating from the Sun and the Moon.
Through the air it sprouts below, and searches for the top:
The earth nourishes it within its warm belly:
And of the perfections he is the common cause.

—–




CORPORATE
Of the General Spirit in all things: and of the preservation of celestial and terrestrial virtues in it.
Sonnet.
Ethereal globes full of vigorous fire,
From a restless wheel the influence descends
On the body of the earth, and animal ardor
Pierces her great porous belly on all sides.
This belly then fills with another vaporous fire,
Unceasingly fueled by a radical mood,
Which in these wide flanks takes on a body of mineral water,
By the concoction of its warm fire.
This coagulable water engendering all things,
Pure land becomes, which in itself holds enclosed
By very firm union the virtues of the high Heavens.
And all the more so as indeed are conjoined in it
And earth, and Heaven; of the beautiful name I call it,
Of terrified Heaven, most worthy and precious.

—–

OF THE RISE OF THIS
General Spirit in Heaven, and of its descent into earth: and of the conformity of the two great purifiers, Divine and Natural.
Sonnet.
This great God who has everything gives and keeps life,
Established as a remedy for souls and bodies
Two purifiers of all ords defilements,
Whose corruption to vice invites them.
The evils of both he provides and obviates,
Opening to them treasures from earth and heaven:
Very sovereign treasures against hard efforts
What does envious death do to soul and body.
They are the two authors of the restorations;
Having earth and heaven participation;
For the extremities average alliance.
That's why both are from Heaven swept down
Down in the earth and in Heaven once more flew back;
To come back down to earth with full power.

—–

STRENGTHS OF THIS ART
Universal spirit, both in the limbo of its Chaos and in special bodies.
Sonnet.
In the general Spirit containing the seed
As much of death as of life, it is necessary to consider
Double strength and double admiration
By juice or by venom, double in essence.
The double juice maintains all bodies by its presence,
The double venom also makes everyone consume:
Preserving, destroying, with sweet and bitter salt,
Of a benign virtue, or of bitter vehemence.
These are his faculties before he was hatched
Of the filthiness of its limb and Chaos;
Having same effects pulled off on land.
But when he received the separation
Juice and venom by preparation,
When all good, all evil, he makes mortal war.

—–

OF SEPARATIONS FROM
The pure substance, from with accidental impurities. And by what means are such separations made in all things.
Sonnet.
As for the ornament of the indigestible mass
Nature usa first of separation:
Thus any Art which aims at perfection,
Must follow this rule and manifest trail.
The substance has for all the excrement that infects it
Either by terrestrial silt or by adustion,
But art by enema or calcination,
Using water, or fire, banishes this plague.
Only the art industry can separate
And by new life after regenerate
All in all; from every vice exempting the pure soul.
Who understands well the art of using water and fire,
Knows the two true paths that rise little by little
At the highest of the secrets of all Nature.

—–

To the reader.

On the figure of the general Spirit of the world.

He is a part in man,
Whose six-letter consonant name;
To which an adding P,
Then S in M ​​swapping;
You will find without any hesitation,
The real name of the subject of sages.

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TREATY OF THE TRUE SECRET SALT OF THE PHILOSOPHERS,
and of the Universal Spirit of the World.

BOOK I.

That the world is lively, and full of life.
CHAPTER I.

Since I have undertaken to treat of the Spirit of the World it is necessary that I face to recognize how the World is full of life: for besides that Nature does not spiritualize anything that she does not vivify it: and that the world consists of continual and indeficient alterations of forms, which cannot be made without vital movement; if do we still see this Nature, as well as most fruitful and caring Mother, embracing and nurturing this world; giving each of its members a sufficient portion of life. So that there is nothing in the whole Universe that it does not try to render animating; because it cannot be idle, thus remains always rendered and attentive to its action, which is to vivify. Now this great body is agitated and provided with restless movement: and this movement cannot be done without the vital spirit: for what is lifeless is necessarily motionless; not from place to place, by violent and forced movement; but from deprivation to form, or to put it more clearly, from imperfection to perfection. The vegetation to plants, and the concretion to stones, advance with movement, which is done by the infusion of this soul agitating this great mass, by means of certain radical and nourishing Spirit: the source and Mining of which is seated at the center of the earth, great ancestress of all things; so that from there come and extend through the whole body (as from the heart) all the vital functions.

Now this root and mine is enclosed in the ancient bosom of old Gemogorgon, universal progenitor whom the ancient poets, very diligent inquisitors of natural secrets, ingeniously depicted dressed in a green cape, enveloped in ferruginous rust, covered with dark darkness, and nourishing all sorts of animals: in whose belly the virtues of the celestial globes incessantly flow, penetrating the sides of the earth, which they fatten with all sorts of species omniform. Where similarly the elementary qualities and forces come to serve this old Father, as producer and specifier of all things perpetually embesong in the dispensation of specific forms by means of his Iliaste (Iliaste and the provider who provides the materials for the generations), and to the excitation of the vital heat, by its Archeus (Archaeus is the fire or natural heat which digests and acts on the said matters). Which Iliast and Archeus are like the two tools of the formation, conservation, and increase of things. covered with obscure darkness, and nourishing all sorts of animals: in whose belly the virtues of the celestial globes incessantly flow, penetrating the sides of the earth, which they engross with all sorts of omniform species.

Where similarly the elementary qualities and forces come to serve this old Father, as producer and specifier of all things perpetually embesong in the dispensation of specific forms by means of his Iliaste (Iliaste and the provider who provides the materials for the generations), and to the excitation of the vital heat, by its Archeus (Archaeus is the fire or natural heat which digests and acts on the said matters). Which Iliast and Archeus are like the two tools of the formation, conservation, and increase of things. covered with obscure darkness, and nourishing all sorts of animals: in whose belly the virtues of the celestial globes incessantly flow, penetrating the sides of the earth, which they engross with all sorts of omniform species. Where similarly the elementary qualities and forces come to serve this old Father, as producer and specifier of all things perpetually embesong in the dispensation of specific forms by means of his Iliaste (Iliaste and the provider who provides the materials for the generations), and to the excitation of the vital heat, by its Archeus (Archaeus is the fire or natural heat which digests and acts on the said matters).

Which Iliast and Archeus are like the two tools of the formation, conservation, and increase of things. and nourishing all sorts of animals: in whose belly the virtues of the celestial globes incessantly flow, penetrating the sides of the earth, which they enlarge with all sorts of omniform species. Where similarly the elementary qualities and forces come to serve this old Father, as producer and specifier of all things perpetually embesong in the dispensation of specific forms by means of his Iliaste (Iliaste and the provider who provides the materials for the generations), and to the excitation of the vital heat, by its Archeus (Archaeus is the fire or natural heat which digests and acts on the said matters). Which Iliast and Archeus are like the two tools of the formation, conservation, and increase of things. and nourishing all sorts of animals: in whose belly the virtues of the celestial globes incessantly flow, penetrating the sides of the earth, which they enlarge with all sorts of omniform species.

Where similarly the elementary qualities and forces come to serve this old Father, as producer and specifier of all things perpetually embesong in the dispensation of specific forms by means of his Iliaste (Iliaste and the provider who provides the materials for the generations), and to the excitation of the vital heat, by its Archeus (Archaeus is the fire or natural heat which digests and acts on the said matters). Which Iliast and Archeus are like the two tools of the formation, conservation, and increase of things. penetrating the sides of the earth, which they enlarge with all sorts of omniform species. Where similarly the elementary qualities and forces come to serve this old Father, as producer and specifier of all things perpetually embesong in the dispensation of specific forms by means of his Iliaste (Iliaste and the provider who provides the materials for the generations), and to the excitation of the vital heat, by its Archeus (Archaeus is the fire or natural heat which digests and acts on the said matters). Which Iliast and Archeus are like the two tools of the formation, conservation, and increase of things. penetrating the sides of the earth, which they enlarge with all sorts of omniform species. Where similarly the elementary qualities and forces come to serve this old Father, as producer and specifier of all things perpetually embesong in the dispensation of specific forms by means of his Iliaste (Iliaste and the provider who provides the materials for the generations), and to the excitation of the vital heat, by its Archeus (Archaeus is the fire or natural heat which digests and acts on the said matters). Which Iliast and Archeus are like the two tools of the formation, conservation, and increase of things.

This Demogorgon is he with whom the mediation is thought of God has produced all that is created in the heavens and under the heavens: so that by admirable adaptation unknown to the vulgar Philosophers, and reserved by them for occult causes, containing in itself his Iliast, and his Archeus, he forms and engenders all; then nourishes and preserves what it engenders: performing everywhere the office of bursar and dispenser; establishing the magazine of its ammunition in the middle of the bowels of the earth, from which it draws and sends life and vigor to all that it produces, from the center to the circumference.
The earth, then, as a receptacle of the superior influences and virtues, has within itself the fountain of this vital soul, from the offspring of which flows to animals, minerals and plants the benefit of life, which gives them feeling, essence, and vegetation, according to that it finds obedient matter, and disposed to movement. Hence it is that animals composed of a mass more flexible and easy to move, smell, and vegetate; and for this cause easily engender their fellows, as endowed with sensitive and vegetative life. But the plants, and all germinating things, of which the Spirit is not stopped by the assembly of a matter at all filthy and hard, grow and increase, provided with the only vegetative life: and go to generate their similar by seed or translation: But not in the way of animals.

Minerals have neither the sensitive nor vegetative faculty, and live only an essential life; especially since their composition is harder than that of animals and plants; and their dirtier and grosser matter, which hinders and restricts too much this spirit which vivifies them, and by this means are prevented from being able to produce their like, if first purged of their gross impurity, they are not resolved in the subtlety of their first matter. Let's see what Augurel, excellent Philosophers and Latin Poet, has to say about it, if first purged of their gross impurity, they are not resolved into the subtlety of their first matter. Let's see what Augurel, excellent Philosophers and Latin Poet, has to say about it, if first purged of their gross impurity, they are not resolved into the subtlety of their first matter. Let us see what Augurel, excellent Philosophers and Latin Poet, has to say about it,

But everyone will eventually believe
That the Metals live secretly,
And that of life they have the strength and place
Divinely, as a gift from God.
And what makes these valuable Metals,
Don't seem to breed their kind
Even less be so virtuous
To convert other things into them:
It is that the Spirit who gives whole life
Is prevented from too heavy material:

And has no power to show virtue
With which nature richly clothed him,
If human industry and living virtue
Do not make room for him, for the end that he lives:
And if the worker extracting it does not try
Thick material that hides it.

So then, no longer being impure and coarse minerals, they will generate by the specific form introduced into them, not their fellows, but in their fellows an alteration and perfection such as is attributed to this much sought-after Elixir: that the wise admire for its divine virtues, and whom fools despise, for not being able with their fascinated eyes to penetrate to the center of its marvels. If, then, the animals, minerals, and plants, which hold most of this visible world, are full of life, what would be the appearance of believing that the whole was poorer than its parts? What will be known even more true to the things of the superlunar world; for the celestial globes influencing life to the lower bodies, it is very necessary that they first received it from this universal soul, since one cannot give what one does not have.

Even it is said that the air, and earth and skies
And from the sea the great spacious tower
Are internally excited
Of a lively soul, and generally
That by this soul all things have life
That we see below the enclosed sky,
And what is more, that by such a soul
The world lives, and its vigor derives from it.

But movement (I mean natural) is always accompanied by life: how then will he produce in others both life and movement who has neither movement nor life in himself? Movement never abandons what life has not yet abandoned: and what is always agitated and moving cannot be considered lifeless. The self-moving soul of the universe, and source and origin of all bodily movement, being the ordinary companion of the body, which causes the very subtle part of this soul of the world seeking the high, and dwelling above, with a continual spinning wheel turns with the celestial globes, which it drives with a clean and endless motion orbicularly: and for this cause all superior things are more vital, perfect, and partakers of immortality, than other inferior ones: because that which is endowed with an unfailing life, must necessarily be agitated with a movement returning to itself.

And thus, that which is moved without end is consequently endowed with perpetual and indeterminable life. It therefore appears for these reasons that the universal world is universally filled with life. So much so that the life of each individual species is only a life of the world; which alone can truly be called animal. In whose corporeal elements are enclosed the occult seeds of all visible and corporeal things. For we see several bodies being born without express previous seeds; like plants, and without conjunction of male and female; Like certain animals born of corruption. It therefore appears for these reasons that the universal world is universally filled with life. So much so that the life of each individual species is only a life of the world; which alone can truly be called animal. In whose corporeal elements are enclosed the occult seeds of all visible and corporeal things. For we see several bodies being born without express previous seeds; like plants, and without conjunction of male and female; Like certain animals born of corruption.

It therefore appears for these reasons that the universal world is universally filled with life. So much so that the life of each individual species is only a life of the world; which alone can truly be called animal. In whose corporeal elements are enclosed the occult seeds of all visible and corporeal things. For we see several bodies being born without express previous seeds; like plants, and without conjunction of male and female; Like certain animals born of corruption. For we see several bodies being born without express previous seeds; like plants, and without conjunction of male and female; Like certain animals born of corruption. For we see several bodies being born without express previous seeds; like plants, and without conjunction of male and female; Like certain animals born of corruption.

The seeds of plants are visible down to the grain: and that of animals up to the progeny. The Metals likewise have their seed; but it cannot be seen except by true Philosophers who know how to extract it from its proper place with great Art: and can it be much rather conjectured by reason, than perceived with bodily eyes. Only if in the elements were not occultly contained a certain secret producing virtue, in which lies potentially a faculty of generating; many grasses would not spring from the ground, nor even from higher walls, than were ever sown or planted there, and of which no one had knowledge before. And so many different animals would not be generated in the earth, and in the water, without previous copulation of the sexes, which nevertheless grow; and then by commixtion of male and female produce their like in the perpetuity of their species; though begotten by such assembly of parents. This is sufficiently experienced by the generation of eels, produced from silt: and flies, or beasts which are seen to be born from the excrement of other animals.

Of what life will it be said that oysters, sponges, and several aquatic things live, which better deserve the name of plant-animals than that of fish?
Now all these bodies do not live so much of a life which is properly particular to them, as of that of the universe, which is general and common: which appears much more vigorous on earth to more subtle bodies, as being nearer to the universal soul of the world; than in those which are coarser, or more distant from it.

The World, therefore, having been created good by him who is goodness itself, is not only corporeal, but also partakes of intelligence; (for it is full of omniform ideas) and as I have already said, it has no member or part which is not vital. For this cause the sages said it to be animal; everywhere male and female; and unite by mutual love and conjunction to its members; so covetous and greedy is he for marriage and the liaisons of his parties. From there, by a translation, comes the diversity of the sexes to the plants, and to the animals, which coupling together, following the example of the world, engender their fellows; no other than the world itself which of itself produces an infinity of other small worlds. For as much as in the world there are engendered bodies, so many are these microcosms: since there is no body, or the parts, virtues, and qualities of small worlds are distinctly noticed.

So that a like produces its like willingly, by adaptation of action and passion: which cannot truly be done without being full of life. For what generation could proceed from a subject that would be considered dead? being neither probable nor possible that what has no life can give it to some other. We often see that without coupling of male and female, or even without one or the other, several things are engendered, to which by natural fomentation life is inspired, from the life of the universe: like some artificially hatch chickens, without the hen having brooded the eggs. And others prepare certain materials, and cause them to putrefy, from which strange animals are engendered, like Basil from an egg da Coq, or from the menses of a red-haired woman: the Scorpion, from the herb called Basil: from the entrails of an ox the honey fly: from the branches or leaves of a certain tree falling in the sea, a species of duck-like birds: and so many other things unknown to us and our world, more worthy of admiration than credence, for being out of the common train of nature, drawing life from this life universal to certain matters, e, certain time and certain place: so full is the world of worrying vivacity, and always in vital action. So that nothing dies in him, but rather than remaining without acting, and consequently without life, he incessantly remakes from one thing to another: and there is no body which annihilates itself or perishes totally. For if it were so, all the parts of the world one after the other, and little by little, would vanish from our eyes, even for so many centuries, and so much change, I don't know if there would be any remnant today. On this subject certain Poet, not ignorant in this secret philosophy, speaking in the eyes of his mistress, says to them,

Your uneven aspect which changes my fortune,
Is like the Sun, contrary in its effects,
Which softens the wax, and hardens the mire,
And makes new bodies of those he has defeated.


—–


That the World since it lives, has Spirit, Soul, and Body.

CHAPTER II.

The body of the world is familiarly known by the senses, but in it lies a hidden spirit, and in that spirit a soul, which can only be mated to the body by means of it, for the body is gross, and the very subtle soul; distant from bodily qualities, from a long distance. There is therefore need for this coupling, of a third party which is a participant in the Nature of the two, and which is spirit-body, because the extremities can only be assembled by the connection of some mediator, having such affinity for one. and to the other, that each one can meet her own nature there. Heaven is high, Earth is low: one is pure, the other is corrupt. How then could one elevate and join this heavy corruption to this agile purity, without a means participating in both?

God is infinitely pure and clean: men are extremely impure and stained with sins: The reconciliation and rapprochement of which with God could never happen without the intermediary of Jesus Christ, who truly God and man was the true lover. In the same way, in the machine of the universe this spirit body, or spiritual body, is like common agent, or cement of the conjunction of the soul with the body. Which soul is in the spirit and body of the world a bait and enticement of the divine intelligence: for this intelligence is quite clearly perceived there by effective elevations, renovations, mutations, variations, and multiplications of forms, which can only proceed from divine intelligence, and not matter, which of itself is brute, and cannot cause any intelligent nature, to form and specify things. The world is therefore nourished by this spirit, and agitated by the soul infused into him by means of that very spirit.

What Virgil, following the doctrine of Plato, naively depicted in these verses.

The sky strewn with fires, the earth, and puts floating,
The gleaming Stars, and the shining Moon,
By an internal spirit are all powered,
And the vivacity of a soul on all sides,
By the infused members moves the whole mass
And mingles with the great body that both embrace.
Augurel in his imitation.
Since it is therefore well assured
That in the body of the world is the soul incorporated;
Believe it fits that in the middle of these two
There lies a mighty and vigorous spirit,
Who must neither body nor soul say;
But which of the two participates, and reduce
Only these two extremities can be one,
By its effects in all very limited.

That all that has essence and life, is made by the Spirit of the world: And of the first matter.

CHAPTER III.

Things are nourished by what they are made of. It is seen that everything breathes, lives, grows, and is nourished by this spirit infused into the world: it dissolves and dies in it failing. It follows therefore that everything is made of him; which is nothing but a simple subtle essence, which philosophers call quint, because it can be separated from bodies as from a filthy and coarse matter, and from the superfluity of the four elements: and when it has marvelous operations. Now it is infused by all parts of the world, and by it the virtue of the soul expands and becomes vigorous: Which virtue is chiefly poured out and given to bodies which have more attracted and partaken of this Spirit, being sent and flowed from above, namely the Sun, which truly produces the quality of matter in essence: So much so that this spirit heated by the action of the Sun, acquires great abundance of life, multiplying and vivifying the seeds of all things, which grow and increase up to the determined magnitude, according to the species and form of the thing. For this cause Virgil truly said:

That igneous and celestial vigor originated
Is in every seed, and in it dominates.

This spirit therefore (by the philosophers is called Mercury) because it is multiform, see omniform, making, the production of all bodies, enlarges a life to some clearer and incorruptible, and to others more confused, and subject to corruption and default; according to the predisposition of the material. Thus this fiery vigor which comes from the solar rays is not all one in everything and everywhere, but is diversified according to the more or less which is at the seed of things. All matters, therefore, of clearer and purer predisposition have the spirit and the life more durable and incorruptible: for all things willingly delighting in their fellows, it is fitting that this celestial heat which is very pure, enters and penetrates bodies. as much and deeper as they are purer, and makes them more enduring, vital,

The proof of this is shown in gold, which being the cleanest and purest of all earthly bodies, partakes most of that celestial heat and fire, which piercing the earth finds at the mines gold matters predisposed, to namely its Mercury, and its Sulphur, (which Ezra calls powder) prepared according to the power of the action and diligence of nature, by purifying and separating from all earthly filth and starches full of adustion. Which materials are at the beginning a sperm or a water mixed with this very pure powder or sulphur, which little by little helped by its own coagulating virtue thickens and hardens by the long action of a continued heat. So long as it is at last brought to its perfection, which is simple in nature, and tinged with an igneous color: for verily heat is the mother of tinctures. If it is therefore taken for certain that this heat comes from the Sun, who will be the enemy of truth and reason who wants to argue that the Sun is the author and father of perfection? so let's rise a little higher, and find out exactly how it can be done.

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How the Sun is said by Hermes father of the Spirit of the world, and of Matter.
CHAPTER IV.

Myis (someone will tell me) since all things proceed from the same matter, how can it be that the Sun is the father of matter, seeing that from it it was itself created? To answer this question it must be understood that if we look at this primary and preiacent matter of all things we will find it invisible, and which can only be understood by deep and lively imagination: from the Sun and vital fire of which, in it naturally innate , the celestial Sun came out and rose full of light and of similar igneous vigor, which deploying afterwards this internal and essential heat, accompanied by this natural heat, spreads the rays of its fire through all the roundness of the world; illuminating the stars above, and vivifying all things below.

Now, because the earth is like the common matrix of all things, the Sun acts mainly in it as the receptacle of all influences: within which are hidden the seeds of all things, which are agitated and carried by the heat of the solar rays. come out in light. This is why we see in Winter when the Sun has moved away from us, that the earth languishing by the deprivation of the perpendicular rays of it, and by this means devoid of sufficient heat, remains sterile: but when at the renewal the Sun rises upon us by its ordinary way, then it regains life and vigor as though resuscitated. The only cause of this change is that spirit of the universe, very full of soul and life, dwelling principally in the earth. Who before he can beget must necessarily dwell and abide in some body, namely in the earth, which is like the body of all bodies. And because all things are fed and nourished by what they are made of, this spirit is very animated by the Sun, and for this reason the ancient sages did not say without reason that the Sun comes in Spring to warm and revive its aggravated father of old age, and languishing half dead, by the coldness of Winter.

Since therefore he is strengthened and revivified by the Sun, it is not without reason that we say with Hermes that the Sun is his father without whom otherwise he would be ungenerate, and could neither grow nor multiply, and this all the more so. more than the influencing heat of the stars comes from the Sun and imprints the earth, which having conceived, engenders, extends, and multiplies this spiritual matter; bringing it from incorporeality to corporeality.

The Hortulain who commented on the table of Hermes abandoning the radical principles of nature, and descending to the particular principles of Alchemy, means by the Sun, the philosopher's gold, which he says is the father of the stone: what is right. For those enlightened in this art know by experience, and have learned it from all good authors (of whom the number is infinite) that in the true matter and subject of the stone are potentially gold and silver, and quicksilver in nature. Which gold and silver are better than those commonly seen and touched, because they are alive, and can vegetate and grow, and the common ones are dead. And if it were not so, matter would never reach the extreme perfection that art gives it. Which perfection is so great that it perfects imperfect metals almost miraculously, as Hermès says.

And yet this invisible gold and silver which by the magisterium are exalted in such a high degree, could not communicate this perfection to the imperfect, without the ministry of vulgar gold and silver. This is why the Masters join them there to the fermentation: thus gold is always father of the Elixir. But it is necessary that those who will have a desire to confirm themselves in this truth apply themselves to reading the good books: because it is not my intention to speak of it here more: because I claim to make known only that the divine Hermes has from one and the same must wanted to touch both strings; as he sufficiently declares when he says that he is called Mercury thrice great, as having the three parts of everyone's sapience: meaning that having anatomized that general spirit, which is the material author and principle of three genres, who are the whole of this great world, he had universal sapience and science, by which nothing was more unknown to him. After having also said from the beginning; and as all things proceed from one through the mediation of one, so all things are born of this one thing by adaptation. Now this one from which all things proceed is the general Spirit of which I wish to treat: : which is procreated by Nature in the earth from this first general matter : or universal spirit : which spirit containing in itself all the celestial virtues in power, has communicated to this mineral matter as much as was necessary to give it being perfect for which it was intended.

So resuming my first wanderings, and moving away from the Chemical paths as far as the subject will allow me, I will say that this general spirit is the stone, and the Elixir, that nature has composed, and of which she perpetrates all her miracles. , much more worthy of admiration than those of the Chemical stone, to which it is only enlarged by this very Spirit, to act in its fellow-man; in order to introduce into it what was debilitating to it: For being truly metallic, purified and accomplished by art, it purifies and accomplishes the impure metals which have remained imperfect, through lack of digestion. But this physical stone perpetually reproduces the things which of them have already had a beginning, and at each moment creates new ones, as much in the animal, as in the vegetable, and mineral kind. What she could not do without the aid and favor of the celestial bodies, and especially of the Sun; source and principle of all virtues and generations. It therefore has the Sun for its father, and contains spiritual gold and silver, since it is the first matter of the first matter of corporeal gold and silver, and because the air is the means by which it receives the superior virtues, Hermès says that the wind carried him in his belly: for which reason Raymond Lully calls him Aerial Mercury. The first parent earth nourishes it in its fruitful bosom: which is proved by the production of all that comes out of the earth: for if this spirit were not enclosed therein, it would have neither the strength nor the power to engender and produce, being properly only the vessel or matrix of so many generations, and diverse productions. This general matter, to which is given the name of Mercury,

That if it be extracted from the womb of its nursing mother, then purged of all accidental superfluities, and prepared according to the art; Who will prevent it from separating from the bodies, to which it will be administered, the corrupting things which are dissimilar to it: and from preserving and multiplying what is in conformity with it? since all the celestial forces and worldly virtues concur in it together.

It is certain that the misinterpreted authors all seem to command or advise that one use metals alone to make metals: saying that in gold alone are the seeds of gold. Sentence, even Judgment without appeal. But besides what I have already said of the difference between vulgar metals, and those which they intend to be taken for their magisterium; yet I will take the audacity to affirm that without this general Spirit which is the only cause of vegetation in all things, this faculty of aurifying or silvering which is in these metallic bodies as vulgar as they are secret and occult, could neither vegetate nor achieve power indeed; especially since nature does not produce itself; and that in every operation there must be an agent and a matter capable of its action; and it is this fire of which Pontanus speaks that the sages have all hidden as the only key to their secrets, without which he has failed two hundred times (he says) in the operation on true matter.

This triple or supreme universal Mercury is therefore the first seed of all the metals, as well as of the two other genera: which coagulates and hardens little by little by the action of the continuous heat which is within the mines, and receives the tincture being perfectly purified. But it is specified in various kinds, and takes various forms and colors, according to the place and the adjacent matter: making metals, minerals, and stones within the earth; and all kinds of trees and plants on the surface; according as it is animated by the rays of the Sun; without which it will remain ungenerate: for from the beginning Nature has established this Law that the Sun should perpetually warm and nourish matter; so that his virtue, triply animal, vegetable and mineral, would be incessantly turned and brought to effect: and this is why Hermes writes that the Sun is his father.

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How the Moon is mother of the Spirit of the world and of universal matter.
CHAPTER V.

Louser to prevent us from being disappointed here, we must consider that as we have body and spirit, and soul; also to this great universe. Of which three parts not being found anything devoid of them, it is a necessary consequence that they are always associated together; so that one is never without the other, that if sometimes it seems that the two are separated from it, they are nevertheless hidden in the third that remains; as the subtle and profound artist would be able to know well, and to see in each body by the examination of fire. What therefore is matter is also spirit: and what is spirit may without impertinence be called body, in view of the fact that they are indivisible and engendered by the law of Nature to be one and the same thing: by that matter is not only body, soul or spirit,

When, therefore, we say that the Moon is the mother of spirit and universal matter, we are not speaking without apparent reason; and there is nothing absurd: But we must show where this motherhood comes from. Heat and temper are the two keys to any generation: heat performing the office of mass, and temper that of female: By the action of heat on moisture, corruption is first made; which is followed by the generation. This appears to the small vessel of an egg; in which the sperm putrefies by the heat of fomentation; then after the chicken coagulates and forms, the same happens in the generation of man, who is brought to a body accomplished in all its parts, by the joining together of two sperms, one masculine and the other feminine, inside the womb, using the woman's natural heat.
I call here corruption the change and passage from form to form, which cannot happen without the means of putrefaction, which is the true way of generation; which is procured and advanced by certain Mercury or quicksilver, as a special bearer and conductor of the vegetative virtue.

The seeds of all bodies are watery, as if full of the humor of their Mercury. That if their innate heat is drawn from potency in act by the external heat of the Sun, then by decoction the generation takes place. What made the ancient philosophers say that the Sun and man generate, namely the Sun, the terrestrial Sun, which is gold: and man, man, it is a manifest thing that fire elemental is as dead and ingenerable without the solar fire: which makes the Sun customarily called lord of life and generation. The heat therefore in all generation of things comes from the Sun; but the so-called radical humidity is fomented by the Lunar influence, which all things receive and feel, being altered and changed by the movements of this star, in its crescent or decline. This is why Hermes said that the Moon is the mother of universal matter, and the Sun its father; for the heat of the Sun and the humidity of the Moon engender all things, because heat and temper temper conceive, and from this conception everything is born and receives life. And though fire and water are contrary, yet one could not profit without the other, but by their diverse action everything is conceived and conceived.

So in the universe discord agrees

To the generations becomes fit and grants.

I want however to give this advantage to those who reading this chapter could make a hasty bad judgment of me, on what I withdraw the main intention of Hermes from the great Physical road to throw it on the path that I hold: knowing well that according to its precept all the good Philosophers want their Sun to be conjunct with their Moon, to make by their conjunction the necessary generation. For as Arnault de Villeneuve says in his flower of flowers, their sperm does not unite with their body, except by means of their Moon, and this Moon is not vulgar money, but the true matter of stone, which assembles in its womb, and retains inseparably the body, which is the Sun, and the sperm, which is Mercury. And it is of this Moon that he speaks in his new light,

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That the root of the Spirit of the world is in the air.
CHAPTER VI.

The vent is nothing but a moved and agitated air: as it is recognized by the breathing of animals, since breathing by the benefit of the air, they throw out wind. The wind, then, is air, and air is everywhere vital and the spiracle of life, since without air nothing can live: for what is deprived of it or suffocated with it dies immediately, and even plants which open and free become feeble and languishing in the respect of others.

We therefore say not in vain that air is vital spirit, traversing and penetrating everything, giving life and consistency to everything, binding, moving and filling all things. By which air begets and manifests that general spirit enclosed and hidden in all things: being imbued and engrossed by air which makes it more powerful to beget. So much so that Calid Jewish Philosopher had good reason to say that the mines of things have their roots in the air and their heads or summits in the ground. As if he were saying that the air causes this Spirit to vegetate, increase, and multiply its mine in the earth. Though experts in the preparation of the stone of the wise may say that Calid understands this passage otherwise: for according to the doctrine of all there are two parts in the work, the volatile one which rises in the form of vapour. , which resolves and condenses into water, which they call spirit, and the other more fixed, which remains at the bottom of the vessel, which they call body: taking this volatile part for air, as it is in truth, and fixes it for the earth. Rozinus wanted to explain this passage by another of the same author where he says: Take the things of their souls, and exalt them in high places; Reap them on their mountain tops, and put them back on their roots. Laglose says that these words are clear, true, without any boredom or ambiguity: and yet that he did not name the things he heard about. Now by the mountains (he says) the sage wanted to signify the pots or gourds, and by the summits of these the copes or stills:

To harvest, according to the similarity, is to raise the water of the aforesaid things in the vessel: to put back on the roots, is to allow the said water to fall back on the earth from which it came. Which is confirmed by Morien, when he says that the whole operation of the sages is nothing else but the extraction of water from the earth, and the putting back of the water on the earth, until as long as the earth rots: for this earth rots with this water, and is mundified, which being mundified by the help of God will direct and perfect the whole magisterium. Some speaking of the air have not put it in the rank of the other Elements, but have considered it as some glue or cement combining their various natures, even have held it for the spirit and the instrument of the world. , because it is the origin and bearer of our universal Spirit. For he soon conceives the influences of all celestial bodies, and communicating them to the other Elements and to the mixed bodies, it nevertheless receives and still retains, like a divine mirror, the species and forms of all natural things: which carrying with it, and entering through the pores of animals, it imprints them in them. , either awake or asleep. We learn from animals and plants that any spirit which is properly attached to the earth, takes its strength and virtue from the air, for we see them grow and rise above, so covetous is this spirit which gives them life. the air, as from the place of its own origin. Also said Hermes that the wind, that is to say the air, carried him in his belly. Aristotle agrees with this, saying that moist things are made of air, and terrestrial things of moist: for the air being very close to the body of the earth, it is moistened on all sides,

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How the Earth nurtures this Universal Spirit.
CHAPTER VII.


GOOD that this Spirit is infused and resides both in lower and higher things, yet it can be more obviously and easily seen and known in the nearer body. Now the closest and vegetal of all bodies is that of the earth. In it, therefore, it is engendered and manifests more, not without great reason: for the earth is like the white and the mound of all the celestial influences and superior virtues, in which all the stars release and launch their rays. She is also the foundation and base of all the elements, containing in herself the seeds and seminal virtues of all things, which is the cause of her being called the Common Mother of animals, vegetables, and minerals. Being therefore engrossed by the heavens and the other Elements, it produces all things from its womb.

Now let us tear this Spirit from it, let it be washed, separate it as much as you like; if we leave this earth thus stripped for some time in the air, it will be fattened and impregnated as before by the virtues and forces of heaven, again producing certain crystalline stones, and shining sparks: and this Spirit which we will think to be at all separated, will always regerminate. By which the impregnation made by the action of the heavens and the first qualities makes it continually generating, because from it comes all that is below the circle of the Moon. It produces all things that have life, preserves them, nourishes them, then finally resolves and transmutes them into itself. Now, being agitated by the aforesaid actions, she throws out double expirations both outside and within her: which expirations issue from this earthly Spirit, imprinted and heated by celestial heat. From the exhalation which rises out of this earth, if it be damp, will be engendered the drizzles or royées: and if it is dry, it will produce the winds, thunders, and other such dry impressions of the air. .

But of that which remains enclosed and constricted within it, should it be moist, will be made all liquefiable things, such as metals and minerals. And if, on the contrary, it is dry and arid, it will produce non-fusible things, like stones and other similar matters. Besides that, all vegetable things come from it, and receive food from this Spirit that the earth nourishes. This is why the ancient poets called this land great ancestor and nurse of all things. it will produce the winds, thunders, and other such dry impressions of the air. But of that which remains enclosed and constricted within it, should it be moist, will be made all liquefiable things, such as metals and minerals. And if, on the contrary, it is dry and arid, it will produce non-fusible things, like stones and other similar matters. Besides that, all vegetable things come from it, and receive food from this Spirit that the earth nourishes. This is why the ancient poets called this land great ancestor and nurse of all things. it will produce the winds, thunders, and other such dry impressions of the air. But of that which remains enclosed and constricted within it, should it be moist, will be made all liquefiable things, such as metals and minerals.

And if, on the contrary, it is dry and arid, it will produce non-fusible things, like stones and other similar matters. Besides that, all vegetable things come from it, and receive food from this Spirit that the earth nourishes. This is why the ancient poets called this land great ancestor and nurse of all things. it will produce non-fusible things, such as stones and other similar materials. Besides that, all vegetable things come from it, and receive food from this Spirit that the earth nourishes. This is why the ancient poets called this land great ancestor and nurse of all things. it will produce non-fusible things, such as stones and other similar materials. Besides that, all vegetable things come from it, and receive food from this Spirit that the earth nourishes. This is why the ancient poets called this land great ancestor and nurse of all things.

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That this Spirit of the world is the cause of perfection in everything.
CHAPTER VIII.

THEsprit of the universe is the general and common genus of all genera: for if we look at the lower or elementary world, we shall find it divided into three subalterns, viz., vegetable, animal, and mineral: however it is always one in everything, but it operates differently according to the diversity of the species. Hence comes this infinite variety of creatures: Otherwise there would have to be by necessity only one kind of thing in the whole universe. But if we look to the upper and heavenly world, we will also find that this Spirit there is one and the same in all: differing only in purification and subtlety. For of his pure igneous substance were made those celestial and far removed Spirits of inferior bodily thickness. And of the medium airy substance were composed the celestial globes, and their luminaries.

Now therefore he has made all things, because he has the virtues of things superior and inferior, because of his exquisite temperature, for this one body, among all, is the beginning and end of perfection: and if the virtues were wanting to him, he wouldn't perfect anything. Here, however, we call perfection simple and natural. By which being only perfect according to the intention of nature, containing in itself the rule, line, action and power of perfection, it nevertheless acquires so great force over natural things, that it attracts everything from power to action. , it alters everything: and penetrates everything, however thick it may be: softens hard things, hardens soft things: and finally increases, nourishes, and preserves everything.

This Spirit being therefore in all bodies, author of generation and corruption, is necessarily of triple operation, for by its dryness it vivifies, by its coldness it congeals, and by its temper it gathers and assembles. For this cause it has been given the name of triple, or triune earth, viz., vivifying, safuginous, and mercurious: for all that is made in the world is made of Salt, Glass, and Mercury, although the principles of Paracelsus are Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury: and that the glass be put for the fourth, as if it meant that all the things composed of these first three, are reduced to a quarter for their last end: as much as glass can no longer be made any production, by the industry of Nature, not of Art. But I want to prove my opinion by example and the following reason: saying that in animals the bones are consolidated and hardened by vitrification: the flesh and the nerves are concretized by Salt, and heaped together by the Mercy mood. To vegetables, the shells of almonds, pine nuts, walnuts, hazelnuts, and all sorts of kernels, may similarly be said to be vitrified: as well as the shells of turtles, snails, oysters, and similar animals which land and sea produce.

The taste alone gives sufficient proof that they are indeed salty, for nothing is saltless except that which is tasteless. And we even get salt from it from which glass is made, like fern, salicot or soda, and many other things. Someone could therefore object that it would be the Salt and not the glass which would be the cause of the hardness of the bones, shells, and shells of the animals and plants that I have just mentioned. To which I will reply that experience is repugnant to it, and reason too: in that all salt melts and dissolves by the slightest humidity of the air or of the water which they receive; all the above things resist it; according to the more or less they have been hardened by this vitrifying virtue, for last proof of which I will here represent diamonds, precious stones, and crystals, which are nothing more than glasses worked out to such perfection in the furnace. of ingenious Nature. And that all these things are condensed by the mood of Mercury is so manifest that there is no need to give any other testimony than common experience. The minerals are sufficiently provided with Salt, Sulphur, and Mercury. Stones, and all that is drawn from the earth, which lacks fusion and extension under the hammer, do have some salt in them, but it is surmounted by the adustion of the corrupting sulfur which intervenes in the vitrification and hardening of them. Metals, and all melting and ductile things, are created and condensed by Salt and Mercury, not without vitrification, which hardens them and renders them intractable to the hammer: according, however, to the more or less impurity and earthiness that is adustible. is encountered at the thickening and coagulation of their Mercury.

Thus we can truly say that all things are made, as of a triad, of Glass, Salt, and Mercury or water: glass causing hardness, salt giving matter, and water making hardness. assembly and condensation. not without vitrification, which hardens them and renders them intractable to the hammer: according, however, to the more or less of the impurity and the earthiness that is adustible which is encountered in the thickening and coagulation of their Mercury. Thus we can truly say that all things are made, as of a triad, of Glass, Salt, and Mercury or water: glass causing hardness, salt giving matter, and water making hardness. assembly and condensation. not without vitrification, which hardens them and renders them intractable to the hammer: according, however, to the more or less of the impurity and the earthiness that is adustible which is encountered in the thickening and coagulation of their Mercury. Thus we can truly say that all things are made, as of a triad, of Glass, Salt, and Mercury or water: glass causing hardness, salt giving matter, and water making hardness. assembly and condensation.

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From the specification of the Spirit of the universe to the bodies.
CHAPTER IX.

THEREsoul of the world, and its action, is represented in all things, in which it is all conformable. It binds and conjoins together the higher and lower things. For as there are ideas in the heavens, so many seminal causes and reasons has her, of which by means of this spirit she forges so many species in matter. Therefore, if it sometimes happens that each of the species degenerates, the soul which is within can be reformed and reduced to its first state by means of this spirit of the world which is very close to it, obedient to every manner of movement. Do not think, however, that this ideal intellect is attracted, but rather the soul endowed with the virtues of it, and enticed by material forms. Which must not seem strange, for she herself makes the meat and the bait, as transmutable into all things by which it is attracted and solicited; residing and still residing here voluntarily.

Zoroaster names these congruities and decency of forms with the reasons of the soul of the world, enticements. From this it appears that each thing and species draws its gifts and virtues from the soul of the world; not all entirely, but indeed those of the seed, and others corresponding, by which it germinates and pullulates. The example is seen and noticed in man, who feeding only on human food, does not acquire the nature of the birds or fish he has eaten, but the human and suitable for his species. . It also happens that sometimes several other animals live on the same food and meat, from which nevertheless each attracts what is proper to its species. So that it is a truly admirable thing that from the same meat man draws what is proper to man; and the bird and the animal what befits the birds and the animals. But this is done, not because in one and the same meat there are various and variable foods; but by reason of the species which is nourished, which attracts and transforms in itself its conforming nourishment, by means of which it engenders its like, because of the virtue of that soul and seminal reason which it has in itself, according to its quality. Further, we must not consider that in the machine of the world, the spirit, the soul, and the body, are a few separate things, for these three always unite and bind together, as we see in the man, and by this union return the whole vital spirit, and the corporeal substance. The soul of the universe therefore feigns and imagines various forms of species, which the spirit receiving into the bowels of the Elements embodies, and produces in light. This is why animals only beget animals; plants from plants and minerals from minerals.

Not, however, in everything in the same way, for minerals, as I have said above, do not engender their like in the same way as plants; because the spirit they possess is stopped and oppressed with too gross and heavy matter; which spirit, if it is once taken from it and added to the mineral matter, will be able to engender its like: especially as having acquired intrusion and entry into imperfect bodies, by the great subtlety of Art, and graduation fire, it drew from the universal soul its own mineral seeds only so much; not those of animals, nor of plants: especially as it was repugnant to Nature. Not that I mean to say that it does not have in it the action of the other virtues; But he demonstrates them only according to the species in which he is accommodated. Otherwise, each thing would have to produce a dissimilar one; namely, that man begat a tree: the plant makes an ox, and the metal an herb. What I say only with regard to the specification of things: because if we consider this genus generalissimo, (as Raymond Lully calls it) to something that one yawns it will make its similar, because it is Mercury , and assumes the nature of whatever it is mixed with.

But human art cannot do what is conceded to Nature alone: ​​which engenders and procreates the species, that Art subsequently expands and multiplies; if the beginning of the operation is taken from the root of the species: as all prudent Physicians know how to do well, who extracting from mines this Spirit already begins to specify, after having duly purified it and led it to perfection, make it capable to perfect the imperfect. These things examined exactly, the expert and informed artist will draw from them admirable adaptations.


SECOND BOOK.
That the Spirit of the world takes shape, and how it takes shape .
CHAPTER. I. _

I think I have sufficiently made known in the preceding book, that by the General Spirit all things are not only produced; but embodied in the universe but it remains to be declared what body this spirit takes, & in what way it embodies by embodiing all the other things. For it is necessary that, taking from himself all their bodies, he himself be corporeal, not being reasonable to believe that he can give what he would never have had. Let us see, then, with what body he is clothed and in what way he is clothed with it. Not that it is however my intention to discuss here the corporification of celestial & supernatural things, but only to attach my discourse to the physical, sublunar, & to the body of the earth which is the vessel & own matrix or this first & general corporifier of things, itself corporifies.

I therefore say that no corporification can be done without a preceding motor, which pulls the power into action, so that what seems not to be, strong in light & arrives at the end & fulfillment of the intention of Nature; which is always to embodie what it wants to produce. Now this motor is nothing other than the fire, or the heat which first moves within the air: For all generations begin there; all the more so as fire is the most active of all the Elements, and consequently more subtle and light, quicker to move. This fire, therefore, which is proper to fly above because of its lively lightness, & to make visible things unknown, necessarily takes the source of its movement & action from below, that is to say from the center of the world, where we have previously lodged the old Demogorgon progenitor of all things; being seated there as in his throne in the very middle of his Empire: so that from there he governs, commands, maintains, and distributes on all sides the essence of life to all this great spherical body, roundly extended around him, so that each one receives in each member what he needs, more easily & by equal distance.

Within the fruitful womb of this ancient father is implanted the root of this fire; which makes it a vaporous breath, which Hermès in his Pimandre calls Humid Nature. For steam is the first & next action of fire; with which she is so conjoined that one could not even imagine it without her. But (someone will say) since this vapor comes from the fire how moist is it, since the fire is hot & dry? & where can this opposite quality come from? There is nothing strange here if we want to consider that it is impossible that the living fire cannot be without humor, which is its food, maintenance, &; subject without which fire itself cannot be imagined. For since its nature is to act, and its action is indeficient; he must of necessity act on something: and that even this thing never fails him. So therefore the co-essential fire & humidity are like the male & the female of any generation; & the first parents of the corporification of this Spirit of the world: as will be seen below.

But fire is like the first operator; especially since action always precedes passion. How much that what suffers inseparably coexists with what acts: As the stoic Zeno said of old, estimating that the substance of fire, by the air converted into water, & preserved in it, like a general sperm, whence then after all things are begotten, was the first matter of the universe. Thales Millesien, whom the Greeks honor with the name of sage, stopping at the patient matter, considered that it was water: which Heraclitus also called Sea: And Moses more illuminated than these two, says that the Spirit of God was carried on the waters before the creation of heaven & earth: Naming fire because of its noble, pure, & worthy essence, the Spirit of God. When I shall therefore say fire to be the principle of things, I shall not stray from reason or from truth: For doubtless it is its first worker: & the last destroyer & moulder of the forms which it had caused: until 'as long as he has reduced things to their period & matter: besides which there is no longer any progression, but transformation: as I will clarify later by comparing visible & familiar things.

The first active power which operates in the production of man is the agitation or motion of heat: which, imitating the action of fire, from which the natural is mainly to separate, draws from the whole body what is called sperm, (in which is contained the potential human semen) which it cooks & digests to be made fit for expulsion, then for generation: or perfect increase of the whole man. Which generation & increase is always aided & conducted by fire, which is the only operator: until, arriving at the goal of its exaltation, & too inflamed by the sulfur of excrement proceeding from the impurity of food, it dries up the humid radical, which is the seat & preserver of life. This done, this very fire does not cease its action until it has converted the bodies into ashes by resolution and corruption, which can only be done by it alone.

But to make this easier to hear, & touch it with the finger, so that by knowing the last matter of this body we know the first; Let us put it in the common fire, we will immediately see that there is something inflammable in it which consumes almost everything, and reduces it to a little ash; which we see of an igneous nature, and nurturing in its last subject and matter a pure salt, of which fire alone is the unique father and multiplier. And whatever burning one can make of it, nothing succeeds in it but salt, which within its interior has its fire; hidden, who rejoices with his fellow man. This is why spagyrics have experienced that in salt there is an incombustibility or secret element of fire which has the same actions of this primitive fire, being for this reason called balm of the bodies: especially since it has in it what gives, increases, and preserves life: which is not otherwise a humid vapor, accompanied by temperate heat. Jean de la Fontaine in his Roman Philosophique testifies that he was not unaware of this mystery, when he makes Nature say:

Some say that fire does not beget
From its naturalness come ashes:
But their reverence saved
Nature is in the antecedent fire:
And if I wanted to prove it
Salt as a witness I will take.

Now to judge that it is endowed with temper, it is only necessary to consider the easy resolution: & to prove that it is full of heat, it is not necessary otherwise to observe its prompt freezing, in which it is easy to notice that the fire acts & unites with fire, as in liquefaction air was joined to air. For in what way could the dry drink up the moist in a subject, if the heat were not innate in it, since naturally the humor is drunk by the dryness resulting from heat?

By this one can easily understand that Demogorgon, which is the Central fire, is not deprived of humidity, on which acting in its own bosom, it raises a vapor mixed with the two qualities, which I call the Spirit of the world: & which many call Mercury of the Mercurys, because all the others proceed universally from him. This rising vapor is therefore not yet a body, but rather something intermediate between body and spirit, as participating in one and the other substance, which remaining thus, could engender nothing. It must therefore take on some body, or form of body: Which is done in this way.

The very subtle vapor proceeding from the dry and the humid, coming to rise, penetrates the spongiosities of the earth, in which little by little it is converted into mercurial water by the encounter it makes with the infused air, & of the earth itself, therefore the surface is greatly removed from the center, which is the hearth from which this heat leaves: just as in the screed of a still where the spirit and distillable vapor liquefies. But because this vapor & its water participate in the two principles, namely heat & humidity, it grows bigger & thickens little by little by moderate & continuous decoction, whose main instrument & means is this innate fire that this vapor contains, even inducing , even forcing by its assiduous action, the dry to drink its wet, & to freeze this water, not with a similar solidity or hardness in everything & everywhere, but first of all mucilaginous, & different. What Nature pretends to do by the information of Ideas to mucilage, is the beginning of induration & solidity; Which must of necessity follow the path of Nature, which is to pass from one extremity to the other by the mean disposition.

Nature thus continuing its digestion, this mucilage becomes firmer; And from the largest matter or part are generated the metallic bodies in the veins of the earth & the concavities of the rocks. Which bodies engendered from the same seed differ in no way in substance, but only in the accidents which happen to them according to the disposition of the places or matrices in which they are engendered. What is therefore more subtle in this vapour, rising willingly, finally reaches the surface of the earth, where it is forced to stop. And all the more so since it cannot remain ocious, & cannot however descend, nor rise higher because being a spirit, it is its own to rise; & that not finding anything solid that can support it; It is strong that she continues the intention of Nature, & works for the generation & embodiment of individuals. But so that more clearly one can hear all that I have already said; let us take one of these individuals, and to give an absolute view of the conclusion to this chapter, let us see how he is procreated; For that will make us certain that this Spirit of the world takes shape, and will reveal to us how it takes shape.

The acorn sown in the earth would remain there forever useless, or would be consumed without germinating, if there were not some agent who carried into action the occult power that Nature lodged there. From where could one imagine this action if not from the central fire coming out of the heart of this Demogorgon, which fire attracted & fomented by the rays of the celestial Sun, redouble its strength & vigour? Does not this germination therefore have its beginning by this fire of Nature, which raising & multiplying its vapor gathers & excites the innate fire within the glans, which on its part also vaporizes by means of its own air, then having begun to vaporize, feeds & increases with this first vapor, which never fails nor ceases to act on the matter of the glans until it is at the period of perfection where Nature's intention has destined it , which is to be made oak: which in its time having reached its natural size, begins (not properly to die) but indeed to move towards decline to return to its first form; & convert into that of the earth, where this vapor is not lacking & is never idle:

For it engenders in the rotting of the tree certain Polipodes, with an infinity of cattle and vermin: or else having reduced the oak to the ground, it begins some other vegetation there. To think of saying that the mass of the glans increases it and multiplies it, would be mistaken: For in germination it is seen that it remains whole, and separates from its germ without any diminution or lessening, and nevertheless the tree came out of it. It is therefore not by the multiplication & increase of the acorn that the oak is engendered: It is also little by addition, & distraction of the adjacent earth, because it would run out as much earth as the tree could be large , which does not happen. It is therefore necessary that it be by some other way & matter, since it is neither by one nor by the other of those. Now this spirit or vapor alone being employed there, it is only that which corporifies & makes individual, & from there comes the creation, increase, & conservation of all things, not of the terrestrial masses which are only the excrements of the spirituous & primeraine material.

As it is seen in the digestion of the stomach, which rejects the excrements with the same weight & quantity of meats that it took them: having nevertheless drawn its own & particular food, which was nothing other than this spirit enclosed in the mass of icelles: which alone by its dryness corporifies, & by its humidity expands & increases, pushed & driven by its own heat. Now this spirit or vapor alone being employed there, it is only that which corporifies & makes individual, & from there comes the creation, increase, & conservation of all things, not of the terrestrial masses which are only the excrements of the spirituous & primeraine material. As it is seen in the digestion of the stomach, which rejects the excrements with the same weight & quantity of meats that it took them: having nevertheless drawn its own & particular food, which was nothing other than this spirit enclosed in the mass of icelles: which alone by its dryness corporifies, & by its humidity expands & increases, pushed & driven by its own heat. Now this spirit or vapor alone being employed there, it is only that which corporifies & makes individual, & from there comes the creation, increase, & conservation of all things, not of the terrestrial masses which are only the excrements of the spirituous & primeraine matter.

As it is seen in the digestion of the stomach, which rejects the excrements with the same weight & quantity of meats that it took them: having nevertheless drawn its own & particular food, which was nothing other than this spirit enclosed in the mass of icelles: which alone by its dryness corporifies, & by its humidity expands & increases, pushed & driven by its own heat. increase, & conservation of all things, not of the terrestrial masses which are only the excrements of the spirituous & primeraine matter. As it is seen in the digestion of the stomach, which rejects the excrements with the same weight & quantity of meats that it took them: having nevertheless drawn its own & particular food, which was nothing other than this spirit enclosed in the mass of icelles: which alone by its dryness corporifies, & by its humidity expands & increases, pushed & driven by its own heat. increase, & conservation of all things, not of the terrestrial masses which are only the excrements of the spirituous & primeraine matter.

As it is seen in the digestion of the stomach, which rejects the excrements with the same weight & quantity of meats that it took them: having nevertheless drawn its own & particular food, which was nothing other than this spirit enclosed in the mass of icelles: which alone by its dryness corporifies, & by its humidity expands & increases, pushed & driven by its own heat.
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On the conversion of this Spirit to earth: & how in this earth his virtue remains entire.
CHAPTER II.

For the reasons already deduced, being there my opinion sufficiently proven that the Spirit of the world takes shape, it is necessary here to declare how it takes shape. And although many have worked a lot & made very little progress in this research, I will try to make it palpable & visible to those mainly who, favored by a happy birth, admirers of the rare effects of Nature, try to enter the cabinet of its secrets. . For what has disappointed so many curious minds in the search & discovery of this body, has been that some have considered this knowledge at all beyond the faculty of the common sense of man, & reserved only for angels or demons. Others than naming him the Spirit of the world, no other body was to be imagined to him than that of the universe; since a general spirit requires a universal body.

The others, which could not otherwise be perceived except by the conversion of more perfect bodies into their first spirit and sperm, by an exact and laborious subtiliation, not realizing that there is no regression in Nature : & that the more the bodies are perfect, the further they are from their beginnings & first corporeality. The others still thought that it was necessary to extract from the bodies what they call quintessence, believing that what was more subtle & volatile was the spirit they were looking for: & thus moving away from the goal where they aimed the most, wanted to find the Orient at sunset: Because they spiritualized the bodies instead of corporifying the spirits. But since this spirit sees him manifestly turned into a body of earth; & that without contradiction or any doubt all bodies are generated from it;

We must therefore draw it from themselves; the more so as it would be infinitely to deviate from the straight path of Nature, if instead of making a body, earthly, one made one of fire, which the quintessentials call their Heaven. Now the beginning of corporification in all things is made by the earth; Because it is the first or next operation of Mercury to be terrified. So why do they want to start with meaning? It's just like starting a building with the roof & not the foundation. Those who tend to But since this spirit sees him manifestly turned into a body of earth; & that without contradiction or any doubt all bodies are generated from it; We must therefore draw it from themselves; the more so as it would be infinitely to deviate from the straight path of Nature, if instead of making a body, earthly, one made one of fire, which the quintessentials call their Heaven. Now the beginning of corporification in all things is made by the earth; Because it is the first or next operation of Mercury to be terrified. So why do they want to start with meaning? It's just like starting a building with the roof & not the foundation.

Those who tend to But since this spirit sees him manifestly turned into a body of earth; & that without contradiction or any doubt all bodies are generated from it; We must therefore draw it from themselves; the more so as it would be infinitely to deviate from the straight path of Nature, if instead of making a body, earthly, one made one of fire, which the quintessentials call their Heaven. Now the beginning of corporification in all things is made by the earth; Because it is the first or next operation of Mercury to be terrified. So why do they want to start with meaning? It's just like starting a building with the roof & not the foundation. Those who tend to which the quintessentials call their Heaven. Now the beginning of corporification in all things is made by the earth; Because it is the first or next operation of Mercury to be terrified. So why do they want to start with significance? It's just like starting a building with the roof & not the foundation. Those who tend to which the quintessentials call their Heaven. Now the beginning of corporification in all things is made by the earth; Because it is the first or next operation of Mercury to be terrified. So why do they want to start with significance? It's just like starting a building with the roof & not the foundation. Those who tend to reduction, bodies in their first germ would indeed have a reason more apparent in their design than the last who want them to be quintessential, if they did not take in this progress a tortuous path which leads them to the opposite of the place to which they aspire. For besides what Nature never retrogrades, they do not realize that they are following the stage of accomplishment, and not of destructive reversion, or to put it more clearly, which leads back to birth.

But besides, that these labors are at all impossible; or at the very least so difficult & long that the ordinary life of man would not be sufficient there, they could not by this way arrive at the true & natural reduction, but would only be a vile fantastic body, greatly removed from the one with which Nature begins all its productive operations, which is the only & legitimate sperm of all bodies. If we consider that everything is embodied by terrification, we will necessarily admit that there is some underlying subject, and soon apt to be terrified: Now I said from the beginning that fire is the first operator of the world, which throws a spirituous vapour, which he cooks & dries to corporify it; for corporification cannot take place without coagulation, necessarily procured by the dryness of the fire. But where does this cooking, drying or coagulation take place, if not in the body of the earth, where do all other bodies come from? It is therefore necessary that the underlying matter of them be hidden there: for if it were not there, it would follow that they would be made of nothing; which contradicts the ordinance of Nature, who wants everything to have its principle, and that from nothing, nothing proceeds.

This matter or principle is therefore attached to the body of the earth, where it is nourished, thickened, and incorporated. For this cause, those who wanted to draw her from the perfect metallic bodies, or from the imperfect & simple, by quintessence attraction would have done much better (since they were looking for the first sperm) to open the womb of the mother, than to kill & to destroy the children who have already reached the perfection of their age, to believe that they are restoring them to the state they were in when they were conceived. But when they would open those who wanted to draw it from the perfect metallic bodies, or from the imperfect & simple, by quintessence attraction would have done much better (since they were looking for the first sperm) to open the womb of the mother, than to kill & destroy the children already arrived at the perfection of their age, to believe them to restore them to the state that they were at their conception. But when they would open those who wanted to draw it from the perfect metallic bodies, or from the imperfect & simple, by quintessence attraction would have done much better (since they were looking for the first sperm) to open the womb of the mother, than to kill & destroy the children already arrived at the perfection of their age, to believe them to restore them to the state that they were at their conception.

But when they would open this matrix what would they find there? Because nothing is there in sight, and several admitting that this path was the most favorable, were still disappointed, hoping to find in the belly of the mines some appearance of the beginning of aurification, which they did not do. Nevertheless, & despaired of their plan, especially since they saw no middle ground between the softness and the hardness of the metal. Since the eye sees nothing there, how is it possible to find and take anything there? This is the work, but this is the toil. Certainly such investigators did not judge that prime matter is anything but spirit & vapor so subtle & slender that only the gaze of the intellect can see or imagine it. However, inasmuch as she is attached to the body of this mother, & lives in it, it is necessary for good reason that she has some quasi-corporal nature, & able to corporify herself.

Now, since I have before enough openly declared to those who are endowed with subtle judgment what this Nature is, spirit vapour, which by virtue of innate heat, acquires a dry quality, accompanied by a secret humor, by which it condenses & coagulates into a specific body. And as this desiccated moist nature was first water, it must also be reduced to water by water, which is the only way to water dry things, like fire to dry up things that are moist: something that Nature observes very exactly in the generation of metals. For the water flowing through the earth's pores finds a dissoluble substance, with which it unites by their simplest parts, and to this union are appropriate the elements duly proportioned. The substance has thus joined by its dissolution, congeals & coagulates itself by hardening that it naturally has in it because of its innate dryness: then by successive & long; decoction it acquires metallic hardness. But since this substance is soluble, what other nature can it be than salt? for nothing dissolves except salts; of which the multitude and variety is great, since there are as many as there are things in the world? So much so that the more it is burned, the easier it acquires to dissolve, provided it has not reached vitrification. This first material is therefore a salt: That is to say & the easier it acquires to dissolve, provided it has not reached vitrification. This first material is therefore a salt:

That is to say & the easier it acquires to dissolve, provided it has not reached vitrification. This first material is therefore a salt: That is to say that salt is the first body, by which it makes itself palpable & visible, of which Raymond Lully hears here in his will, when he says: We have declared above that at the center of the earth is a Virgin earth, & a real element & that it is the work of Nature. Starting out Nature is housed at the center of everything. So salt is that virgin earth which has not yet produced anything; into which the spirit of the world is first converted, by vitrification; that is to say, by exhaustion of humor. It is he who gives form to all things, and nothing can fall to the sense of sight or touch except by salt: Nothing coagulates but salt: Nothing but salt freezes:

It is he who gives hardness to gold, and to all metals: to diamonds, & to all stones, both precious and otherwise, by a powerful but very secret vitrifying virtue. Moreover, it is seen that all things composed of the four elements return to salt. Because if it happens that a body rots, what will remain of it if not an ashen powder which conceals a precious salt? & if this body is destroyed by burning, calcination, or incineration, what will we get out of it in the last resort if not salt? The glassmakers will serve us for this proof. This is why Arnault de Villeneuve, great Doctor & Philosopher, in his new chemical light speaking of the permanent water of the sages, which is dry water, which does not wet the hands any more than vulgar quicksilver, says: Who, then, will be able to make this water? certainly I say that it will be the one who makes the glass. The same Author speaking of the excellence of this dry water, gave it enough to know when he says in a chemical treatise to which he gives the name; from Philosophical Breviary:

The operator will no longer be without salt than an archer will shoot without a string. And the fountain of lovers also says, Without salt cannot put indeed, useful thing for your fact. It is therefore of salt that all bodies were first composed, for as I said in the preceding chapter, the principles of composition and resolution are similar. And as all philosophers want & hold as an infallible maxim, the first matter of things is none other than their last, that is to say that in which they are resolved in their end, giving as an example ice & snow which by heat is reduced to water, of which by freezing they were made. And if I wanted to report here all the testimonies of good Authors, a fair volume would be born. Now to show that this salt is the pure & true earth, not the one on which we walk, which I want to prove to be only the excrement & dregs of the other, I will have recourse to the first creation of things to which I will appear by the example of a similar operation which is done in imitation of Nature, & by the means & the same rule that this great universe has been made. I have said before that the principle of things was water, or else a moist Nature, as Hermes says, on which, according to the text of Moses, the spirit of God was borne. But I may be asked how this great heap & confusion of waters was divided, so that this ample & heavy terrestrial mass came out of it? & by what means so many diverse things are produced from this earth.

I have said before that the principle of things was water, or else a moist Nature, as Hermes says, on which, according to the text of Moses, the spirit of God was borne. But I may be asked how this great heap & confusion of waters was divided, so that this ample & heavy terrestrial mass came out of it? & by what means so many diverse things are produced from this earth. I have said before that the principle of things was water, or else a moist Nature, as Hermes says, on which, according to the text of Moses, the spirit of God was borne. But I may be asked how this great heap & confusion of waters was divided, so that this ample & heavy terrestrial mass came out of it? & by what means so many diverse things are produced from this earth. I will answer such questions as only experience has shown me, saying that it is naturally probable that some plate is first made in the midst of these waters by means of separation, according to Moses' own text. , who says that God separated the waters from the waters, because there are two kinds, namely the elevating water, and the congealing water. The first, rising by evaporation, therefore left the second fixed at the bottom: as those who make salt, both marine and fountain salt, see daily.

It is true that one is made by the attractive force of the rays of the Sun: and the other by the expelling violence of fire. Now fire alone, where the only heat between all the things of the world possesses this separating virtue, by one or the other of these two ways, either natural or violent. It is therefore by one or the other that this separation has been procured. But to whom would Moses have known how to compare this fire if not to the divine spirit, which cannot be otherwise defined than the universal source of light, of animating heat and of vital movement: by which all things exist and persist in their being? Let us consider the salt of Nature being still in its limbo or chaos, That is to say diffused, dissolved, or drowned in its water, in what form will it appear to our sight, & what quality will our taste & touch attribute to it if not bitter water? Which shape & quality, it would retain forever if the separator did not intervene. But as soon as this elevating water feels the action of the fire which is its enemy; the separation begins to take place by evaporation, & gradually diminishing makes appear in the center of its globe a small plate of salt which assembles just as the body made the earth in the first limb of the universal waters. Here, then, is the first operation that fire made, namely to bring out the arid, that is to say, the earth.

But just as this first earth remained coagulated by fire with its excrement & faeces; this salt which is truly earth also retains its own, although it seems pure & clean, full of whiteness & lucidity: I reserve to speak in their place. Now this salt or this arid earth which coagulates and sits within the water, re-drinks all its humidity, & dries up by the continuation of the fire: nevertheless keeping within it an internal humor which does not abandon it; and from which this dissolutive virtue comes to it: then arriving at temperature, between the dry and the humid, it remains suitable for the productions of things, drawn from power to effect by the action of heat. And in truth, just as the body of the great earth has this productive and specific virtue of individuals; also to that which we call salt; Not that it produces herbs, metals, or animals, as does the other, but it has in its bosom the original seed of all things; so that experience makes us see there by the operations of fire, the colors, flavors, growths, vegetations, and hardenings, which we see in each of these three genera.

And not only that, but also the own fire that the Sun put there; by which he vivifies & nourishes all things. As it appeared to me in the progress of certain philosophical work: Having seen in this matter alone, distinctly & one after the other: according to the order & the intervals determined by the masters, all the colors & the appearances that they say they must arrive in their matter at the making of their stone; with this sudden fusion after having reached the high redness of the field poppy: And yet without having produced the miracle so much desired & awaited, as regards the Metamorphosis of metals: but having produced on human bodies by universal & natural sweats, effects so miraculous that I would not dare to publish it without fearing the title of charlatan: however, Monsignor, your Highness can protect me from this injury, as an irreproachable witness; since the report of these marvels having reached her, you deigned to visit the dwelling of your poor Philemon, as well as Jupiter; of the generous intention of being assured of it by the mouth of a good man, who, cruelly afflicted with various pains, and too exhausted from the languid length of his ills, had no recourse but to heavenly goodness, nor hope only in death, at each moment demanded. The true saying of which again compelled your highness, to cause to be heard by solemn information a multitude of others whom I had relieved by this same remedy. And if the greed or the envy of the one to whom was committed & entrusted the care of the health of the late (of very illustrious & glorious memory) my Lord the Reverendissime Cardinal your very dear brother, had not prevented him from taking it, I believe that God would not have denied his Excellency the same grace and blessing that he had extended to so many poor people.

If therefore this salt has all the qualities of the earth, who would want to maintain that it is not itself earth: and consequently that it should not be called terrified universal spirit, as Hermes depicted it? But I will say that this conversion cannot be done except by an artifice of very easy practice, and very difficult to search. Because without lying it is an act that passes the human to make see with the eye & touch with the finger this first material that a world of men admired for their great doctrine in all the centuries, estimated even affirmed to be invisible , & incomprehensible. Amused only by a deep theory to talk about the excellence of the thing; & not to seek it & know it by its effects. So that among all the curious people I have practiced for forty years since I have smelled the first odor of it, I have not found six who know it. Now having sufficiently clarified how this salt is converted into earth; & gained this point also, which is the true operation of operations: it now remains to show how after this conversion his virtue remains entire to him.

However, before going further, it is very reasonable to say with what virtue & strength this Spirit or Salt was endowed, in order to know how to seek it out & find it in him when he is terrified. I will therefore say to this effect that it is an indubitable thing and which needs no proof, that the Heavens are in continual movement which necessarily tends to some end. For, however naturally we can say the end of what moves is to go from one place to another, if the movement is made for some other cause: & the intention of the movement does not is not merely to move from place to place: but to make this movement to achieve the effect of some other end. For there are two ends: One which the Philosophers call the end for which the thing is done, like the end of Plato's generation, it is the soul of Plato. And the end for which Plato took the virtues is beatitude. The other end is what things are going to because of the previous one; like the end of the assembly of the male and the female, it is the generation, but the end for which the generation is made, it is the man, or the animal. Also the purpose for which Plato went from Greece to Egypt was to learn sapience. But the end of his journey was Egypt where he claimed to go.

The end therefore of the movement of the Heavens is not only to move from place to place: But in order to influence their virtues on the lower bodies. Because to imagine that the influence is made & spreads uselessly in places where there is nothing to receive it, it is too gross an error. Now this influence of virtues is indeficient & continual because the movement by which it takes place is orbicular, always beginning again & returning to itself. Who is the reason why the things on which it is done, & what proceeds from it is of the same nature & quality; constantly receiving a force & multiplication of these virtues which never fails: & since this influence does not extend over the Heavens, where as I said, there is nothing; it follows of necessity that it must do it on something inferior and corporeal, on which it can act. For nothing suffers except that which has a body: But what natural body is there in the world but that of the earth? is it not the body of bodies; And he alone who of himself can subsist, having all the qualities required for bodies, namely length, width, depth, area? Isn't this the prefix subject or goal of Nature, to which she constantly exerts herself to corporify & animate?

Where, then, could she accomplish these works if not in the body of the earth? thus the earth is the only inferior body which receives celestial influences, the virtues & powers of which are to penetrate, warm, purge, separate, vivify, increase, preserve, & restore. There is no need to dispute here now if the Stars & the Heavens influence their bodies on the body of the earth, for experience raises us up from it by the testimony of the senses. Wherefore, leaving that for known, I will only endeavor to deduce how they make their virtuous influencing. I once said that they tend downwards directly and not upwards. And especially since the bottom of a spherical body is its center, it is therefore necessarily on the earth that they flow, & in it alone that they end & stick their points. For the earth is the true center of the universe, and the point of this great circle where all the lines of these instructions end.

And because this earth is a solid body, and the solidity of all other bodies comes from it, a very subtle virtue is needed to penetrate it through its smallest parts. The Heavens, therefore, which are of very subtle matter, produce such virtues, for the operations ordinarily follow the qualities of the body which produces them. But this penetration would be useless, & would be like running water on a field of which it waters only the surface because of the speed of its course, if it did not do some rest there. But since it infallibly falls to the center, and cannot go beyond it, finding nothing lower to descend there, it is forced to stop there and accumulate. This is why some have said that the bottom of the earth is very precious, because all the celestial virtues assemble and unite there. Which thus united and assembled have an infinite power, as much because they flow there continuously, as because they proceed from bodies infinite in virtues, immortal, incorruptible, and indeficient.

The ancient Poets who fabulously left us what they had imagined of these occult things, dividing the world into three, assigned to Jupiter as the first son of Saturn, the Sky: although some have wanted to attribute the birthright to Neptune, & the election of this reign superior to Jupiter, for certain sophistical reasons that are not at all necessary about me: to whom Neptune was given the Sea for his lot. Pluto was appanage of the Earth, as younger: And yet he is considered the richest of the three brothers, because in his inheritance are born & are continually reborn all the treasures of the world: & seems that he made his two brothers tributaries towards him with what is most exquisite. They call him King of the underworld, and for his place of pleasure give him the Champs Elysées, where the chosen and blessed go to court him. Our Theologians also want that in this same place are the hells, and the torments of souls: persuading themselves that being very true that the influences of all the stars which are of igneous nature fall there, there must be an incredible ardor.

One can doubtless call this infernal place, since there is nothing lower: But let the souls there be tormented by this fire, and let the ardor of it be or may be such as they say. , that seems remote from reason, and from the true axioms of Philosophy. For, besides the fact that souls do not occupy any place, by their very confession, and that their nature after they have left the burden of their bodies is to reach out and carry themselves upwards, because of their spiritual lightness, which is more of the igneous quality than any other; they can only with violence, neither as light be emerged in this underground place, nor as simple suffer the action of the fire which has no empire on its similar. Why then do they want them to come down to this place to be tormented? if it is not that the heavy burden of sin with which they are enveloped, depressing their nature, carries them downwards & brings them down to the center of the earth: & that the same sin again having taken hold & as if incorporated with them, faces I do not know what composition that makes them liable & subject, not to the simple & natural action of this fire, but perhaps to the violence of another fire created by God for this purpose: & perhaps to this very fire whose we speak, his action being redoubled to him by a secret & divine virtue: which is highly probable, & seems to be authorized by holy writing: However, I do not want to make a separate opinion recklessly; no more than departing from the orthodox faith, to the support of which I have long dedicated my life, and the little industry that I hold from Heaven.

I will nevertheless say in passing (not to deviate from my first speech) that it is bad conclusion to say, that since in this place all the influences of the Stars are assembled, it follows that there must be an extreme ardor, which in truth I would confess if the fire of the Stars were like the vulgar, destroying & consuming, not vivifying, preserving, & nourishing: for if it were such as one believes it, not only the earth but the universe was long ago consumed. These influences truly warm in the bosom of the old Demogorgon, But it is with a vital ardor, and not mortal, or destroying. Which plants there an omniform virtue, which by this heating expands throughout the earthly body, being the first driving cause of generations. And do not think that the external heat which comes from the Sun only heats the earth, & makes it engender: because we see that in winter, when the Sun is farthest from us, the inside of it is warmer than in the hottest of summer, how wells, fountains, and deep waters are experienced. So that during the worst winter frosts, the metals do not leave to cook and harden; And can it be assured that it is when their greatest cooking takes place, because the central heat is suppressed & retained in the earth by the coldness of the air & water which surrounds it.

The Sun rising in spring, and approaching its perpendicular upon us, is not the principal cause of the vegetation of things: For if it depended on it alone, no one will doubt that the higher and exalted would go on increasing in proportion to the increasing heat: which is seen on the contrary. But because a similar one willingly attracts the other, & one moving away the other also moves back & leaves, the Sun by the magnetic force of its rays attracts & recalls the heat of the centric Sun, withdrawn & compressed within the earth by the bitter rigor of the cold, which rising to the surface restores the vegetative virtue to all things. It is therefore not the external heat of the celestial Sun which heats the depths of the earth, but that of the terrestrial Sun innate in it: for there are two kinds of heat: one of reverberation, which is the external ; the other of influence & penetration, which is the internal, of which I hear spoken: The nature of which is to vivify, increase, & preserve, by the maintenance of the radical humor contained in this fire of which I mentioned in the previous chapter. What is more, to verify that this central fire is not extreme, nor suitable to torment & burn, we see that all the stars by their influences do not tend to heat, and that it is not only natural for them to heat up, because Saturn is cold & dry: Jupiter hot & humid: But, hot & dry: the Sun hot & dry: Venus cold & humid, the Moon humid & cold: & Mercury being natural to all, adapts variably to all. It is therefore easy to judge that all these influences engender a temperate heat of the four qualities, which are hot, dry, cold, and moist. temperature.

That is why this vapor or spirit which comes from this center partakes of these four. From whence take their origin all the qualities of the simples; some of which heat up because the heat dominates them: others dry out because of the dryness that controls them; the others moisten & cool according to the more or less coldness & humidity that abounds in them. On the other hand, the Stars pour into the center several other natures or qualities than these, because they sow there the seeds of flavors, colors, & smells that we taste, see, & smell in all things. I therefore say that the Stars warm the earth in its center; & consequently this original Spirit who dwells there participates in this warming up.

And because the natural virtue of heat is to separate; by the same influence descends also this separative virtue, which divides the pure from the impure, the subtle from the gross, the light from the heavy, & the sweet of the bitter. This separation, which can be called purgative, is the cause that everything naturally rejects from itself the excrement which is not of its specific substance: what has the truth is very necessary: ​​for there is nothing in the world in which the excrement does not exceed the natural substance.

And all we see & touch is nothing but the excrement that envelops this hidden substance. We see it clearly in the meats we eat? the mass of which is not converted or trans-substantiated into our flesh, but is evacuated by the places intended for it. Nature attracting only from here the invisible & spiritual juice, apt to carnify & substantiate itself in us. In the same way can we say that this terrestrial mass which we trample with our feet is only an excrement of the first substance, which amassed in the limbo of chaos, collapsing & sinking around the center in equal proportion : who caused this spherical roundness, with the equilibrium substance, which makes it unable to move or fall, because being already descended to the lowest place, it can only pass by going up, on any side whatsoever: & that would be totally repugnant to his nature. We see that the lines which from each part of the surface of a circle fall to its centre, which is their point, cannot be drawn without ascending from whence they started. I am not saying that in the body of the earth there is nothing but excrement; for although it appears entirely excremental, whether in its excrement is enveloped a pure substance; which entirely spiritual cannot subsist without the administration of a body: as we see in all the things which come from it, whose seed and first matter is invisible; but is carried and driven by the corporeal mass which is even engendered with it, because nothing is corporified without excrement.

Whereby to the generations of things this substance is separated from the body of the earth by the operation of influencing heat; neither taking nor retaining anything from this earth: but only helping itself to its support. Which has served from the beginning if not a receptacle & store of celestial influences; or to better say that a vessel or this spiritual matter performs the operations: as will be more clearly treated with evident demonstration in the next chapter, where I will speak of separations. But would it be pointless to separate things, if after separation they remained useless and without action. The goal to which Nature tends is to vivify by separating, in order to avoid death which, moreover, only comes from the abundance of excrement which suffocates the pure & natural substance: I mean natural death, & not violent & forced.

That if the seeds of things always remained buried in this excremental earth, nothing would come out in light, and would receive the benefit of life. But the virtue of Heaven by its vital influence draws them out into the primitive spirit, which fills with it the departure & expands in all kinds & each of them, according to their nature & composition so requires. The vivification therefore comes from the purification that the Stars do by influencing: with which also flows a virtue of increase & restoration. For being in continual motion they are also in continual influencing, & therefore in perpetual vivification: incessantly adding life to life. What can only be done increases does not follow, with conservation & restoration: One by the indeficient maintenance of life, the other by the infinite resupply of what employs it & departure to the generations of the species: as clearly seen in this first corporified matter; which pregnant by celestial impregnation feeds, multiplies & increases by itself, pal a living source of nourishment & growth which flows inexhaustibly.

Which is the cause that it is called dragon or lush serpent in itself: Ever reborn & germinating like vegetables, wherever it is. Of force that any place & place which will have been once populated with it, will never be deprived of it, some enema or burn that one can make of it. And this is certainly one of the most distinctive marks with which we can discern this raw material. These are therefore the principal virtues which this universal spirit received from the celestial influences from the beginning of the world, and will receive until the end: always producing marvelous effects in all the members of this great universal body. But one might ask me why this first matter, which I said to have received so many pure & virtuous influences from Heaven, is ordinarily found stuffed with so many vicious qualities? & how does it retain them after having received them, seeing that it is constantly at work in the actions of separation, vivification, increase, conservation, & restoration? for if it does not separate, it must mortify.

And if it does not increase, preserve, and restore, it must indeed diminish, destroy, and weaken: which, to tell the truth, it never does. I will answer that the Stars have a double influence; One natural, the other accidental. The natural is that which is innate in them, and was given to them from creation, which is this government of the universe of which Hermes speaks in Pimandre, by which they maintain it in its being, guarding & conserving it by their virtues of destruction, decadence, & annihilation of the virtues of this influence, with which the Spirit of the universe is incessantly furnished & endowed, as we see; which applies them & shows them in all things to which it gives increase & subsistence. But the accidental is that which occurs to them beyond their nature by the occurrences of their situations & looks: And this changes at all times, so that it is never similar: & has power only over the effects of matter, and not on matter itself. For whatever malignant influence happens, we see that the earth in its center does not allow the operations to be duly carried out, & ceaselessly produce animals, vegetables, & minerals.

That if mortifications sometimes happen, that only proceeds from the malice of the aspect which only touches the surface of the body, that is to say the excremental mass, and not the interior substance, which is the same thing. And in truth this accident changes: so much so that this influence operates sometimes one thing, and sometimes another completely opposite; What the natural & principal never does, which remains fixed & permanent at its point. From there must be drawn a conclusion that the first matter as simple of itself only receives the celestial virtues, which it still receives and keeps in its terror. Now we must declare how it retains them; in order-to prove what Hermes says, that his strength remains whole being converted or turned into earth, all the more so as all the celestial virtues descend & agree to the center of the earth: & as their courses tend only to the information of matter which is like a receptacle of the supreme Ideas. This matter itself, being full of forms, not actually, but by possibility, is diversified by innumerable specifications.

Thus she is not properly a body, but a quasi-body, and the continual companion of bodies, which she always craves by a desire for information toward which she restlessly moves and leads him. Which motion & conveyance comes to it by the action of celestial fire which I have before said beings the prime mover in Chaos. What the ancient poets like Orpheus, & Hesiod described under the name of love, & that Homer & Pindar François, Ronsard,

I am Love, the great master of the Gods,
I am the mover of the heavens,
I am the one who rules the world:
Who first out of the hatched mass,
Gave light, & split the chaos,
From which this round machine was built.

Since then this matter of its own nature & desire tends to corporify, who can say with valid reason that by corporifying nature strips it & deprives it of the very virtues that cause corporification? And since coming to take shape it is converted first and soon into earth; Who would want to deny that this earth is not endowed with its same virtues? For although because of the commixtion & competition of the elements it has some impurities, if in its depths it is still very pure, so that after its purification the most powerful & active of all the elements, which is fire, there is no more destructive power, because it surpasses it in perfection & subtlety.

This is why it penetrates all bodies so quickly; invigorating them & increasing in strength; restoring & conserving in them what it finds there to be of its nature, namely the radical humidity; that by its igneous fusibility it purges & separates the excrement which envelops it & tries to suffocate it. In a word, it is this excellent medicine which Solomon says is drawn from the earth, and which the prudent man will not disdain. It is still the precious salt to which this great Doctor of Doctors compared his Apostles, as to the most exquisite treasure that the Heavens have produced. For he would have immediately said you are the diamonds, the rubies, the pearls, the gold or the silver of the earth, if he had not known that all these things, although admirable, have nothing in common. they are comparable to this general salt: to which alone they owe the homage of their glorious perfection.

This medicine operates like fire by consuming: the impure which separates from the pure, by a perpetual banishment of the Heterogeneous parts; & an adoption of Homogeneous. Heaven having thus engendered this virgin in the womb of the earth, she has rightly retained the virtues of her parents. And as the child who is naturally participating in the moods of his father and mother, by the commixion of their seeds, was called by the ancient sages by a name properly composed of the names of his two progenitors, namely Androgine; that the poets said Hermaphrodite; because he could not yet be called man or woman, being incapable of producing the effects of either: also it is appropriate to attribute to this virgin the name of Uranogea, where terrified Heaven, since being earth she nevertheless has in herself, by their virtues, all the Heavens enclosed & joined by an indissoluble bond: of which she shows the admirable operations. Which, however, I have already made here a sufficient opening to those who by the light of their noble intellect will be able to cross the dark thickness of the black forest: & as Virgil says, to whom will be given from above to enter the dark dungeons of the earth.

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Of the separation of fire from earth; from the subtle to the thick, & by what industry it must be done.
CHAPTER III.

The very wise working nature teaches us by its own operations that we must in all things consider the end to which we wish to arrive, and where we must begin our works. For this reason the prudent inquisitor of natural secrets must have true knowledge of the principles, progress, and qualities, both internal and external, of matter, so that, claiming to accomplish some excellent work, he does not confuse the end with the beginning, and by fantastic regimes. & unknown paths he never strays & moves away from the great, plain, & straight path that Nature traced from the first project & foundation of the world. The divine Hermes knew well how to take this path by the perfect knowledge he had of the constitution of the universe: & wanting by Art to follow the vestiges & natural traces of it imagined very prudently that the earth is the principle of all things: & the first which was created by separation within the belly of chaos. This is why he thus entered directly into the Sacrarium of the natural mysteries through the terrification of this prime material, which I said above is nourished in the matrix of the earth.

But since it is not enough for an Architect to have the materials for a building, if he does not have the science to build and implement them: Hermès was not content to be provided with the materials suitable, but he carefully researched & learned the means to implement it, in imitation of the great Physicist in the making of the world: creating from it a small world to which he knew how to enclose all the virtues of the great one, from which, & on whose patron he would have taken it & fashioned it. Considering therefore that what he wanted to do was a very perfect thing, and that to achieve such perfection it was necessary to begin with the low and still gross things, that is to say, by the separation of what was superfluous and harmful to his work: he first wanted to divide the contrary Natures, to avoid the ruin of it. In what truly we can say that he took the bird by the foot, according to the adage: & makes its entrance by the real door & alley which leads straight to the cabinet of the secrets of Nature. For separation is the beginning of all things, and the first operation which distinguished the confused members of the universal body. By dividing the misshapen heaps of chaos first began to clear & arrange the order & form of the elements: for without this separation day & night Sun & Moon, Winter & Summer, would still be one same thing now: Metals & minerals so diversified, would have only one same body: And all the plants one same seed.

It was therefore necessary that Nature begin this beautiful order and distinction which we see embellishing the universe by the work of separation. But coming down to particular things, let us consider that this learned worker begins all her labors there. Generations do not begin or end except by separation: & by separation food increases & maintains all bodies. That if I wanted to expand in the proof of this truth by each of the species, I would wrap myself in the confusion of the same Chaos from which I would never emerge for the infinity of examples that would be offered to me. I will therefore lay this first foundation, that nature begins all tasks by separation. But since it is not enough to know this if we do not also know which things it separates, and where this separative virtue comes from: it is necessary to examine this matter so that my discourse works regulation and by order.

However, before entering this list, it seems appropriate to define this separation, and to declare how many kinds there are. Now, separation in general is nothing but division and distinction of dissimilar things; as from heaven from earth; of the Sun from the Moon; & other things I have already said. As well as pure from impure, hot from cold, dry from wet. And from this definition I will derive two sorts or species of separations. The first will be simply different & not contrary things, like parts of the world that were separated from the first chaos. Or else to come down to particularities, like wood from the bark, leaves from the fruit, root from the branches.

And this species will simply be called distinction, because in truth these parts are not divided nor cut off from each other: whether we consider the principal members of the world, or else the particularities, for, although the earth and the Heavens seem separated because of their situation, namely of the top and the bottom, if is it nevertheless cut off from each other, there being a perpetual connection & alliance between them. As well as one can gather from several places in this book. This is why Homer, no less admirable in Philosophy than in poetry, said that the earth was attached to Heaven with a chain of gold. Moreover, following the example that I once gave, the leaves & the fruit, the wood & the bark, the branches & the root, are not separated & divided as opposites, but are each distinguished in its own way. ornament & place: nevertheless having a certain kinship & connection, without one occupying the other, but agreeing, helping, & supporting each other.

The second kind of separation is the disassembly or unbinding of totally strange, contrary & superfluous things: which have no natural connection with the substance of things: like the impure from the pure, the cold from the hot. , the coarse with the subtle, & similar things. Not that I mean to say these things cannot be together, but that their assembly & mixture causes by their diversity the destruction, or at least prevents the action of the innate natural virtues in the pure substance. And this manner of separation must properly be said to be division or cutting off, which Nature practices in all her productions, in order to free one's own actions & virtues in everything. The first is therefore only as a distinction of parts that are truly dissimilar in situation & figure, but nevertheless homogeneous in substance & virtue. For it is a certain thing that the wood, the bark, and all that is of the tree, participates in this innate virtue which is properly particular to it, but general to all its parts. As for the other subordinates, there may be dissimilar ones, that is to say, which receive more or less substance, but not contraries: for the same effect does not produce diametrical things in a single matter. ; as from a healthy plant a poisonous worm cannot issue, even though it is beneficial to one body and fatal to another; as well as the verastre which feeds & engraines the quails, & kills the man: not however being able to exert these contrary virtues in the same subject. That is to say that the verastre cannot feed & kill the quail, nor poison & feed the man altogether.

The virtue proper to the plant is therefore in the whole plant, and each of the parts of the plant is truly dissimilar in situation and figure, but not contrary in virtue or substance, because the leaf and the fruit are of the substance of the plant. , & have more or less the virtues of it. You may want to object to me that cabbage produces two different effects, according to popular opinion, which considers that their juice releases the belly, and their marc tightens it. To which I will reply that if it is proper to the substance of this plant to let go, it is impossible for restriction to come from it: for, to tell the truth, the marc is not substance; as it is sufficiently experienced in the digestion of the stomach which takes in the substance of the cabbage by food; but he rejects the mass as excremental, and which has no nutritive virtue, which virtue is all in the substance, and in each part of it.

Because the substance has this property that it does not receive in it any contrariety, but only the more or the less: What I hear of the actions & virtues of it, not of the essence. For example of which one can say that the man in each part of the man is not more or less man than another; but well we see that the virtues & actions, of man are more excellent & powerful in one than in the other; & in this member here than in that one. The similar is to the simples of which we see the parts more or less hot or cold, dry or humid one than the other: what their colors and flavors denote, however there is no contrariety in these things; for we do not find that one part of a plant kills or poisons by too much coldness, & that the other heals by too much heat: but we do find by experience that the flowers & tops of the branches are more subtle in action & virtue than the trunk or the lower parts: especially since the characteristic of the purest of the substance is to rise to the highest: & the less pure to remain closer to the excrements, to the lower parts. What Nature wanted to practice for two reasons, one to adorn & embellish the plant by the variety of its digestions: the other to give to humans, even to all animals, what more or less made them need for the conservation of their being; showing herself in this to be a very careful mother, who prepares all necessary and proper things, each according to her degree, as much as her industry and power allows her, for she never goes beyond simple perfection: as with herbs, flowers and seeds are the most perfect parts that she has been able to develop. Which afterwards the beginning art or Nature has finished are by him led to a higher degree of perfection, by the same path as Nature's tooth: knowledge is by separation: as will be said hereafter. Nature therefore by this first kind of separation only distinguishes things for ornament of the subject, & utility of animals, or other parts of the world, between which; she sowed & planted an alliance & reciprocal kinship, so that all preserve & help each other according to their naturalness & sympathy.

But the second manner of separation is different, for by it Nature, or art in its imitation, divides or cuts off contrary things; that is to say, it distracts from the substance all that is not of its essence, but rather is its enemy, being nevertheless with it, even though it is not of it: like the pure of with the impure, the subtle with the gross, the substance with the excrement. This second kind of separation is also made for two causes as well as the preceding one. One to preserve pure substance from corruption & death; the other to make its virtues & actions freer by stripping it of all coarse starch.

For the impure thing that envelops the pure of substance & mingles among, ceases to quarrel & fight it until it has overcome & suffocated it, giving entrance & access to mortal corruption that does not cling never to simple & pure things, but only to orders & compounds. All substance, therefore, is simple & pure of itself, & consequently not subject to corruption nor to death: as we see in superior things removed from all excrement. But the lower ones are not so, for they dwell in the midst of the impure islands of the world, of which it is natural to destroy and mortify: as that of purity is to vinify and preserve. Corruptions & mortifications come to men through the islands of the world, in which they live a short & painful life full of boredom & languid illnesses, no longer no less than a criminal enclosed within an order & obscure charter, where he transits between death & hope, among infection & vermin, sated with the scrap of spoiled meats & briefcases.

For all foods are impure, & carry with them the executioners of life, namely the hidden venoms from which death finally murders us in treachery by our own hands, &with our consent; having in them only such a small quantity of vivifying and nourishing substance, and still so much embarrassed and infected with excrement, that the digestion of the stomach can hardly attract it alone. These venoms entering & penetrating thus in the bodies with the substance, they do not cease increasing there and piling up, until as long as they have obscured, even extinguished the light of the life, & mastered the legitimate action of Nature , which is vivification, if by medicine & separation they were not prevented & cut off. So it is excrement that causes corruption, which comes to us in two ways. The first, from the seed of the parents, who, unhealthy and corrupt, produce an impure and corrupt seed, which gets worse from race to race. And which, however, is subject to the correction of medicines, which arrest the course of this active corruption tending to mortification.

It is properly this accursed Satan who circles the world, incessantly seeking to devour the poor worldlings: And for this cause he prowls around the terrestrial globe, that is to say, around the excrements of the world which have their principal seat in the earth. ; which even vomits corruption on the other elements. Thus the living men here and there are corrupted in them and by them, and therefore can only have a corrupt seed which always becomes more and more corrupt over time. Because our age, more vicious and overwhelmed than that of our ancestors, has made us worse litter than that of our fathers; as a more depraved will come out of us; who will be some other capable of still surpassing her in outbursts.

The other source of corruption arises from the abundantly excremental foods, by which the bodies are infected so that this infection passes from father to son, as we see in leprosy, & other hereditary diseases. Now these foods acquire this corruption from the place of their generation. For after the sovereign author of all things had disposed of the confusion that was in chaos, he caused the higher things to remain pure and subtle, & the lower orders & coarse as much as the nature of the substances is to rise towards the place of their origin; & that of excrement to sag & fold towards the center. Hence it is that the pure which is in the animals and vegetables rises & seeks the top, making them rise & grow until it is delivered from the excremental masses which ensnare it & attach it to mortal corruption, & that he can reach the place where he is further away in order to live there without alteration or failure.

Hence it comes that the more spiritual and subtle creatures inhabit haughty places as more purified, and live on suitable foods and similar to their natural substance. But those that are more corporeal dwell in low places, & remain among the faeces & filth that have their seat in the lower places: this is why they are injected & spoiled, living from what is confused & mixed among the islands of the world. For whatever the earth & other elements (which are the receptacles of these impurities) can produce, is corrupt & defiled, begetting therefore corruption & defilement in all that is fed from it: by means of which the blood acquires a bad disposition, which causes the malignity of humors, to some more, to others less, according to the extent of the inquinament of the parents, & the excessive quantity of the use of corruptible things from which proceeds the cause of the destruction & mortality.

For if the earth and what it begets were as pure as the sky, all animals would live the same life that celestial hosts live. But Nature has established this necessary law that what is more bodily lives around what is more corporeal: & what is more corruptible & defiled around what resembles it. Now the earth is the lowest of all bodies, and therefore the grossest and most corruptible. Nothing can therefore come out of it that is not similar to it, if the intervening art of separation does not remove this corruption & impurity, drawing what there is of pure substance in the bodies: what the true Philosopher can do with industry. I have & never will have any intention to offend the Doctors, that on the contrary I honor as it is ordered.

But I wonder, with many learned people, of the lack of care they take to bring the Apothecaries to a more useful curiosity in the preparation of their medicines, then that they find themselves so often frustrated with the hoped-for success of their vulgar procedure: because they want to heal & restore sick bodies & debilitate, their brewing quality of beverages in which there is so much impure & coarse faeces, that the little substance in which the helping virtue lies is submerged in venom, & has no power to act against evil; nor Nature to help him in this action, because she herself is tormented in this conflict, as much or more by the impurity of the remedy than by the disease.

It is therefore to want to fight corruption with corrupt & corrupting weapons: which I consider to be impossible. For, as Petrarch said, never have the rivers been dried up by the rains, nor the fire extinguished by the flames. Corruptible added to corruptible increases corruption. They also try to restore the debilitated patient by feeding him food which they consider easier to digest & less impure or subject to corruption, but they do not consider that they are advancing very little & that the food, whatever choice they do not profit, especially since having no action or destructive force capable of examining or lessening the cause of the evil, they only serve as a feeble support to the miserable life stumbling from weakness, which for that reason does not leave to expire; if Nature does not herself make some effort, and revolts against her enemies to counter her from their mortal attacks: or else that it be guaranteed by exquisite medicines, elaborated by industrious artifice to supernatural purity & perfection: the incorruption & virtue of which restores pristine vigor, & by the same means uproots the origin of the disease. For all true medicine must do these two operations of purging & restoring everything together.

In which lies the whole art of medicine, although today the lesser of these two parts is in use, namely purgation: & that the most excellent, which is restoration, be abolished, or neglected through laziness or greed. So be it, do we see some of their potions entering the body of man having an effect other than letting go of the belly, & often purging, not what causes the disease, but only a few excremental matters which in no way affect the harm: & sometimes by simple badly prepared, or dispensed, & improperly adapted, cause superfluous evacuations which offend Nature already offended with danger.

Which is irritated, so much speaks emptiness that it especially abhors; than by the violent movement which is made in such purgations, tending rather to kill than to heal. What violence of movement she hates less than emptiness; for she is impatient with the assaults of these two sworn enemies to her destruction. Wherefore, vulgar medicine scarcely cures stubborn diseases with its common drugs prepared in the ordinary way. That if one of many is healed it does not happen through pills, boluses, or drinks, but by the virtue of nature which is still sufficient to overcome the impure quantity mixed in such remedies, and to profit from their little substance. Or that the venomous force of these excremental & corrupting things, pushed & rejected by vigorous Nature, attracts & carries with it some portion of the peccant humor which resembles it, & this by attraction & sympathy. Thus such a strange drug working the body moves Nature which, similarly disturbed, & wanting to resist this enemy, rejects & fights violently what is harmful & damaging to it.

If every medicine must be suitable and not contrary to Nature, it must necessarily be purged of all these venoms, which it has received only from the excremental and corruptible mass. This is why the true physician must first choose the things which are most suitable & sympathetic to the human body, & purge them of their impurity: or else which naturally have in them a general virtue & innate purification & hidden within them. Which purification cannot be done otherwise than by the destruction & separation of the harmful impure, & the restoration of the pure which was suffocated by filth. But because it is not my profession to practice medicine, nor my intention to treat it here more, having said this little about it only to free myself from the strait or the wind of the occasion had launched, I will resume my journey & will say that since there is nothing in base things that is not infected, enveloped, & as buried in the corruption of excrements & faeces which engender mortification & prevent the freedom of the legitimate substance, & of its actions, it was necessary that by necessity nature practiced the remedy of the separations, which are made by division & retrenchment of the pure with the impure, from the subtle to the coarse, and from the salutary to the destroying. But all the more so since this admirable worker performs such operations in secret, working there only inside the bodies by secret digestion, and without ever going beyond this simple perfection to which her power is extended, which makes the corporeal Elements cannot lead the bodies where they are enclosed to the supreme degree of their property: the Philosophers have prudently taken it into their heads to separate this substance from the corrupting mass at all, & after this separation lead it through the paths of Nature, which are the digestions & sublimations, to the highest degree of purity, acquiring for them a new form by a second begetting, so that they have taken from things all their first Nature, quality and property.

Having, to put it better, changed what was impure body, into spirit full of purity: what was wet & cold, into heat & dryness. Practicing this not only to cash & simple, but also to the great compost of the world, which is our universal spirit. For if the universal Nature of things is not renewed, it is impossible for it to reach the state of incorruption & renovation. Regeneration is therefore the first fruit produced by separation. But as the grain can generate nothing of itself if it does not die and rot in the ground; also it is possible for nothing to be renewed and regenerated except by previous mortification. Mortification is therefore the first rung to ascend to separation, and the only path to achieve it. Because while the bodies remain in their old corruption & birth, separation can never come between them, except that mortification, that is to say putrefaction & dissolution, has passed there.

What Jesus Christ himself divinely knew & made known, saying that unless man dies in imitation of a grain of wheat, he cannot acquire incorruptible life. Not that he means to say that this life must be acquired by bodily death, for if he were thus the wicked, villainous, dying would have the same advantage of the virtuous righteous: But he means that the old man must die , that is to say, that man mortifies & separates from himself the old corruption which he had drawn from the seed of our first father.

But this corruption is properly the intemperance & excess that came about through the bit of the apple, since which man has not stopped dying, because from then on the earth & all the animals it produces began to be infected. of the venom of this deceitful snake hidden among the fruits, that is to say the food, by the delicacy of which it entices the poor humans to get drunk on it, & to swallow the forbidden morsel in which their death was hidden. And the serpent is the corrupter whom I call Satan because he crawls on the earth, & the circuit incessantly mingling & slipping in it, & what it produces of animals, vegetables, & minerals, in order to poison the earth. world, & introduce into man the tyranny of death. From this intemperance and excess of living has come the deprivation of virtue, vice being properly only a banishment of justice, and justice nothing more than a temperate desire and continual progress towards good. It is therefore necessary that this intemperance & excess die in us, especially as they engender in man all kinds of sins, & spur him to malice & wickedness.

This is why we are commanded to be sober, avoiding greedy & drunkenness, main progenitors of carnal desires. And that we fast in order to slow down the pernicious vigor of the intestine flames which move our senses, & kindle our blood to corruptions. But is it well recognized by those who have anatomized man, that there are two men in him, one celestial & immortal, the other terrestrial & corruptible: one who is the captive, & the other the prison. But it is a great question to know how it is possible that the celestial buried in this filthy and spoiled abyss can preserve its essential purity there? Because it is very certain that the liquor, however excellent it may be, loses its precious taste or smell if it is long enclosed in a bug vessel.

And that the healthiest man in the world will run the risk of being infected if he lives in a pestiferous house. The celestial man is good & self-sincere. But joined to the earthly, to which impurity & vices are natural, it is very difficult that it is not tainted by them. The depravity of this essential purity undoubtedly comes from the bite of this apple, which is, to speak naively, the intemperance of candied foods in pernicious & contagious corruption. For this cause it is therefore necessary to mortify this intemperance & corruption, to rebuff this old destroyer of one & the other man, & to regenerate by a new life what approaches the incorruption of the celestial father of the male. Now our restorer Jesus Christ has only taught us two means of regeneration, one by the water of baptism, the other by the fire of the Holy Spirit.

Water is the one that washes away stains, fire is that which consumes & separates all impurities from pure essence. And just as his precious blood (which is true water) purges the vices & cleanses man from death which the mortal corruption of the earthly father has procured for him. Water also dissolves & purges the dregs & excremental filth that corrupt all substances. The fire of the Holy Spirit consumes & separates the excremental impurity of sins, the fire likewise divides that of the substance of things, which on this occasion must be mortified in order to be regenerated. And this mortification is the putrefaction & digestion which makes her more fit to receive the benefit of separation. This mortification is done in us while the Sun of the Holy Spirit darting its divine rays around the inner globe of man, which is the heart, they heat it to the center, & gradually consume there the corrupting affections of the old Adam.

Chemical fire in the same way, reverberating the tips of its flames around the body it wants to purge, has this virtue of burning & annihilating what is impure & strange in nature. According to the more or less that this impurity is rebellious & inobedient to dissolution & separation, which then afterwards is accomplished by distillation. It is therefore the straight path that nature holds for the regeneration of all things, which would have no laudable effect in medicine if they were not reborn by means of fire and water. This is why after their second nativity they remain free in their forces & actions, which before were buried in the excremental mass, & could not exercise the vital functions with which Heaven by its benign influence had enriched them, no longer no less than the man being still imprisoned in the charter of old Adam cannot produce any praiseworthy and virtuous act.

But before embarking further on deducing the practice of these things, I will take up the order at the beginning: namely, that having defined the separation & how many species there are, I will now declare that they are, & whence proceed the things which must be separated: and whence comes the separative virtue. I have sufficiently warned the curious that in every body there are two parts, one is the excrement, and the other is the substance. One which is essential, the other which is accidental. Now the substance simply considered as I said, is entirely pure & without any corruption: the excrement, on the contrary, totally impure mixing with the substance is what spoils it & perverts its purity. The generation & formation of substance has been sufficiently elucidated in the first two chapters of this second book.

It now remains to decipher the being and the qualities of excrement. Whereupon I inferred from what has already been said, that nothing should be separated except excrement, laying this foundation that there is nothing in the sublunary world between the things that are passable, which is empty of excrement. For when God separated the parts of the world, there was a reduction and collapse of what was coarser in the raw material, as heavier and less subtle. And from the heap of faeces which gathered around the center below, was formed the earth provided with the true substance: but confused in the coarse thickness of it, after Phoebus had slain the monstrous Python, swollen with the poisonous humor that had been generated among the earthly silt. That is to say, after the innate dry had drunk up superfluous moisture by the operation of natural heat, the earth began to feel the actions of this substance hidden within it. Which substance is this spiritual matter, never idle, but incessantly prevented from generating and vivifying. Which properly must be in this place called earth, because it is truly the proper & virtuous substance of the earth, & that alone which engenders all bodies by its own corporification, according to the ideas of individuals. What I once depicted in the Ode Pindarique dedicated to the Grand Duke of Alençon, my very honored Lord & Master; from which I will relate here a few verses on this subject.

The mind focused on the face
Of this indigestible mass,
The surrounding all around,
Make matter separate
Heavy, light,
And the black night of the day.
Then hoarded mood
The heavier & colder body
Makes the stiff roundness
Than a tight squeeze
Water or air counteracts
Of such firm & even weight
That without suffering even badly
Cannot fall into decadence.
Then pouring the soul within
And the seeds of the world,
The second nanny fact
From Heaven & blazing fires.

Now all the more so as from this universal separation, what was more innate & subtle chose the top for its seat, & what was coarse & massive descended low to rest there, it happened that the celestial bodies distant & separated from all filthy faeces remained immortal, expanding in roundness, both because they rose in one flight from the beginning, and because the naturalness of eternal things desires the round form, which is the only indeficient form & accomplished. It happened on the other hand that the gross and earthly remained subject to corruption and death, because in corruption was joined an assemblage of contrary things, namely, elements differing in qualities, as heat with coldness and moistness with dryness. .

To which was also mingled the commixtion of these impure faeces which were properly the dregs of the first universal matter, which of itself was not created pure as some imagine, because all that would have come out of it and would come out again n he would therefore have been enslaved to death. And what is more, no generation could be made in the lower world, neither having any alteration nor mutation of the forms, which would all have only one face: without distinction of top or bottom. Things would also remain pure & subtle, & consequently deprived of ornament: Even to speak of branching, there would have been no creation of matter nor of the world. It was therefore necessary to mix these coarse faeces with the subtle substance: For where there is only purity there can be no action, because nothing can act without a patient; the pure having no empire over his fellow, nor the impure over his fellow.

Now Nature, which is in continual action to separate the pure from the impure, for the preservation of the essence and the growth of life, has for its sole subject this substance, mixed with impurities, which always retains the the state and nature of its first creation, only nourishes it, multiplies it, and increases it with nourishment, multiplication and increase of faeces, which are not consubstantial with it, but birth companions, or uterine sisters. So be it, those who have by divine inspiration found the means of extracting this first matter, & of corporifying it to the limitation of nature, know by experience some purity, neatness, & clarity that it seems to have, if it is accompanied by a great deal of earthly filth, which extracts from it with great industry.

Moreover, it seems to me that I have already, by fairly valid proofs, made it known that every massive body is fed & maintained, not by this visible excremental earth, but only by this spiritual matter, & yet we see that they are all full of excrement: & even their whole mass is nothing but excrement, in which this spirituous matter suitable for corporifying is lodged invisibly: same weight & quantity as we took them. It is therefore not from the mass that we draw the oil of our life, but from this pure essence & substance hidden within it. In short, excrement is nothing other than the impure domicile of this nourishing spirit, and like a cart which carries it to the places where it must be distributed in order to accomplish the required separation and digestion.

Haven't trees & plants seen excremental mass incorporated into them & isn't this mass the support & conduct of this vivifying & vegetating spirit which makes them grow? I am not saying that all that is corporeal in the tree or other individual is totally excrement: for in each one dwells I do not know what part of the substances which I cannot simply call body, but only capable of corporifying in some sort this that nature cannot make of itself. Because in such a way that what is seen & touched is truly generated by corporifiable matter, if, however, it is not the substantial body, and nothing is seen but excrement. So that nature never causes anything to appear there of what is the essence of life, and the substance of the thing; or to say more clearly what is of the first & last matter: But the art whose industry exceeds the simple power of nature, can do it well. For the ingenious physicist considers that even in natural creations the spiritual matter and substance of things is never found pure, if being mixed among the faeces, it follows that it is heterogeneous to them and strange, because we see it separable from the digestions of the stomach, which rejects the excrements, and retains only the substance: not that this separation falls within the sense of sight, but of the intellect, by the appearance of the effects, when we see the feces separated & thrown aside as useless for the maintenance of the essence of the bodies.

Then the augmentation, restoration, and vivification which happens to bodies by this substance certifies it to us: but nature hides from us the operation which performs these actions. The substance is therefore separable, it is necessary that the purity be innate in it which is homogeneous & similar in all its parts. Now this purity cannot be discovered or brought to light by nature, which never labors except simply to bring things to the perfection of its design. But the artist sees that heat is the only way and the tool that nature uses to achieve this perfection, & that fire is the only purgator & separator which always tends to perfectly purify.

Then seeing that in every body there is some pure substance in its center, which can be separated by nature, if not at all exactly, at least according to the extent of the forces of this nature; he resolves to take the same path & to use the same instrument that nature has taken, to have the fire, & to lead it so that in the destruction of this substance which is pure in its center, it burns & separates all excrement, even until, having reached a very high purity, he perceives that this fire no longer has any destructive power, but rather an action specific to preserving it, exalting it, & to introduce there view dyeing & quality similar to his; finally converting all this very worldly substance into its own nature.

The minister of art therefore judging that in all things this substance is infused; & that all things can be burned, remaining after their burning an ash that the fire cannot devour; he wisely concluded that in this ash that remained there was some hidden treasure, not subject to the rigors of the flames. So that continuing his operation he finds there salt, which is not generated by the fire, but which remains victorious over the fire, like a pure gold of each burnt body. This salt is therefore the last matter that remains of bodies, and not the ashes from which it is extracted in the last resort, and from which afterwards nothing more can be extracted.

Because if it is converted into water by humidity, this water is re-frozen into salt by heat. From which one draws the consequence that such water was the true Mercury from which the bodies had been first created: & that this water being hidden in this ash prevents it from being consumed in the fire by burning: Just like the universal Mercury hidden in the bosom of the earth before the production of the bodies.

This is why the learned Rouillasque, in his writings, calls this humidity mercurial fire water, because fire engenders it & nourishes it, even increases its goodness all the more as it remains in it longer. For it is the last operation of fire to make salt, and salt is nothing but dry water, which acquires and preserves its temper and its dryness by fire, which necessarily is of the same nature. What I am saying here so that it will not be found strange that I have maintained from the beginning of this book that fire is not without humor, from which being nourished it is force that it participates, since all things must be fueled by what they are made of. So much so that fire & mood are like two correlates that can only be imagined without each other.

And no doubt the elements have such a connection & affinity between them that one participates in the other: & each of them is found in its companion. For the earth contains its water, its air, and its fire: The water has its fire, its air, and its earth: The air has its earth, its water, and its fire: And the fire has its water, its air, & its earth. Without which participations there could be no conversion between them: and neither would there be any sympathy or propriety. We can therefore gather from what has already been said that there is nothing empty of excrement: & that excrement & substance are the two parts of which all bodies are composed, & that nothing except excrement alone should also be separated of the subject as accidental, and which has no affinity with the essence of the substance. We can similarly understand that fire is the only one that procures & facilitates this separation. But it is time to say how it is done, for it is not enough to propose that separation is the beginning of the works both of Nature and of art, nor to know that these things are separable, if the no one knows how this should be practiced.

I have said before that there are two kinds of separation. One that is made by distinction & ornament, of which I will remain silent now especially since it belongs to nature alone, & not to art. The other which is made by division or cutting off of the parts: which is the one whose practice I wish to clarify. I once said that all visible and tangible things are composed of these two contrary parts, excrement and substance. As for substance, it is in itself simple and indivisible, whether it is generally taken for the first matter of all, or else for particular species, according to the impression of the celestial idea or form which is infinite.

That is to say that in the limbo of the universe, or else in each species of compound bodies, this substance is one in essence, virtue, and quality. And it cannot be said that in the same subject there is a part of it of one kind, and the other of another: but it is not so with excrement. On what I will lay this foundation, to know is that there are only two things by which all separations are accomplished, which are fire & water. And that there are only two separable things in all bodies, one of which is divided by fire, and the other by water. In the first place, we must hold as an indubitable thing that the nature of fire is to consume & destroy everything that is burnable: And that of water to wash & cleanse the substance of the refuse that defiles it. Fire devours all that is volatile & of the airy quality, because it is its own food.

Water divides everything earthly & gross. It is therefore necessary that between its two extremes there be some middle disposition which must be saved and guaranteed, having in itself neither faeces nor adustion which subjects it to the power of these of these two expugnators. Whereby it is very clear that adustion & faeces are the two corrupters & destroyers of all things. What the divine Hippocrates recognized when he said that all diseases come from the air, or from food. Meaning that the excess of meats full of excrement, & the air easy to receive corruption, & which easily corrupts & starts the excrement with a fire exceeding that of Nature; are the cause of all diseases. For the excrement of meat fills the bodies with earthly impurities;

And the inflammable air is what hears the sulphurous & combustible matter there: which, easily conceiving the ardor, also consumes with it what is vital & radical, carried away by the greatest quantity of what is volatile & burnable. Terrestrial faeces and adustion are therefore the two authors of corruption, and what prevents in all things the vigor of substantial actions. That if we desire the familiar proofs, the stench that digestion and excrement produce, we will satisfy too much. Because what smells badly to the things that we burn, shows that it is nothing good. Likewise there are stinking fumes from the excrement coming out of the bodies, which come from corruption. But besides this corruption which they engender, there are still two inconveniences: one is the prevention of penetration, the other that of fixation: which are the two actions most necessary for the preservation of life.

Because what nourishes & maintains life must necessarily be a subtle thing in order to penetrate bodies through their simplest parts, in order to strengthen & sustain, like a secret oil, the light of life hidden in the center of bodies. That if she was coarse she would opilate, suffocate, even suffocate rather than enter through such delicate & untied ways. On the other hand, what holds & maintains life in a state, must also by reason be something stable & not leaky. That if was volatile, death at every moment would enter us, introduced by the corruption engendered by the starchy adustion which continually besieges our lives. Earthness therefore prevents intrusion, & adustion prevents fixation & stability. From this may be drawn a salutary advice for Medicine; namely, that any true medicine which is taken inwardly to restore life debilitated by disease, & to unearth the cause of approaching death, must have two properties, namely, to penetrate promptly to the center of health, & to preserve that center, by dilating it & bringing it back through the whole body.

What the ancients once practiced with happy & glorious success. And for some time this too barked & envied Paracelsus; who, following in their footsteps, has discovered for his posterity what so many centuries heaped up on top of each other had kept buried. Do & say who will want the opposite: but I dare to affirm that without the operations of fire nothing can be led to purity, nor fixation, which are two parts that we must above all seek & introduce in all medicines. To which I am led and confirmed by a strong reason: which is that no truly medicinal body being in its first nativity, that is to say in the first form, enveloped in the excremental thickness of its feces full of corruption, can not reach the seat of health, nor counterguard it having once encountered it; because it does not have this subtle penetration, nor this fixed permanence required for the re-establishment of what is spoiled and corrupted; & to the conservation of what is restored. For there is no appearance that this can be done by vulgar preparations, either in substance or infusion.

As for the substance, the impossibility is found by itself, since it only produces a violent purgation which tends more to dangerous debilitation than to salutary restoration, as I have already shown. And as for the infusion, he cannot thereby draw anything simpler than a little nitrosity which is in all bodies, with some parts of the excremental faeces. Whence it comes that the truth the infusion attracts some exterior taste of the thing, but not the interior virtue, which in its center has a taste quite different from the superficial matter. For it is usually seen that common infusions are all full of bitterness, which one tries to correct by sugar or honey, since most Apothecaries do not derive from things their natural sweetness, at which nature rejoices.

For any bitterness which comes from heaven, to which the epithet of bitter is commonly given, conceals in its depths a sweetness which cannot be discovered by simple infusions, but by fire, with ingenious artifice. Being without doubt this sweetness the perfection of all medicine. This is why Arnauld de Villeneuve says, if you know how to soften the bitter, you will have all the magisterium. What Brachesco knew well, as he testifies in his dialogue entitled Démogorgon. To return therefore to my subject, this hidden sweetness cannot be manifested unless it is entirely developed & devoid of its earthly faeces, & of this volatile & airy adustion.

For the earthly engenders the strange flavor because of the salt's own excrement; from the diversification of which, according to the diversity of the species, and the places where they are generated, comes such variety of flavors; For all flavor is caused by salt, and the more salt there is, the more flavor there is. Besides, what is airy & volatile engenders bad & unnatural odors, which by the adustion & inflammation of the unctuous & burnable sulfur throws out this stench that one smells of what one burns. That this volatile thing is an excrement is sufficiently proved by the stinking fumes of the burning bodies from which the soot attached to the chimneys and smoky floors is generated.

Which retains the smell of burnt bodies, & the bitterness of salt excrement. And abundance is further verified by the blackness & obscurity that this vapor imprints on everything it touches, preventing most of the light & splendor of Nature, which always desires purity, & to see itself separated from darkness, as he perceives in all bodies, of which the most perfect shine with a greater luster, coming from their purity: & the others remain more or less dark according to their composition more or less confused with these impurities: As well as the perfect or imperfect metals.

And the precious stones give ample knowledge of it. And if we want to leave the distant & strange peregrinations, & by the advice of the oracle finish our curious journey in ourselves, looking well for the causes of our indispositions & more flagrant illnesses, we find that they arise from those foul fumes, which darken the light of our health: whence follows an apparent hint of what is going on within. For the healthy man, because of the internal clarity of his natural disposition, wears a clear and brightly colored face: But the sick man, no sooner is he struck with the disease than he shows his attack in a certain dark and leaden pallor, which discolors & dulls the naive of this first complexion. And all this change proceeding only from the fumes of the adustion & inflammation of the excremental sulphur, which spread through all the limbs & infect them with sulphurous soot, even to their surface, by means of the pores which make the bodies pierceable.

We can also say that this pallor & discoloration also proceeds from the fact that nature, feeling itself offended & besieged by disease, causes all the clear & clean blood to be withdrawn from the center of bodily health, which is the heart, in order to gather there & join all one's forces, to virilely fight & support the onslaught of evil, abandoning on this occasion the exterior devoid of this natural clarity. Whose exterior remains as mortified earth & tending to discoloration & obscurity: Because the earth in which evil begins to convert & return, is black of its nature, as fire is clear & candid of fient, like two elements of opposite qualities. The earth, therefore, on its side, as thick & dark, gives darkness: & adustion of sulfur as sooty & smoky darkens likewise.

Because of which both are causes of corruption, destruction and spoilage in all things. And there are properly only these two who engineer & pursue the ruin of everything, for what they are in everything: & there is nothing down here among the compounds that is exempt from it, except gold, & precious stones, which Nature has elaborated to perfection, as much as it has been possible for her. So much so that death is in all other bodies a perpetual hostess, which they try to enthrone things in order to destroy them.

But nature, as a pious mother and careful preserver of the work of her hands, has armed in their favor two powerful and subtle champions to beat down the pride of these insolent adversaries, & drive them out of their fortress. It is fire for one, exterminator of this sulphurous adustion: & water for the other, which separates & takes away this terrestrial starch. Now, as nature is ingenious and subtle in all her operations, so she has left art endowed with such subtlety and industry:

For there are only these two ways to arrive at separations; Which nature itself has followed from the beginning of the world, from which first shapeless seeds, empty, and confused, were dissolved pell-mell in the waters, from which they were separated by means of the fire of the spirit of the Lord extended by above, which was the first agent and mover in the separation of Chaos, from which it followed that light was immediately separated from darkness, the distinct forms from confusion, the generations from sterility, and death from life.

So much so that if things had remained confused in their first disorder & mixture of the impure with the pure, of excrement with the substance of the Earth with the Sky, & of life with death, all would be deprived of the action of power, of essence, & of life, leaving the whole mass lying uselessly in its confusion. The artist therefore having entered into the consideration of these things & seeing that nothing can display its virtue until the confusion of excrement & impurities is banished from it, he has chosen water & fire for his coadjutors, to the example of Nature whose operation he curiously remarked, even in the generation of metals, which are all the more perfect the better they have been mondified and digested in the stomach of the earth.

By which it is a point which remained fixed & resolved, that fire & water are the general & principal means of separation. But all the more so as the composition of things is diverse, and some yield more with difficulty than others, it was likewise necessary to diversify the actions of these two, without however going astray or deviating from the plain path of Nature. For to some, flammable and infecting unctuous adustion & sulfur wanted to be drawn from one kind, & to others earthly starch from another.

Calcination was invented along with sublimation, to purge adustion. And for earthly starch filiation & dissolution have been put into use. Descent has also been practiced to preserve weak bodies & easily inflamed: But all these things are done by fire, like calcination, sublimation, & descent: or by water, like distillation & dissolution. The ways & precepts of which are distributed in so many good ancient & modern books that I will deport myself out of discretion to speak of them more, since all my speech adding nothing new to them, could neither bring ornament nor ease. It will suffice for me only to say what I know of it in general by form of definition: Namely, that calcination was invented for hard & rebellious materials because of their continuity & strong composition, that it prevents them from receiving easily the separation of their excrement without being divided by their smallest parts.

And from this come four uses, which are the burning of impure & fetid sulphur, the easier separation of superfluous & strange terrestriality. Internal sulfur fixation & faster dissolution. For the nature of fire is to consume the adustible parts which are not of the essence of the substance: to facilitate the division & rejection of earthly excrements: to fix & strengthen the radical sulphur: & to multiply the salt in the bodies, which alone can afterwards receive dissolution by water. Now I say that calcination falls only on bodies which for their continuity hardly yield: Because spirits or things that are volatile and slightly fleeing in the fire cannot be calcified without the addition of things fixed and dissimilar to their nature: intention or purpose of calcination being none other than to extract the salts from all things, because in them consists the best part & principal secret virtue of bodies or spirits, to which is attached that corrupting addition which for this subject must in all sublimation let go & evaporate as useless: in order better to deliver from the earthly faeces that middle substance which remains, prepared & conveyed to purification & fixation by the action of fire. Now this practice of sublimation has been found for what the calcination which cannot be accomplished without extreme violence of fire would raise the pure with the faeces without any advancement of separation or purification.

It is quite true that sublimation requires some fiery violence, but it is only then that the sublimable thing is deeply mixed and attached to the faeces or lime of some fixed body, the better to arrest and retain the earthly filth. And this way of sublimating is the safest; except for things that have their faeces able to stop themselves. The descent is practiced for two purposes, one to extract oil from the plants, without burning them, the other, to mondify the fusible bodies before they are rendered leaky.

These are the three ways of separation which are made by fire. There remain the two others which are made by water, namely distillation and dissolution. The first is done by the inclination & the filter, in order to draw the clarity of the things dissolved in the water, with the water. Because that which is done by the still I put it in the rank of sublimations, before it is done by elevation and not by enema. This, which some consider indifferent & ineffective, is not however to be rejected, but rather to be valued, as one of the main operations of nature, which has established it as the only means of separating the earthly filth opened & loosened by the preceding calcination, & prepared for separation: & thereby lead & convey things to the advancement of their perfection, to the purity of which this manner of distilling them elevates & sublimes, being for this subject of some sages called secret sublimation.

The second operation which is carried out by water, namely dissolution, is carried out by moist and moderate heat, like that of horse dung, of the bain-marie, of the vapor of boiling water, or by infusion in the water: or else by burial in humid places: but all these arrows fly to the same white, which is to reduce to water the calcined things, so that by this liquefaction the earths by filtering remain subsided at the bottom of the vessel. The reiteration of this practice is very subtle & necessary, almost in all things. For if by continuous calcination, we wanted to separate the simplest parts of a compost, & reduce in salt what it has of salty essence, an irreparable inconvenience would happen, because the intemperate & assiduous force of the flames would sublimate & constrain the best & greater part of what is sought with so much care, so that there would remain only very little of the soluble matter with a large quantity of faeces.

Apart from remaining in the fire for too long, this remaining material could be vitrified. It is therefore better not to hamper or violate nature by excessive haste and to cover up patiently at reiterations. This inconvenience happened to me once in the calcination of the common Crystal, which, wanting to purge of its excrements to reduce it to true essence by a long ignition, I found it entirely vitrified with its faeces & therefore useless for my purpose, & for any other work. Because even though the Crystal seems clear, lucid, & transparent, the first black fumes, then purple ones which appear in its calcination, with a stinking & sulphurous odor, testify well its excremental earthiness just as the white ones which follow them are true indices of the homogeneity of the substance, which ultimately remains clear & floating in small quantities, as long as it has reached Nature & consistency of pure crystalline salt: & during these last reiterations the ungrateful odor which is felt at first changes into a very smooth & pleasant, similar to violet powder.

Now from the reiteration of the calcinations, besides the things predicted, come two good things: One, that the calcined thing acquires by habituation to the fire this subtlety & permanence to the medicines of which I have already spoken: The other, that what is often dissolved acquires penetration, prompt & subtle intrusion, & powerful virtue of transmuting the state from patient, from sickness to health from languor to vigor, from destruction to restoration & perfect amendment. These are the ordinary ways of all separations which tend to no other purpose than to sequester the pure substances of their corrupting excrement, and to elevate them from the heavy earthly thickness to purity: and in short from imperfections to perfection. What Hermes wanted to teach, when he said that one separates earth from fire, & to interpret himself added these words, & the subtle from the thick. What he wants to be done gently, & with great industry. Because by speaking of the preparation of the general spirit of the world after the terrification, & by the same means opening the way to that of all individuals, he wanted to make it understood that in this earth there is something difficult to retain & keep, namely a light & volatile spirit which is preserved by the temperament of fire, & which on the contrary would easily vanish with the separable part which abounded always more, & overcomes in quantity the most of fixed substance, if one does not governed the operation with patient gentleness and ingenious method.

To which the artist must observe an important maxim: it is the distinction of the three sulfurs, of which the two are separable, namely the external which is lost by calcination & dissolution, & the internal which disappears by the only decoction: But the third is that which one calls fixed: which is properly the true sulfur of Nature, & the proper subject of the substance, to which the Philosophers have given the name of agent , or fixed grain, or element of fire, in their physical compost. As for the external, it is the first volatile & edible, especially since it is entirely foreign, & the first pasture of fire. The internal is more united & rooted in substance, & hence dislodges only with greater violence & continuance of fire:

This is why before its departure it takes on all colors, beginning with blackness, which is the first mark of earthiness, adustion, &corruption: & the forerunner of putrefaction & mortification. Then traversing through the other mediums, one gradually arrives at whiteness, which is the color of the air, whence it rises to the igneous color, which is redness, in which the power of art ends, & the empire of fire: beyond which there is no further progression. Something that the poets have fabulously depicted under the character of the inconstant Protheus who was transformed into various monstrous figures to frighten & deflect those who tried to capture him. Now this variety of colors is caused by the internal sulphur, the true author & producer of all the tints & diverse variegations that one sees by nature & by art in all the things of the world. And can be distinctly noticed in the decoction of this first universal subject, as he has (as I have already said) produced them to me once.

But as soon as the whiteness shows itself, immediately the sulfur of Nature appears, which Geber says is white on the outside, & red on the inside: for this whiteness is finally followed by the redness, without any other aid than fire continued & increased by degrees. , which made one of the sages say that their white stone was a gold ring covered with silver. I wanted to say in passing these few words about the colors that we find designated by all good authors: not to presume to teach here the preparations & operations that I know well to be necessary for the accomplishment of their great Elixir so exalted & highly praised by them: But only to make the curious disciples of the learned Medea recognize, who by a careful and profound inquisition try to enter the sacral of the mysterious Physics, what are in all things the sulfurs that must be removed or preserved.

Believing that I have used the time worthily enough that I steal from the economic business to which I am attached, if I can restore some vigor and sparkle of life to this languid part of Natural Philosophy, which those envious of its glory have buried alive in the tomb of calumny, under the odious title of abusive transmutation & falsification of metals: Although the mere ignorance of the true mystery prevents them from distinguishing it, gives place to their slander: which for its sole foundation rests maliciously on the effrontery of certain challengers, runners, & smoke sellers, who veil & cover with the sacred mantle of this beautiful virgin, their shameless & shameless sophistications with the make-up with which they charm the eyes of the credulous; & as treacherous Sirens, plunge the curious into Caribde & Scilla.


Of the ascent of the spirit to Heaven, and of its descent to earth.
CHAPTER IV.

This great & Sovereign author of all things, foreseeing from the beginning of the world that infection & corruption would be a mortal war in all things composed of body & mind, wanted to oppose this dissension with a certain remedy, in order to save the one & don't lose the other. For the spirit and the substance being enveloped in the bodies, and the bodies buried in corruption, it was impossible that, being the bodies assailed and overcome, by corruption, the spirit lodged in them should not receive loss and damage. & remain with the bodies slave of death, which without interval is on the lookout to surprise nature, & enter in all kinds & species to exercise its tyranny there. The proof of this is too sufficient in the natural and sometimes hasty end of animals, plants, & minerals, which we see arriving by accident of corruption.

And who mortifying the bodies it happens that the spirits run even fortune. That is to say, their life-giving virtues are at all annihilated. But because in all his works this admirable workman wanted to sparkle the fire of the perfect love he bears to the man whom he had destined from all eternity for the sole instrument of his glory, subjecting to him alone all he would be of more marvelous in the creation of the universe: he has in his favor established sovereign remedies both to purify & accomplish the things he had created for his use, and to guard & preserve himself against the assaults of this corruption deadly. Knowing therefore that the two parts of man were created one in the other, namely the spirit to the body, and that the body is continually besieged with corruption by its sensuality which attracts it and entices it to intemperance, engendering infection & damage to all the members, he predicts that the spirit which is its host could not remain there free from contagious corruption.

Also we usually see that the man entirely given over to bodily intemperance & overwhelmed with sensualities, deny by the same wicked & licentious means in all excesses of spirit, bankrupting the love & fear of God: to the honor & glory of the world: to piety towards his own: & to charity towards the next. So that current sinisterly wallowing in the quagmire of its crimes, it is impossible that the spirit does not participate in the sorrows as it will have participated in the pleasures.

And considering that the whole human generation since the first excess, which occurred by the bite of the forbidden apple, never ceased to run to this death, and that by this means the ruin of all man was inevitable, he prevented this misfortune by a wonderful remedy & out of human comprehension. Because knowing that by the spirit & the body the man participated of the Sky & the earth, he wanted the remedy to have a similar participation. What was found in Jesus Christ, our only savior, restorer, & preserver descended from Heaven to earth, who nevertheless retaining his entire deity, miraculously became man with a mystery misunderstood & incomprehensible to common sense, especially that salvation could not come from the earth alone where corruption reigned; so that it was necessary that the water flow from it from above where the fountain of purity is. He therefore came to earth to dwell in us & with us, to enclose us within the barriers of righteousness & temperance, regenerating us to new life, by a change of mind & body, mortifying those of corruption & sin , to give birth to those of sharpness & virtue.

Which could only happen by him alone because of the extremities of the two natures that he had to take, making himself divine & human, in order to average the alliance of low things with high things, distant from each other by this incompatible distance of death & life, of corruption & purity.

The earth received this inestimable treasure & too much exceeding its merit, by a means it did not know how to understand whence, after the regeneration projected by the water of purification, & the fire of the Holy Spirit, it ascended to Heaven, entirely stripped bodily accidents & passions only, & not of the body that he carried away incorruptible & glorious, having acquired immortality by his death. And from the dexter of the father he will come back down to earth after the universal conflagration to renew the world & separate the good exalted & destined for life, from the bad depress & condemned to death.

This is how the Sovereign Father of Mercy has provided for the salvation of man, whose body conjoined with the spirit is likewise its preserver whom Heaven has brought into the world, and who must be sought out and discovered by the light of Nature, being the man for this purpose endowed with rationalization & judgment, in order to be able to know & understand the gifts presented to him. But this man who to make such a search had been created as celestial, forgot himself, employing rather what was noble and divine in itself in I don't know what frivolous and perishable vanity than in the inquisition of useful sapience and solid truth. In short, he preferred to follow the inclination of his earthly offspring, than the divine & celestial intelligence, which he allowed to stagnate in him, like an indifferent thing, & which would have been transmitted to him occasionally from above.

Is this why the race of men has always been almost extinct before having seen the light? (apart from a few whom a favorable star looked upon favorably at birth) has more eagerly pursued the possession of treasures and perishable goods than she has thought of the acquisition of celestial gifts and precious riches that the good mother nature displays to him publicly and in all places, for the salvation & maintenance of his life: damaged rather than rescued by abundance which is commonly shrouded in mortal corruption. And it is clearly seen that the most spiritual among the vulgar having no glimpse of the brilliant brilliance of these infinite riches are only amused by their superficiality, cowardly abandoning the divine virtue concealed in their center.

Which has caused so many errors, not only in their medicine, but also in their philosophy, that they both go crawling & tottering in the dark caves of uncertainty, to be guided by no bright light. Calling minds therefore to the clarity which should lead them to the sovereign remedy which God has specially intended for the preservation of man by filling him with heavenly blessings, I will dare with all the humility & sincerity required & decorous within my reach & profession, not as a Theologian, but only as a simple disciple of the Philosophers, to sketch here some naive conceptions, which the amateurs of truth will be able to favor as much as they will find them reasonable.

I would therefore say that any intelligence that man alone communicates to man is uncertain and confused, because ignorance and irresolution usually lodge in it. But that which he receives from the universal light is very clear, and very firmly based on an unshakable foundation. For to know absolutely is to know things by their first causes, and there is never any certainty in the seconds until one has arrived at their source. This is why the Nature of species cannot be known unless knowledge of their genus has preceded. Nor the Natures of the Microcosms (whose number is infinite) without having first understood that of the great world which gave them being.

Man also cannot be well known without prior knowledge of the Macrocosm, of which he is only the effigy, no more than this Macrocosm without having understood what & how it is made. For in what way could we know the man who is at his beginning only a little mucus or formless mucilage, nor how he rises to perfection, if we have not known those who engendered, not the second parents, who are the father and the mother, but the first, namely Heaven and Earth.

And even if we had no perfect intelligence of the first creation of these, how could we know them? Just as the limb of man lies in the womb where there is only a little mire, which later forms on the copy of the parents & by the same progress & ways that they were perfect. Thus the Sky & the Earth, & all that is in them, that is to say all this great world, is like a limb & mass in chaos, of which one can have no light if one does not contemplate the plans & projects of its distinction & formation. Let us therefore come to the original in order to know the extracts: & by the pattern let us judge of the things imitated.

I say that the first & sovereign creator (who is like the point from which all things start, & the inexhaustible source from which flow this infinity of streams,) has a nature which is particular to him, namely to produce & preserve everything in the universe. Because it is proper to the perfectly good author to produce & procreate things, then maintain & preserve them, when he has created them. Of this first effect, which is creation, the secret is hidden from everyone, and we only have it as an effigy to generations.

But the second is open at least to the enlightened, as elect & born of the spirit, not to the children of the flesh, lest these precious daisies be unworthily prostituted to filthy & stupid swine. Now the first and most excellent degree of this conservation was done and taught by Jesus Christ, in the manner declared above: who willed to be imitated in all things, having with an unspeakable mystery given himself as patron of all the good works that e must do in the world. For Nature always walks with the same step without ever leaving her paths, which she follows exactly in all her works.

Thus, therefore, the father and common preserver provided for the common preservation from the birth of the world. Nature likewise made her plan from the beginning, & has always applied itself to its productions with continual action. For just as it was necessary that all salvation come from above for the preservation of the spiritual part of man, it was expedient by the same necessity that that of the bodies spring from the same rock, so much so that from base things where is the seat and dwelling of mortal corruption cannot proceed salvation or life.

This is why Heaven as a perpetual fountain of immortality & perfection goes continually influencing its virtues on the body of the earth, which the benign Stars favor with their lovingly pitiful aspects in consideration of afflicted mortals: in order to engender in it by these influence For just as it was necessary that all salvation come from above for the preservation of the spiritual part of man, it was expedient by the same necessity that that of the bodies spring from the same rock, so much so that from base things where is the seat and dwelling of mortal corruption cannot proceed salvation or life.

This is why Heaven as a perpetual fountain of immortality & perfection goes continually influencing its virtues on the body of the earth, which the benign Stars favor with their lovingly pitiful aspects in consideration of afflicted mortals: in order to engender in it by these influence For just as it was necessary that all salvation come from above for the preservation of the spiritual part of man, it was expedient by the same necessity that that of the bodies spring from the same rock, so much so that from base things where is the seat and dwelling of mortal corruption cannot proceed salvation or life.

This is why Heaven as a perpetual fountain of immortality & perfection goes continually influencing its virtues on the body of the earth, which the benign Stars favor with their lovingly pitiful aspects in consideration of afflicted mortals: in order to engender in it by these influence especially since low things where is the seat and dwelling of mortal corruption cannot proceed salvation or life.

This is why Heaven as a perpetual fountain of immortality & perfection goes continually influencing its virtues on the body of the earth, which the benign Stars favor with their lovingly pitiful aspects in consideration of afflicted mortals: in order to engender in it by these influence especially since low things where is the seat and dwelling of mortal corruption cannot proceed salvation or life. This is why Heaven as a perpetual fountain of immortality & perfection goes continually influencing its virtues on the body of the earth, which the benign Stars favor with their lovingly pitiful aspects in consideration of afflicted mortals: in order to engender in it by these influencewe have an immortal Spirit & vivitrusting, who taking shape within this second mother has shown & expanded her virtues by all parts of the world, distributing them to each creature according to her scope.

And from there are proceeded the particular forces recognized by their effects on herbs, beasts, stones, & other things which have drawn from this general Spirit, this infinity of powerful properties, which work almost miracles in the conservation of our bodies, & of all others. Now, as God was willing to enrich men with the perfections of his son, according to the understanding of their nature: And yet did not want each of them, being stained with vice, to go and seek his remedy and perfect salvation in his fellow man, but in that alone which was the true Ocean from which this perfection had flowed to them. Also Nature, which has always made itself an exact observer of the will of God & imitator of his operations, has not established the perfect virtue of healing & restoration with herbs & particular creatures, but has wanted it to be sought precisely at the center of where it is generally communicated to them, namely in the earth, where this vinifying Spirit is engendered.

For if the simple are endowed with the virtues of healing, restoring, nourishing, and preserving, how much better must he who sends them, and from whom all things receive them, be endowed with them? But to prove that the earth is the treasurer & dispenser of these virtues, the only daily experience is enough for all reasons. She must possess them all, for otherwise she could not give them. It is therefore something worthy of admiration and astonishment that so many great personages have consumed the time of their studies and practices in drawing water from simple streams already far removed from the pure limpidity of their source as having passed through the impure silt of filthy lands & never thought of running straight to the fountain itself.

Not that I want to despise special drugs, but I would like us to look for the general, without however neglecting the particulars. Because I believe that this one is sufficient for all cures, if these are still commendable for putting an end to certain external evils which attack only the surface, and not the center of health, Returning therefore to my goal, I will say again that the earth is the womb in which Heaven has engendered this Spirit which nourishes, restores and constructs bodies, from which alone all solidity and perfection of healing can and must be drawn. Now how one must find & take this powerfully virtuous Spirit, any prudent man that a sincere desire will carry this useful search, must above all be warned to follow incessantly the plan traced by the divine hand, on which Nature itself forms & guides: God, infinitely exceeding Nature, is not in any way attached to natural reasons, any more than a sovereign monarch to the laws which he would have prescribed, which however his people would observe without asking why he would have established them in this way.

But who better followed the features of this divine model than the old Trismegistus, who first after the deluge (according to some) having opened to men the mysteries of the knowledge of God, perfectly touched those of Nature? for besides what he has angelically clarified the divinity, by the Pimandre, where he manifests with an admirable doctrine, the creation of the great and small world; their beginning, progress, & duration, continuing in one flight this sacred Philosophy in Asclepe, it seems that with a prophetic Spirit & voice he loudly declares the regeneration of man to be one day done through of the Son of God, clothed in human robe. And if again industriously struck the same white on the emerald table, where he said: that as all the things of the world are created from a single subject, by the meditation of one, which is God, his magisterium (which is this sovereign & general medicine) will be perfected & accomplished from this unique thing by adaptation. This adaptation, is it not the mirror where we see divine meditation enigmatically represented, to show that Nature necessarily follows in the footsteps of her master: just as in the other books he testified that the author of regeneration has Salvation had to come from Heaven & become man, living among men for their edification? Also he says in the table (which he left as a testament & last testimony of the excellence of his lofty conceptions) that this General Spirit conservator of bodies, to which he attributes the name of father of the perfection of everyone , descended from Those, namely from the Sun & the Moon, whom he told the Pimandre to be the principal governors in this worldly Monarchy in order to corporify himself in the earth, which he names his nurse, by means of the air that he says he carried in his belly, especially since the celestial influences could not be communicated to the earth, if the air that first receives them did not carry them as a mediator & served as their vehicle.

And just as the divine restorer & protector of souls left nothing of his divinity becoming man, so he says that this universal Spirit conservator of bodies keeps & maintains his entire force being converted into earth; that is, by taking on an earthly body. God wanted his own Son, our Redeemer, to be regenerated in his humanity by the water of Baptism and the fire of the Holy Spirit. Not that at the center of his Nature he needed any to be purged, but only because he was among the world & men scoured with corruption to whom he wanted in everything & everywhere to be a true patron of renewal & purification giving them a visible & ample testimony that he was to the flesh of their nature; not defiled nor corrupted, but liable & mortal as well as they.

Like the good mother nature willed that her first born son, who in his center is of pure substance, was nevertheless renewed & as if regenerated by water & fire; that is to say, by the separation of what is earthly from what is igneous; of what is thick with what is subtle; & to say in a word of the impure with the pure. What Hermes means by saying that one separates the earth from the fire, not that one must separate the proper earth from its own fire. For man will not separate those whom God has conjoined, but only from that which is impure & gross, from the pure & subtle of the substance of this earth & of this proper fire, which are the parts or Elements of our spirit. embodied. But besides this intelligence which first presents itself to the eyes of the intellect, there is yet another more hidden one: for having meant by the separation of the earth from the fire, that of the gross and the subtle, he still wanted to say that it was necessary to separate the natural qualities of these two elements, by stripping the damp coldness attached to earthly things & serious, without which it cannot subsist, to clothe the hot dryness, which is of the nature of fire, & consequently light & spiritual.

This is why he adds that he rises from earth to heaven, namely from imperfection to perfection: for Paracelsus calls fire firmament. Now, as nothing can reach celestial perfection without having first left the imperfect & peaceful mortal bark, in which properly overabounds that quality of coldness which causes the accident of mortification, as heat engenders life: that is to say, an impassive essence over which neither fire nor corruption have any more power. And indeed this acquisition of life by death is practiced naturally in all vital creatures. For every sperm or semen must be mortified to animals in the womb, and to vegetables in the earth, before any vegetable growth or specification can be made.

That if this rule is observed religiously to the members, by how much should it be recommended & followed more exactly to the chief? And if by this mortification the life of the accessories acquires some duration, how much more will that of the principal approach perpetuity? Jesus Christ himself teaches us these things by the likeness of the grain which he said could not bear fruit unless it dies first, signifying the mystery of the resurrection which his death was to precede. Because he wanted to die to be reborn to a more lasting & glorious life, showing himself in this, not only exemplary of men, but true patron of all Nature. This Saint & learned Roman Hermit reverently & often times alleged by all the natural philosophers who have written for fifteen hundred years, Morien, says as much of the fixed grain to which Nature has given power to perfect & multiply metals. For he says that unless it is rotten & blackened it cannot be accomplished, & will be reduced to nothing.

I have taken it upon myself to say this in order to teach the less educated how one should recognize the creator by mere creatures. And especially as vulgar men beg for this knowledge of more distant things, doing like those who demand the perfection of the sciences from pupils of the last class instead of consulting the old oracles of the wisest doctors: I wanted by these naive conceptions to conjure them to employ the excellence of this rational soul which is given to inquire what is this sovereign principle, by the most exquisite things which give & preserve life to us, & to all mortal creatures. Mortification therefore necessarily precedes any entry into Life and mainly in this first born spirit of Nature when it has taken shape.

Because one cannot otherwise separate from him what prevents his regeneration for life, and the purification of his essence. Not that in this death he loses his body by burning & destruction of fire, nor by rotting, but just as in the germination of the seeds putrefaction did not annihilate what is embodied in them or just as the precious body of our Redeemer was in no way worsened, destroyed, nor corrupted, always having in him this center & germ of life by which he rose again, to which these two natures were so joined together that they never abandoned each other: for the corporeal retained the spiritual here below as long as was necessary for our salvation & the spirit carried the body Heaven for glory, after the mystery accomplished.

This is why in the exaltation of the Mercury or universal spirit, after the first degree which is made in its preparation by the separation, all that remains in it corporeal and spiritual is rendered volatile, because the elevating virtue still overcomes the virtue fixing. However, in the end, the fixed retains the volatile with itself by the action of helping heat, which increases the forces of the two noblest elements and totally annihilates the power of the two most imbeciles. What Hermes wanted to signify in one of his treatises by the feathery bird which is held back by the featherless bird.

And Nicolas Flamel by the two dragons, one with wings, and the other without, which he had represented in one of the arches of the cemetery of St Innocents in Paris, and in another stone painting next to it of the great altar of the church of Sainte Geneviève des Ardents which he had built. But without getting lost in the detours of these mazes, do we not see that all the vegetables do not stop growing & rising in the air by the force of this volatile spirit, which (as I said in the first book) would elevate them even more for the desire it has to return to the place from which it started, if they were not restrained & stopped by their own earth & body mass in which is hidden I do not know what fixed. Now, in order not to be accused of contradiction by some not yet used to the common terms of our masters, I want to explain myself by warning them that I in no way mean that this volatile spirituality is what I have previously called sulphur. volatile & separable, which is one of the perpetrators of corruptions.

But only the simplest part of this primeraine vapour, which never loses its internal subtlety & acuity, whose nature is to rise & tend to perfection. For to sublimate properly according to the true meaning of the Philosophers is nothing other than to perfect, and to exalt matters from imperfection to perfection. Just as Mercury has its elevating substance, so has it its fixable substance. As for the first, it is innate to it of itself: But as for the second, even though it has it in its center (that is to say in the help of art. And to show more clearly by what paths Nature proceeds in her operations, I consider it very reasonable to say here something of the causes and manners of fixation.

Taking up then this axiom undoubtedly alleged from the beginning of this book, that in the order and constitution of the world an infallible and perpetual rule is observed, that everything that has life must have some duration in it, & that nothing is produced under Heaven that does not have some kind of life in itself, I would say that this duration is done by conservation to a perpetuity. Because the goal of Nature is to want to perpetuate, being the characteristic of the good author to always want to keep the work of his hands, until he has reached the end of old age, and until the light of life is extinguished by the cold drizzles of death, at whose feet it is necessary that all nascent things must prostrate themselves, by that inevitable law imposed on everything that begins, to hang to an end.

That if things remained in their first extreme, which is being born or beginning, without advancing to the second, which is dying or finishing, everything will remain in its Chaos, or to put it better, nothing would consist, & would be the principles of any subject useless, even destroyed by themselves. To avoid which inconvenience Nature has established this order & progression of things, being in continual action & motion, ie conservation & perpetuation. But what extends life and even what preserves it cannot be without some lasting fixation and consistency against the onslaught of destruction.

And this conservative essence is in some species more fixed than others, for which reason they are of longer & durable life, as more difficult to destroy or mortify: as well as the Deer & the Raven between the animals: The oak between plants: & Gold between minerals. What comes to them from the commixtion of the elements in them more equal & more digestible, so that death, which is proper to divide and disjoin, cannot so easily enter into these compounds which are too firmly bound and cemented by strong digestion.

And being the more the bodies are provided with these two remedies, so much the less are they subject to the accidents of mortal corruption. But because Nature cannot of itself reach the perfection of this union & digestion, it cannot also save nor guarantee the bodies from final destruction. Now the industry of art which has always overcome it (although it is driven by it, & can do nothing by itself) considering these things has endeavored to imitate & surpass it by the own course of his same way.

Because seeing that in all bodies the conservation & prolongation of life was done by something tending to fixation, and something at all impossible, and to think of giving it back to him would be a long and very doubtful task. Who made a certain Poet say with good reason: Here or nowhere is what we will ask.

And truly those there have been heavily deceived who have followed stray & tortuous paths, amusing themselves with the common meaning or bark of the words of the wise, & not with the lively marrow of their intention. They must therefore first sacrifice to the infernal Juno; for there was the chief and the source of things.

The prudent & better understood begin all their works by the root, & not by the branches: Elising (as the learned Bacon says) a thing on which Nature has only begun her first operations, by the assembling & proportionate mixing of a pure & quick mercury, with similar sulfur congealed in solid mass: O sacred words, in which this good Englishman, or rather this good Angel, has clearly depicted this unique & true matter of which all the Philosophers have written so many volumes under various figures, & fabulous enigmas: not to hide it maliciously, but to reserve the privilege of this knowledge to the learned & pious; who, having once discovered it by their assiduous study, and dear experiences, disguise it and adorn it in their turn.

And to leave the masters the opinion only by ignorance I bring this passage in this place improperly, and take Marten for Fox, wanting to understand that this matter so ingeniously represented by Bacon is this first & general Spirit that I took for subject of this book: I will beg them to believe that I know well what difference there is between the father and the son, or between the begetter & producer & what he has produced & begotten. Daring to say without vanity that I know one & the other by reason & experience.

Because the sage wanted to instruct the inquisitors of the mineral principles for the making of the stone of the Philosophers, discovering to them the first metallic material prepared, composed, and specified by Nature, and I am dealing with the universal material not yet specified, which can be properly to say raw material of this first metallic material as being this generalissimo genre of genres so celebrated by Raymond Lully: but I used this sentence as an example & authority, without however there being anything absurd, since this universal Spirit is the common father of the mercury and the sulfur contained and proportioned by Nature in this unique subject of the masters.

Now, I want the curious artist to consider two things here, one to choose by subtle imagination an invigorating Nature capable of affecting all bodies, the other to choose something that can itself invigorate & re-generate . And do not want to understand, however, that it is necessary to take two different and separate things or matters, namely one agent, and the other patient, but only one which has the two virtues together of vivifying and being vivified. As for active vivification, I have already said enough about it: but as for passive, I say that every principle must have its origin in itself, for if it were born from elsewhere it would no longer be a principle.

And since he gives being to all things, it is necessary that in engendering them, he draws from himself this replenishment & perpetual plenitude, because of which he is in continual action & movement to vivification, which prevents him to die, because he is never abandoned by himself, having his movement from him & within him. What Macrobius subtly disputed on Scipio's dream clinging to the soul of man, how much better the dispute can be adapted to my intention, making it serve for the soul or spirit of the world, which is the subject I am dealing with.

By which from his same arguments I will draw this: Everything that moves by itself is a principle of movement and in continual life, he who is in continual life can only have vivification from himself, is he therefore himself vivifiable? Now the general Spirit of the world is such. And since he becomes a body in the earth, or better said that he takes his seat there to corporify himself & convert into the earth in which, (as Hermes says) all his virtues, action, & qualities remain whole, it follows that being vital, he himself replenishes life by multiplying himself by his own virtue.

What we perceive in this universal Mercury which is always nourished and resupplied in its mine, so that even though we extract what we can from it, if it will grow there again as much as before, and in no matter where it is thrown, it will never fizzle out there. Not that I mean to say that it is generated from the earth, but in the earth, through all the parts of which it crawls & pours out incessantly by multiplication & vegetation. What the ancients wanted to signify by this serpent that Moses himself said went sliding on the earth & fed on the dust of it. This is what moved the cabalists to call it Claw of the Sepulchers, especially since it devours & consumes the lying bodies there when it converts them into earth. Not that dead bodies nor the earth are its food, but they are the seat where it feeds and feeds.

It is the place where he moves, turns, & flows without rest, of which Medea warns Jason, saying to him: What the ancients wanted to signify by this serpent that Moses himself said went sliding on the earth & fed on the dust of it. This is what moved the cabalists to call it Claw of the Sepulchers, especially since it devours & consumes the lying bodies there when it converts them into earth. Not that dead bodies nor the earth are its food, but they are the seat where it feeds and feeds. It is the place where he moves, turns, & flows without rest, of which Medea warns Jason, saying to him: What the ancients wanted to signify by this serpent that Moses himself said went sliding on the earth & fed on the dust of it. This is what moved the cabalists to call it Claw of the Sepulchers, especially since it devours & consumes the lying bodies there when it converts them into earth. Not that dead bodies nor the earth are its food, but they are the seat where it feeds and feeds. It is the place where he moves, turns, & flows without rest, of which Medea warns Jason, saying to him:

See the Dragon watching, with frenzied fury,
Who of noisy scale has the body surrounded,
Whose throat hissing smoke & fire loosens:
And who in twisted folds goes yawning the earth
From his broad chest, in the powder imprinting
The sinuous furrows that it traces incessantly.

I wanted to bring these two considerations into play, not only to show what the search for this Mercury must be, but also to verify that what it contains that can be fixed in it is nothing other than this vivifying essence. , which being duly fixed perpetuates & preserves life in all bodies into which it enters, by expelling excrement by its purity & perfecting imperfect things by its perfection.

The purpose of both natural and artificial fixation is perpetuation & preservation, which is done by means of the tincture that Mercury acquires by this fixation. For tinting is truly life, and life is nothing other than what covers, paints, and colors the body with this complexion which makes it appear vital; & which is lost & tarnished at the approach of death.

This is why Nature willed that the blood in which life consists should be dyed red, and that the more it would be pure, clear & vivid in redness, the body would appear & indeed be healthier, more beautiful, more disposed, & more vigorous. As, on the contrary, being by accident troubled, thickened, and charged with austere blackness, or changed into false colors, the body felt and suffered the severity of the evil within, and gave evidence of it without by its discoloration. We notice the resemblance to plants whose vital vigor appears in their lively greenness, of which change denounces decadence, and a journey to their death. The similar is to metals, whose perfection or imperfection is discerned by their colors.

Gold has of itself a magnetine force which attracts hearts by the brilliant luster of its sparkling & pure tint, in which Nature has spread all she could best, having reserved however for the industry of the art of to overcome again, even to infinity, by the supreme gradation which it adds to this natural splendor which acquires for it the name of terrestrial Sun.

The artist therefore exalts by his labor the orange color in which Nature has limited her power in this precious masterpiece to the highest degree of obscure redness, by which increase the imperfect metals are colored in certain quality to the natural degree by the protection of this artificial dye, showing that this citrine color that Nature has introduced into gold is only a channeling of redness, where lies the height of the perfect virtue of preserving and multiplying.

Which is the cause that this metal, though excellent over all others, cannot of itself deprive them of perfection, nor place preservation to human bodies, as too truly have presumed & published many thousands of challengers, alchemists, & lazy physicists, some with their sophistical amalgams, fusions, & dissolutions, & others by their fantastic infusions, & ridiculous confections. But if these two species of curious people had plunged a little deeper into this ocean of marvels, they would have recognized that the supreme acquired redness is an inseparable accident, producing one and the other a miracle by the excess of its heat which nevertheless consumes only the impure superfluities, and not the substance of the bodies, that on the contrary it maintains and multiplies in all equality, as much as the philosophers say it is as much above the vulgar fire as the vulgar is above the natural heat of animals.

It is quite true that Paracelsus makes much of that which he extracts from gold by the spirit of wine in his treatise on Tinctures, and attributes to it many beautiful virtues, as well as to those of antimony and coral. To which he seems to want to prefer that of Mercury, which he says becomes any tincture being once led to perfect fixation, & which it penetrates the bodies by their simplest parts because of its pure subtlety. What I in no way believe he heard said of the vulgar Mercury, nor of that of the sages, to which only art, helping nature, can introduce these two things, namely perfect dyeing, & accomplished fixing. Tincture is therefore, properly speaking, the pure substance of things, and the body is only excrement.

This manifests itself well in that the bodies after the separation of their tincture remain useless, without virtue, and corruptible; just like carrion deprived of life, movement, & vital color. By which we can say that the tincture is the goal of the fixation: so that by its permanent assiduity in the fire it acquires a perpetuation & conservation to the body which receives it. Now the way to reach this degree of fixation where lies the accomplishment of the whole work, is none other than to preserve by prudence the light and fleeting things, and patiently accustom them to the fire until they burn it.

may suffer very violently. This is why all the good Authors preach nothing else to their disciples than patience, which they say is on the part of God, and haste on the part of the devil. On which I will say as an infallible maxim that nothing can be fixed without previous calcination, which must be done by the conjunction of the fixable spirit with something entirely suitable to its nature, & which can retain it in the fire of calcination, so that by this means accustoming him little by little to bear the heat, he is more apt to suffer the increase of the last fire which gives the fixation.

And the reason why one must proceed with this discretion, is that wanting too quickly to hasten this operation, the special spirituality which causes the tincture would fly away, abandoning one's body without being able to imprint its tingent virtue there. So that it would necessarily be necessary to give this examined body a new spirit, before being able to introduce the desired color into it, which is one of the greatest secrets of the spagyric art, because it is the spirit which colors by means of fire, & not anything else. Now, this tincture accomplished & sovereignly exalted in our Mercury, it follows that he rises to the supreme degree of perfections, indeed (to speak like Hermes) that he ascends to Heaven.

If that after enduring all the mortal torments, he took on new life. That is to say, having made him pass the dark straits of putrefaction, buried in the sepulcher of a ship, he nevertheless rises to the resurrection by the stripping of all things mortiferous and corrupting, by means of which he has attained the sovereign degree of excellence.

This is done by separating the earth from the fire, the subtle from the thick, and then fixing by graduated heat the parts thus purified. But to speak bluntly or riddles, this ascent to Heaven (which is the sublimation & exaltation of these parts elaborated to perfection) would never take place if the separation & purification of them had not preceded, & given rise to the fixation which is the extreme & last goal to which art aspires.

Whence we notice that it is done for two main purposes: one to perpetuate the tincture, the other to separate & draw from Mercury the volatile & burnable sulfur which is in its center, & which would not leave if it untroubled by the long action of continual fire, which must be regulated, lest the violent precipitation should lift up from the beginning the pure spirit of Mercury not yet established. What the Count de la Marche Trévisane openly taught, saying: that the fleeing does not fly in front of the pursuer, and that the fire is done in many ways as it wants to be done.

That is to say that the spiritual part is not forced by intemperate ardor to abandon the bodily part which finally must fix it by the action of its internal sulfur helped by the external & common fire, discreetly led by the required degrees: where the main industry of the operation lies. But (someone will say) if the fixation acquires for it, with this penetrating subtlety, a permanence in the fire, how is it possible that afterwards it can sublimate again? give him wax wings again, and we will see that he will have no rest until he has risen from the ground to try to get out of the tower where he is locked up. Be careful, however, that he does not want to rise too suddenly, for fear that the Sun will melt the wax and burn his feathers, throwing him into the sea. We will therefore do as the wise Dédalle observes the middle of the two extremes: especially since if the flight is low, the humidity of the waves will weigh down its wings, & if it is high, the fire will burn them.

Wasn't it the impatient & blind desire that Icarus had to get ahead of Daedalus who lost him despite the paternal precept, and from which proceeded the pernicious stumble of Phaëton guiding the horses of Phoebus, if not for having considered himself more capable of this conduct than the master who led him taught? who said to him:

To go this way nowhere else I confess to you:
Note only the traces of my wheel:
And to give equal warmth everywhere
Too early to earth & Sky neither rises nor falls:
Because if you climb the sky too high you will burn:
And falling too low the earth will destroy.
But if through the middle your career remains
The source is more united & the way surer.

However, it is not enough to have said these things, although true, according to the mystical sense of our predecessors. I must explain their intention wrapped in the obscure veil of these fabulous words, which are only for experts in the trade. Know then, quite curiously, & never leave this list, that when Hermes said that this thing rises from earth to Heaven, then again descends from Heaven to earth acquiring the virtues of both together, he did not understood by this ascent that matter must rise or sublimate itself at the top of the vessel: But only that by giving back to it after it has reached perfect fixation some portion of its spiritual part (of which the Hortulain says one must have a good quantity & in reserve for this effect) it will dissolve & become all spiritual, leaving its terrestrial consistency to take the aerial one which is the Heaven of the Philosophers then having reached such simplicity, it will be frozen & brought back to earth by a new decoction which will be done by the same degrees of heat, until the body has so much embraced the Spirit that they are made inseparable, thus will she have celestial subtlety, & earthly fixation.

Always following the full path of nature, if this Icarus could not at all elevate (that is to say subtilize) he will have to strengthen his wings, conjoining new feathers with new wax: that is to say by repeated dissolution, which the masters repeat so often that they seem importunate: except to those who hear the consequence of such repetition. What is done to better unite things by mixing them in their smallest parts. What one could not achieve otherwise, no more than the commixtion of the two without the purification of one & the other, keeping however exactly the volatility in mind delivered from terrestrial impurities: & acquiring whole attachment to the body stripped of all internal faeces. It is therefore by dissolution that this thing ascends to Heaven, and by freezing that it descends to earth. Which is naively expressed by two ancient Latin verses, which I have explained in this quatrain:

If the fixed you know how to dissolve,
And dissolves it to fly:
Then, wanting to fix it in powder,
You have something to console yourself with.

This body thus glorified will therefore ascend to Heaven on the wings of its spirit, then in the same perfection as it will have ascended there, it will descend back to earth to separate the good from the bad, to preserve & vivify one, to kill & consume the other.

That is to say that in all the bodies where he will enter, he drives out the impurity, amending & preserving the pure substance of them, because the repeated solutions & fixations will have given him a force to penetrate the bodies, in which otherwise he could not have entered. It is therefore necessary to plunge the young Hermaphrodite & the delicate Salmacis back into the fountain, so that they kiss each other & that Salmacis, delighted with contentment, can say: Come to pass that at no time will this beautiful adolescent be separated from me, nor I from him. ; & that in mutual bliss love perpetuates our conjunction: thus our two bodies will have only one heart and the same face.

Then make the island of Delos appear motionless, carrying Apollo & Diana whom Latona gave birth to there. Fable which does not want to teach us anything except that one freezes & fixes this dissolved matter, in which are contained the Sun & the Moon of the Philosophers. I do not intend (as I have already said) that the reader of this book thinks of finding the Mines of Peru there to satisfy his greed: although in several places I have shown enough to the dessillés than I I am by no means ignorant of the true paths, although I have not yet made up my mind to undertake such a long journey; for certain reasons conforming to those which prevented the good Trevisan for the space of two years after he had perfect knowledge of it from the books. I therefore display here only a precious drug, or rather an inestimable treasure that pious Nature gives us for the maintenance & prolongation of our life, of which she has received from God the charge & general protection. What I do, in truth, is borne out of a laudable desire to serve the public with all my industry, after the favorable Star of experience has led me to the salutary port where I try to address the curious.

For I have sometimes treated this universal spirit so happily that with a very small quantity I have relieved a hundred people almost overwhelmed with various infirmities: there is no doubt that an infinity of excellent spirits have entered very far into this deep forest & traversed by dark paths, who, seeing it filled with terrible monsters, were so astonished that, turning back, they diverted themselves from such a useful enterprise. As well as with a learned & ingenious brush has mystically depicted the kind Poliphile, the courage of which however never having weakened under all these Panic terrors, gave him the audacity to cross one & the other edge of this forest black: & overcoming all obstacles led him safe & sound to the pleasant & desired sojourn of his dear Polia, enclosed in the rich temple of Vesta. I admit that the path he took is open to everyone, but not everyone has Ariadne's net like him to lead them around this labyrinth & everyone is not a Theseus to be able to overcome the Minotaur .

Whose descent is common & easy to all,
But whose exit is difficult:

In one is the work, in the other is the toil:
Few men begotten of the Gods have had this beur,
For those whom Jupiter the righteous loves & supports:
Where the wing of the virtues up to the Stars takes away.

We must therefore first find this brilliant branch dedicated to the infernal Juno: of which Virgil says:

That the whole forest keeps covered with its shadows,
Enclosed in thick, dark, & dark ramparts:
Without which it is not permitted to descend
In underground places. So you who want to go
Seeking the virtue of Nature's secrets,
Through the unknown horror of many dark ways,
Where only the flavor of the Heavens can advance to you,
Seek it with eyes of sublime thought,
And having discovered it, your pure and spotless hand
Grabs it in reverence, & promptly tears it away,
For he willingly follows the lucky one who handed him over,
Since fates once permitted:
Otherwise, there is no force or iron that detaches it,
And the harder we seek it & the harder it hides.

Now if nature has taken care to hide these things, lest they be prostituted indifferently to all, and the swine come to flower the marjoram, or, as they say, rummage in the garden where the roses grow, one should not be surprised that the ancient and modern sages studied themselves to weave so many fabulous veils and enigmatic figures to cover them by showing them: for they knew well that ceremonious Nature does not want us to see her naked.

Otherwise she would never have taken the trouble to mask herself with so many diverse forms and different species, so that by the infinity of these variable figures, her venerable secrets would be preserved from the contempt ordinarily common to things that are too common.

This is why I still deal with it here with the same solemnity and restraint, so as not to fall into the peril of the one who divulged the secret mysteries of the Eleusine Goddesses, which no mortal is yet permitted to elucidate, because they always want to remain secret & chaste, & not see themselves abandoned to public use as well as shameless courtesans.

And if I speak of it with dignity in my turn, those who are advanced in the inquisition of such secrets will judge it easily, because experience is the true and irreproachable mistress of things. For the rest, one should not find it strange if I have sometimes authorized natural & spagyric operations by some conformity they have to the sacred mysteries of Christianity, which I in no way intend to profane, but, on the contrary, to celebrate their excellence and make them touch their fingertips by the testimonies of the care that the eternal author of the world took to provide for the salvation of souls and bodies.

Who has caused certain very learned authors to describe that true Chemistry (which Paracelsus calls Spagyrics) follows the train of the gospel step by step, because by means of it, with the help of fire, all powerful works are tested? virtues of Nature, which the ancients even insinuated in their old Theologies: like the Bacmanes & Gymnosophists in their Gymnosophy: & especially the Egyptians. For the magic of all Paganism, nor the fabulous involutions of the Poets were, and meant nothing other than the discourse of this whole book. What the learned and subtle Brachesco has diligently examined, whatever the envious Toladanus wrote against, after seeing himself disappointed in the experience of the secret which by importunity he thought he had torn from him: having imagined that he took the foam of common salt for the Mercury of the wise, since he had assured him that he was getting away with something vile, cheap, and thrown in the streets. Not taking care that the discreet masters designate their true matter by giving it the name of all the metals, without any deception: for those who know it know too well that it contains all seven together & would gladly ask them if they believe that the Cosmopolitan has heard of vulgar Steel, when he says in his riddle, that Neptune showed him under a rock two hidden mines, one of Gold & the other of Steel.

He is too clever a man to have had such a frivolous thought: but he named the material by that name for the conformity which it has by its polished luster with steel. And indeed it would have been a thing very unworthy of the name of sage in Brachesco to discover in a moment a secret which he had been able to buy from two-thirds of his age.

But so that I may say my share of the meaning covered under these Mythologies, do we not clearly see that the ancient Demogorgon father of all the Gods, or rather of all the members of the world, who are said to dwell in the center of the earth, covered with a green & ferruginous blanket, nourishing all sorts of animals, is nothing other than the universal Spirit who from the belly of Cahos, obeying the voice of the Lord, shed light on the Heavens, the Elements, & all that is in them, which he has always since maintained & vivified & because he is truly lodged in the middle of the earth, as I amply declared at the beginning of this book, that is to say at the center of the world where he is placed as in his throne, & whence as from the heart of this great body, & seat of universal life he produces, animates, & nourishes everything: the surface of the earth which it envelops, which is blackish & of the color of iron, enamelled & painted with all sorts of grasses & flowers.

Virgil, perfectly instructed in all these mystical secrets, gave this Spirit or soul of the world the name of Jupiter, whom he had his pastor Damete invoke for the principle of his chants, so much so (he says) that all things are filled with him. And this God of the forests Pan, adored by the shepherds, may be held for the same thing. Because in addition to this name which means everything, he is still made lord of the forests, because the Greeks held him as rector of Cahos which they otherwise call Hilé, meaning a forest. Orpheus in his Hymn therefore calls him:

By the strong, the subtle, the whole, the universal.
All air, all water, all earth, & all immortal fire,
Befitting with time within a very throne,
In the lower realm, in the middle, in the supreme,
Concerning, engendering, producing, keeping all:
Principle in everything, of everything, which overcomes everything.
Seed of fire, air, earth, & wave.
Great spirit enlivening all members of the world,
Who goes at all in all changing natures,
For universal soul in all bodies housing it,
To which you give being, & movement, & life:
Proving by a thousand effects your infinite power.

Saturn son of Coelia & Vesta, (who are Heaven & Earth) & husband of Opis his sister, (who is this helping & preserving virtue of everything) represents the same Demogorgon. For his children whom he devours and then vomits them up again, are these not the bodies to which he has given being in each of the three genera, which in their end are reduced in him, to reproduce new ones: so that by this perpetual vicissitude, the order established from the creation of the world, can forever be maintained & conserved?

He is painted hoary and sordid, his head covered, his hand armed with a scythe: and for his motto he is given a serpent which curls up in a circular figure, bites its tail. He is truly very old, since he is the principle of everything: He has white hair and beard, which go to him growing as he sees himself in many places, neither more nor less than are the germinating things. It is sordid & unclean of itself, because of the earthly filth that joins it, full of sulphurous & corrupting adustion. His head is covered.

That is to say that the head of his perfection is hidden under the veil of his impurity, which makes him unknown to many, joins the difficulty of his obscure search. His scythe is the biting ponticity with which he slices & devours everything. And the serpent which bites its tail is its virtue and regenerating nature, by which it restores and engenders itself, as is said of the Phoenix, on account of which it is sometimes given this name. So that it is always as it were round and inefficiently growing, crawling through the earth like serpents. I can already hear someone picking me up and saying that the intention of the inventors of this fabulous description of Saturn, which they took for lead, is very ill conceived.

Especially since according to the writings of all scholars in the generation of metals, it is the oldest & first born of all, by the natural freezing of Mercury in the veins of rocks. Which devours all the others because of its rawness which makes it abundant in Salt, because it is from the Salt that this biting & devouring action comes to it; as he experiences himself enough through the cups of the refiners, where he revomits the Gold and the Silver, which he indeed had the power to swallow up, but not to consume and destroy, because in their decoction they have acquired a firmness & fixation capable of resisting the feeble heat of his greedy stomach.

I do not entirely condemn this meaning, especially since it conforms in some points to the above description, but not being so in all as is the one I have deciphered, I persuade myself that if we pass by the judgment experts, the denial will not be for me Maye represented the earth, so called, as ancestress or great mother from which this spirit or universal Mercury takes its birth from the pure & invisible seed of Jupiter, which is the air. For he truly comes out of it by these means, as this learned Cosinopolitan very discreetly explains in his rich treatises. This Mercury is painted with wings in several places, to show that it is elusive & volatile in its Nature. His head is covered with a hat, for the same reasons that I gave earlier when speaking of Saturn.

He wears a caduceus & fatal rod twisted with serpents, both to signify his renovating virtue, and for what I have said of the serpent of Saturn. With which rod he opens Heaven & Earth; & gives death & life. Now this rod represents the powerful Nature, by which ascending to Heaven & descending to hell, that is to say to earth, he acquires the virtues of superior & inferior things. By this same power he draws the souls of the Orc, puts him to sleep, and closes his eyes with an Eternal sleep, as Virgil sings.

Also it is called by some Theriac & Venom, namely death & life; according to usage & doses thereof, because all life consists in Temperance & justice, & death in excess, which is their opposite. There is an infinity of similar mysteries in this pagan Theology which have no other goal than that at which I aim. But it would require a large separate volume: & fear to bore the reader with too frequent repetitions of the same things. It will therefore suffice for me to have discussed this little superficially, to show that all these mythological commentaries with their allegorical historical are invented only to covertly insinuate the admirable operations of spagyric nature. As among the others that of Jason & Médée, according to the testimony of Suïdas elegantly reported by Crisogone Polidore in his preface on the works of Geber.

In favor of which I will dispense with the promised silence, to declare that this name of Medea means cogitation, meditation, or investigation, drawing its derivation from a word which signifies Principle, Origin, source, or reason. For all meditation, cogitation, or investigation, must doubtless have some principle or reason for foundation on which it rests, and from which it springs: giving it the opportunity to make such research with rationalization. This Medea taught Jason (who is the Inquisitor or Philosopher) two things of which all Philosophy consists. The first is to conquer the Golden Fleece, which is the art intended for metallic transmutations with mineral things.

The second is the restoration of bodies debilitated by disease; by healing them promptly & perfectly: then restoring to them that youth or first vigor diminished, & almost extinguished by the cold aconite of the years: Chasing from the bodies by this uniquely universal medicine, all humors & superfluity corrupted & corrupting which lead them to their end, most often precipitated by the excess of such unforeseen accidents. These two miraculous effects were attained & accomplished by Jason, religiously observing the useful advice of the wise Medea: after however a long & laborious navigation followed by infinite perilous chances, because of the dragon & the Bulls that it suits him to tame.

Gold The second is the restoration of bodies debilitated by disease; by healing them promptly & perfectly: then restoring to them that youth or first vigor diminished, & almost extinguished by the cold aconite of the years: Chasing from the bodies by this uniquely universal medicine, all humors & superfluity corrupted & corrupting which lead them to their end, most often precipitated by the excess of such unforeseen accidents. These two miraculous effects were attained & accomplished by Jason, religiously observing the useful advice of the wise Medea: after however a long & laborious navigation followed by infinite perilous chances, because of the dragon & the Bulls that it suits him to tame. Gold The second is the restoration of bodies debilitated by disease; by healing them promptly & perfectly: then restoring to them that youth or first vigor diminished, & almost extinguished by the cold aconite of the years:

Chasing from the bodies by this uniquely universal medicine, all humors & superfluity corrupted & corrupting which lead them to their end, most often precipitated by the excess of such unforeseen accidents. These two miraculous effects were attained & accomplished by Jason, religiously observing the useful advice of the wise Medea: after however a long & laborious navigation followed by infinite perilous chances, because of the dragon & the Bulls that it suits him to tame. Gold & almost extinguished by the cold aconite of the years: Chasing from the bodies by this uniquely universal medicine, all corrupt & corrupting humors & superfluity which lead them to their end, most often precipitated by the excess of such unforeseen accidents.

These two miraculous effects were attained & accomplished by Jason, religiously observing the useful advice of the wise Medea: after however a long & laborious navigation followed by infinite perilous chances, because of the dragon & the Bulls that it suits him to tame. Gold & almost extinguished by the cold aconite of the years: Chasing from the bodies by this uniquely universal medicine, all corrupt & corrupting humors & superfluity which lead them to their end, most often precipitated by the excess of such unforeseen accidents. These two miraculous effects were attained & accomplished by Jason, religiously observing the useful advice of the wise Medea: after however a long & laborious navigation followed by infinite perilous chances, because of the dragon & the Bulls that it suits him to tame.

Gold These two miraculous effects were attained & accomplished by Jason, religiously observing the useful advice of the wise Medea: after however a long & laborious navigation followed by infinite perilous chances, because of the dragon & the Bulls that it suits him to tame. Gold These two miraculous effects were attained & accomplished by Jason, religiously observing the useful advice of the wise Medea: after however a long & laborious navigation followed by infinite perilous chances, because of the dragon & the Bulls that it suits him to tame.

Gold this navigation is the painful search and doubtful experience of things, where one often sails all the time of life without being able to reach the port of this immense sea of ​​Nature. These monstrous Bulls that must be subjected and coupled to the yoke, are the furnaces where the operations must be carried out; which naively represent the head of a Bull, and throw fire through the eyes and the throat, as the fable says. Because it is necessary that there are ventilators by which the degrees of heat are regulated, and the fire preserved from suffocation, especially since if one is not master of the fire there will be many accidents during the course of the work, which would defraud the workman of his expectation.

I can speak about it as an expert: for of the nine vessels which I put in decoction to find the true degree of heat, the eight perished, and only the one remained to me by means of which the experiments of which I have spoken above were made. This dragon always watching over it is this general Mercury that Cadmus once knew how to kill, that is to say fix. The field of Mars where it was necessary to close the teeth of the martial serpent is nothing other than the vessel in which rise these soldiers armed with sharp spears. Which vessel should not be in this place a glass still as Pollidore thinks & says, but a form of Cabacet as the fable says, narrow at the bottom & widening greatly at the top. And it must be of good, well-baked clay: and not of iron or glass. At the bottom of which will rise a camp armed and bristling with spears, who seem horribly irritated, lying against each other to fight as well as in the middle of the battlefield.

Here is what the Poet ingeniously invented, to make the vulgar admire as very strange and unheard of, a thing so familiar that if I named it, people would laugh at him and me. But after Jason had accomplished his labours, he still had to lull the watchful dragon who guarded the Golden Fleece to sleep, and slumber him so that from his throat neither fire nor smoke came out. Which he did by drowning it in the Stigian waters, that is, by redissolving & refixing it with his spirit. There was therefore nothing left for Jason to possess the Golden Fleece, & to rejuvenate his father Aeson, aggravated by extreme old age, if not a single labor that Medea taught him to crown his good offices, it was the fermentation and conjunction of the butter of the Sun with the paste of this prepared Mercury; which of itself is not capable of producing two such excellent effects: being, in truth, only the land where one must sow the pure wheat that Nature has produced & led to the perfection granted to it. By this last labor he finally saw himself master of this double treasure, which he gloriously carried away to the place of his birth: with which he filled himself with wealth & his old father with vigorous health, banishing from him the importunate languor that drags after be the long age.

I will therefore now let Jason & his Medea enjoy their bliss, & will only say that nothing could be expressed by this watching dragon & throwing fire from the throat, more properly than our spirit or Mercury, which is the most lively & inflammable thing in the world, being on this occasion called fiery water, or of life, because as Brachesco says that it suddenly ignites before its coagulation, & is not vine water hand of life, because it vivifies everything.

That if one contemplates it in its apparent surface, who will ever think that there is in it something fixed & not expendable, seeing that so lightly it lights up & vanishes at the slightest touch of the fire?

Or that there was a life-preserving virtue in its center, showing evidently that it is all enveloped in deadly venom, destroying rather than vivifying?

But as God constituted the fiery Cherub with the flaming sword to guard the tree of life, also Nature has established this watchful dragon and throws fire to prevent the entrance to the garden where she has planted the precious tree bearing the golden apples, that is to say the knowledge of the most occult secrets of her treasure: that the learned ancients did not want to write at all, but only to teach by mouth to those they knew worthy.

Who has been the cause that these great and admirable sciences have vanished and for a short time have been held ignorant for counterfeited at pleasure. What Esdas foreseeing to owe future by the banishments, killings, escapes & captivities of the Israelite people, & fearing that such mysteries perish because without the benefit of writing the memory of men could not be greatly lasting, he assembled all the sages who remained until the number of seventy, here is contained sight, intelligence & source:

And so I did. Pic de la Mirandolle, considered a miracle in doctrine in his time, speaks of these books with great reverence: & here are his words. These (says he) are the seventy books of the Kabbalah, in which Ezra has rightly said aloud that there lies the sight, the intelligence and the source, that is to say the inestimable Theology of the supreme divinity. , the fountain of sapience the entire metaphysics of intelligence: the river of science, that is to say the very firm Philosophy of natural things.

These books having been hidden for a long time were by Xistel Pontise fourth of the name started to translate into Latin language for the utility of our religion, but this good work was interrupted by his death. However, they are in such esteem and reverence among the Hebrews that it is not lawful for anyone to touch them unless he is at the age of forty. And it is an admirable thing that there is in this cabalistic doctrine with the decrees some points of Christianity. All this is taken word for word from the writings of this renowned Comte de la Mirandolle.

Now, having in my opinion forgotten nothing of what was necessary for the purpose that I proposed to myself to interpret according to my sense the contents of the table of Hermes, which is an obscure Philosophical Cabal, I will withdraw from this Ocean of marvels, to wipe me with the rays of the Sun of your favors: bidding farewell to your Highness, and proving by legitimate reasons, that true Philosophy is the happiness, the honor, and the glory of everyone.

THIRD BOOK.


Some magnificent & ingenious Prince wishing to build a sumptuous Palace, will order the Architects that having ordered the base of the principal members & designated their enrichment, they practice in a safer & more convenient place a cabinet where he can withdraw & preserve his treasures & most precious securities. So that, in addition to the pleasure he may take in this, he may at the right time draw from it himself what he wishes to give; without the effects of his liberality depending on anyone other than him.

For it often happens to many greats that they are unworthily compelled to beg from their servants (even at the chance of an impudent refusal) a present of little value which they wish to recognize the merits of some virtuous man.


This prince, is the rich & abundant Nature, who by divine meditation has built this great palace of the world in the middle of which she has placed the globe of the earth to serve as her cabinet, & to assemble there what she has most precious. by the contributions it demands from all the other members & Provinces of the universe. Drawing incessantly from this inexhaustible treasure the maintenance of his building, and the substantiation of all his creatures. Which for this cause she lodged here, in order to be like children always close to their mother's breast.

For all that lives in the world dwells in this earth, feeling well by a natural instinct that in it is seated the storehouse and source of life. This is why the sensitive bodies talk & go around here in search of their food, which as a benign mother she gives & supplies to the insensitive, substanting & increasing each other by the benefit of vegetation. So that those who are attached to her by the roots, like the child in the belly of the mother by the navel, receive & draw from her without work their food & their drink. That is to say their life, which they miss as soon as they are separated & cut off from it: As we see it daily in the uprooted trees, & cut branches.

But the others who are not bound to it by attachment, pursue and seek only in it this life which they know to be hidden there: Some by the sole teaching of Nature: Others by the warning of experience joined to that of Nature again. In what certainly all these creatures make it clear that the earth is a very rich & perpetual treasure of life & that they would willingly return to its entrails to be more abundantly participating in it. What has given subject to man (to whom as more excellent of spirit, has been conceded from Heaven to be able to seek & discover things by reasons) to enter into the curiosity of the prolongation of life, which he has judged to have to be drawn & exhausted from this earth which leaves it for everything, nourishing, sustaining & preserving everything: & which never diminishes or lacks in its powerful fecundity, for its center is always provided & full of this vivifying spirit, therefore not estimating nothing so precious and dear as the treasure of life, for which alone he ventures at all perils, and submits to all labors, & often vainly he wanted to surpass all other animals in this curious research, so that as he is created of God very perfect in the respect of all other earthly creatures, he would rise with a bolder flight to the knowledge of things.

For even though the brutes have in common with us that manner of reason, which is according to the vital soul, which the Greeks call reason hidden within, and that some have more of it than others; if they are not capable of the arts, except a few, as Galen said, to whom, however, dexterity comes rather by nature than by institution, which can simply fall only in man, who alone owes say able to learn them, & teach others, contemplating with the eye of a deep & more than human cogitation the things hidden in the earth, under the waters, even above the Heavens, & of its own industry acquiring the most perfect of all goods, is the philosophy: because Heaven & Nature have as it were to each other's boredom contributed their best for its perfection. I therefore consider that it is not out of place to report here a few verses, in which I have depicted this excellence in certain dialogue, in which I have Thimon & Philo discuss the felicity or infelicity of man.

Philo.
Removing from the trial the two best titles,
You produce the inventory & the extract of misfortunes,
And to make the cause obscure & halfway,
You depict the whole man to us in his smallest part:
Part where nevertheless shines among humanity
I don't know what great that smells of its deity.
But consider man in his most worthy form,
Shape from which sparkles an insignia light
Who other animal forces to fear it;
To receive the laws & let it be tamed.

See that noble intellect, that quick spirit that flies
From sunrise to sunset, from one pole to another
In a moment of a moment, on the wing of thought
That Mercury or Iris cannot anticipate.
Eagle that with a fixed eye in their splendor looks
The yellowing Sun & the pale Moon,
Who knew their tracks, & distinguished the towers
That one & the other ends by perfecting its course,
Which clarifies the shade & the nocturnal veils
Has seen from the highest Heavens the last stars:
And brought us back the hidden reasons
Why their various courses go changing with the seasons,
How these divine eyes mourn their influences,
To animate the bodies with celestial essences.

How from the subtlest of these beaders crying
Becomes the exquisite enamel of spring flowers,
Of the least subtle the leaf, & of the largest the bark:
Which despite the seasons maintains the tree in its strength:
How the Spirit of the Adam & General World
Produces a triple genus, & in everything is equal:
As in its purity the gems it procreates,
And the Gold in the bowels of the earth it concretizes,
Then how this spirit of all bodies is extracted
To oppose it to the strokes of homicidal trait.

This intellect was the eye of which it is said that Lincaeus
Had great rocks the transparent thickness,
Seen Pluto enthroned & known what
The Nymphs under the azure of the deep Ocean:
How rich pearl is produced, & increased
In the polished marble of its shiny coat.

And how the coral would be taken from the rocks
As well as a soft grass attached to the rocks.

Who made travel by sea as well as by land,
Defend & increase his country through war,
Build Cities, & fortify them,
Wait for an enemy, or challenge him.

Who of the great body of the world has made the anatomy,
Imitated from the high Heavens the Angelic harmony
And who reduced everything to just laws
Of the compass, of the ruler, & of the number, & of the weight.

This is why God created him with his face & view elevated towards the Sky, not inclined & bending towards the Earth, as well as to the other animals devoid of reason, who care only for the mangaille.

In such a way that nothing is lacking in his perfection but a longer life, & less traversed by troubles & illnesses, in order to be able to attain full knowledge of things & bring out this invaluable jewel of intelligence with which he alone is gratified by a special privilege. This imagination gives rise to the audacity in Paracelsus to murmur against Nature accusing her of inconsideration in that she gave to some irrational & useless animals the usufruct of a very long & healthy life, however much this grace be to them indifferent, & that it has denied men this much desired & necessary good since it was the only way to make them accomplished in the rarest sciences.

Man has therefore generously resolved to acquire by art what Nature had refused him, so that deploying the forces of this intellect he has undertaken to climb the ladder of Philosophy to the highest stage of natural secrets, to know to the restoration & prolongation of life, beyond the common limits of their species. For in this lies the end & principal aim of all Philosophers, who will surely never find anything greater among the spacious forest of the investigation of the mysteries of the world: of which doubtless this Philosophy is the happiness, the honor & the glory. For in the whole universe there are only three kinds of goods to be seen: namely those that are attributed to fortune, such as wealth, greatness, and dignities.

Those that are given to the bliss of the body, such as youth, health, strength, and disposition. And those that belong to the spirit, which are the sciences. As for the first two, they are uncertain & perishable, & cannot of themselves preserve nor ensure the most necessary part of man, which is life: especially since both are subject to mutation & decadence. . But the third, being acquired by more solid means, can not only give the other two, but also equip them against the accidents of fate and mortal corruption, with the assurance and preservation which they lack.

I mean, however, what is indeed truly science, as is the perfect knowledge of the works & secrets of Natures: to climb to which, all the others are only simple steps. This is why excellent men have taken very little account of the first of these three goods, which they have neglected, even abhorred, in order to go about more freely in the pursuit and acquisition of the other two. But much more ardently to that of the third party, like the one on whom absolutely depends the safe and free possession of precedents. For as in all creatures there is nothing more exquisite or desirable than life, which gives feeling, vegetation, and consistency to everything, so there is nothing richer and more precious than what can sustain it. preserve beyond common use. Now is it quite apparent that life is a celestial and divine thing, whatever can sustain it must therefore be of the same nature, because all things are sustained from that from which they proceed. But still, I want to say rather that this preserver of life is life itself. Because the extent & extension of it is done by addition & resupply, in order to avoid the vacuum or failure in it.

The meats we take only serve us for that, because they participate in the life of the universe; & contain in them some particle, that the cook of Nature draws from it & expresses to join it to ours. But because what little they have is too much enveloped in excremental corruption, & is not perfectly fixed to withstand the onslaught of destruction, which is this unnatural fire, which ceaselessly acts to try to banish it from us with the radical humidity, and to remove it from its domicile, it would be impossible for man to acquire this length of life by meat alone.

By which it is necessary to draw it from purer bodies, and to develop it further from all that could infect it and prevent it from producing in us the effect for which Heaven has intended it, which is to increase and vivify the OUR. But rather is it very necessary to enter into the body of the world, and take there that general life which never fails; but carries in itself its multiplication and expansion, in order to produce it afterwards in us, as much as the forces of our natural composition can carry it: because it should not be estimated that by that we can become immortal, since all that carries bodily mass in itself, ie excrement & corruption, cannot be perpetuated.

And we would have to be stripped of all bodies before we could arrive at this title: because after this stripping our life, remaining free, truly resembles the universal life of the great world, in which, reuniting, it rejoices in this as in its own nature, following the rule that everything returns to the place from which it started.

What Theophrastus wanted to understand by the soul of those who will live in the fifth, that is to say, who will be untied from the mass composed of the four elements, & will live in a fifth more perfect than the four: secret that the only embalmed intelligence of the essential smell of Philosophy is able to understand. For this fifth element is not a thing situated above the earth, the water, the air, and the fire, as having at the separation of the Chaos mounted higher than them because of a greater lightness:

But it is properly a simple Spirit of itself, which mixes indifferently everywhere, which nourishes & animates everything, & gives essence to all things: being nevertheless in its center (that is to say in its own nature) free from all corporeality, which is the true domicile of death. Because since the consistency comes to him from the bodies, it is necessary that before this consistency & specification he be very simple & purely spiritual, not mixed nor confused in the confusion of the assembled elements, & consequently not subject to corruption & mortification: which mortification to the bodies is not, however, the annihilation of this Spirit, but only the separation & banishment of it: because feeling the corrupting sulfur which masters the whole body, to seize it & occupy it entirely, he is compelled to abandon the place, & return from whence he came, namely to the center of this great sphere of life, leaving the bodily & excremental masses to the earth from whence they were taken.

Now, since this great world and its life consist of a spherical form, which is the indeficient roundness, the ancient sages took the argument of considering it eternal; & that all the lines & the circumference of the globe proceed from the center as from a source: For they are both made of individual points, the long or round expanse of which can only be imagined without a center. It is quite reasonable to believe that the center of universal life is the seat of the greatest of all the treasures of the world, of which the earth is the true central point.

Also the center of life is in this earth, which has been chosen by this universal mother for the cabinet & storehouse of her riches, which she amasses & assembles there to draw them out by the way & use them for the upkeep of his admirable edifice, and the substantiation of his children and servants.

Whoever will have Heaven so propitious that he can once enter this rich and sumptuous cabinet, of which Philosophy alone holds the key, will he not have reason to say that he has ascended to Heaven like these two chosen ones? of God Enoch & Helia: & descended to hell like these three heroes Orpheus, Hercules, & Theseus? But these singular favors are granted only to the children of the Gods, who under the paternal blessing have been able to obtain the opening of them by the helping hand of this Queen of the Arts, the profound Philosophy, which one can justly call happiness, the honor & glory of the world, since it exalts man above man himself, from a distance as far away as that which separates Heaven from Earth: And enriches, honors, & decorates his lovers above the human excellence of all others, as much or more than Croesus surpassed in opulence the poor Irus of Homer, that the midday of the most beautiful day of Summer passes in luminous ardor the darkest and coldest night of Winter, or that the brilliant & pure gold surmounts in luster, value, and virtue the vile filth of iron.

O great, O venerable, divine Philosophy! how happy is the mortal there who you grant the grace to deign to receive his wishes, to grant his prayers & to fill his soul with the incomparable felicity that brings the perfect knowledge of the most hidden things: to which the human understanding, without being carried there on your indefatigable wings.

For could one imagine for the happiness of man some good equal to the two that you extend to his favorites, making them assured of a healthy and long life, and of an inexhaustible abundance of treasures, which nothing can take away from them or only diminish, once you have made them possessors of this supreme and miraculous medicine. Of which Nature herself in her lament speaks thus: & virtue the vile filth of iron. O great, O venerable, divine Philosophy! how happy is the mortal there who you grant the grace to deign to receive his wishes, to grant his prayers & to fill his soul with the incomparable felicity that brings the perfect knowledge of the most hidden things: to which the human understanding, without being carried there on your indefatigable wings.

For could one imagine for the happiness of man some good equal to the two that you extend to his favorites, making them assured of a healthy and long life, and of an inexhaustible abundance of treasures, which nothing can take away from them or only diminish, once you have made them possessors of this supreme and miraculous medicine. Of which Nature herself in her lament speaks thus: & virtue the vile filth of iron.

O great, O venerable, divine Philosophy! how happy is the mortal there who you grant the grace to deign to receive his wishes, to grant his prayers & to fill his soul with the incomparable felicity that brings the perfect knowledge of the most hidden things: to which the human understanding, without being carried there on your indefatigable wings.

For could one imagine for the happiness of man some good equal to the two that you extend to his favorites, making them assured of a healthy and long life, and of an inexhaustible abundance of treasures, which nothing can take away from them or only diminish, once you have made them possessors of this supreme and miraculous medicine.

Of which Nature herself in her lament speaks thus: divine Philosophy! how happy is the mortal there who you grant the grace to deign to receive his wishes, to grant his prayers & to fill his soul with the incomparable felicity that brings the perfect knowledge of the most hidden things: to which the human understanding, without being carried there on your indefatigable wings. For could one imagine for the happiness of man some good equal to the two that you extend to his favorites, making them assured of a healthy and long life, and of an inexhaustible abundance of treasures, which nothing can take away from them or only diminish, once you have made them possessors of this supreme and miraculous medicine.

Of which Nature herself in her lament speaks thus: divine Philosophy! how happy is the mortal there who you grant the grace to deign to receive his wishes, to grant his prayers & to fill his soul with the incomparable felicity that brings the perfect knowledge of the most hidden things: to which the human understanding, without being carried there on your indefatigable wings. For could one imagine for the happiness of man some good equal to the two that you extend to his favorites, making them assured of a healthy and long life, and of an inexhaustible abundance of treasures, which nothing can take away from them or only diminish, once you have made them possessors of this supreme and miraculous medicine.

Of which Nature herself in her lament speaks thus: how happy is the mortal there who you grant the grace to deign to receive his wishes, to grant his prayers & to fill his soul with the incomparable felicity that brings the perfect knowledge of the most hidden things: to which the human understanding, without being carried there on your indefatigable wings. For could one imagine for the happiness of man some good equal to the two that you extend to his favorites, making them assured of a healthy and long life, and of an inexhaustible abundance of treasures, which nothing can take away from them or only diminish, once you have made them possessors of this supreme and miraculous medicine. Of which Nature herself in her lament speaks thus: how happy is the mortal there who you grant the grace to deign to receive his wishes, to grant his prayers & to fill his soul with the incomparable felicity that brings the perfect knowledge of the most hidden things: to which the human understanding, without being carried there on your indefatigable wings.

For could one imagine for the happiness of man some good equal to the two that you extend to his favorites, making them assured of a healthy and long life, and of an inexhaustible abundance of treasures, which nothing can take away from them or only diminish, once you have made them possessors of this supreme and miraculous medicine.

Of which Nature herself in her lament speaks thus: to hear his prayers & to fill his soul with the incomparable bliss that comes from perfect knowledge of the most hidden things: to which human comprehension could never arrive, without being carried there on your indefatigable wings. For could one imagine for the happiness of man some good equal to the two that you extend to his favorites, making them assured of a healthy and long life, and of an inexhaustible abundance of treasures, which nothing can take away from them or only diminish, once you have made them possessors of this supreme and miraculous medicine. Of which Nature herself in her lament speaks thus: to hear his prayers & to fill his soul with the incomparable bliss that comes from perfect knowledge of the most hidden things: to which human comprehension could never arrive, without being carried there on your indefatigable wings.

For could one imagine for the happiness of man some good equal to the two that you extend to his favorites, making them assured of a healthy and long life, and of an inexhaustible abundance of treasures, which nothing can take away from them or only diminish, once you have made them possessors of this supreme and miraculous medicine. Of which Nature herself in her lament speaks thus: For could one imagine for the happiness of man some good equal to the two that you extend to his favorites, making them assured of a healthy and long life, and of an inexhaustible abundance of treasures, which nothing can take away from them or only diminish, once you have made them possessors of this supreme and miraculous medicine. Of which Nature herself in her lament speaks thus: For could one imagine for the happiness of man some good equal to the two that you extend to his favorites, making them assured of a healthy and long life, and of an inexhaustible abundance of treasures, which nothing can take away from them or only diminish, once you have made them possessors of this supreme and miraculous medicine. Of which Nature herself in her lament speaks thus:

Who cures all disease,
And who has never begged:
Who has an ounce & a single grain
Always is rich & always healthy:
In the end the creature dies
Of God content & of Nature.

Without which blessings life is by no means life, but an odious languor, comparable to some tumultuous Sea that several contrary winds, blowing pour back waves on waves, engulfing in the end our poor tormented ship in the depths of the dark abysses of death.

For from birth we have as internal enemies the squadron of illnesses, the number of which is almost infinite: then from the outside the cursed battalion of the inconveniences that inhuman poverty leads to. And these two adversaries come to conspire against life & practice their secret intelligences, to judge a little what defense could preserve it from their assaults. Besides which further harm the disdain and mutations of fortune, against which the human Spirit (covered with the impregnable & invincible weapons of august Sapience) virilely opposes: With what praises, then, can we worthily decorate him who first revealed to us the principles & precepts of Philosophy?

But rather how could the human Spirit penetrate so vividly to the heart of the World & Nature by the search for such marvels? Certainly he who first was looked upon by such a good Star that he was to understand & practice these high & occult mysteries by an experience full of reasons, With what praises, then, can we fairly worthily decorate him who first revealed to us the principles and precepts of Philosophy? But rather how could the human Spirit penetrate so vividly to the heart of the World & Nature by the search for such marvels? Certainly he who first was looked upon by such a good Star that he was to understand & practice these high & occult mysteries by an experience full of reasons, With what praises, then, can we fairly worthily decorate him who first revealed to us the principles and precepts of Philosophy?

But rather how could the human Spirit penetrate so vividly to the heart of the World & Nature by the search for such marvels? Certainly he who first was looked upon by such a good Star that he was to understand & practice these high & occult mysteries by an experience full of reasons, Was a child of a God, or some God Himself .

On this occasion, true antiquity wanted to persuade us that Apollo was the inventor and superintendent of medicine. Which he shared with his son. Aesculapius, as a very precious thing, with a very strict prohibition to divulge its secret on pain of being punished as sacrilege and impious. Finally, whoever tastes, embraces, and possesses this divine fruit of Philosophy, he is as though seated on the summit of an inaccessible mountain, from where he sees the others occupied with low and childish things.

So much so that he pleases the eyes of his noble intellect casting their gaze over the conceptions of the most renowned among the vulgar. For the popular & common sciences give belly to the earth, & simply creep around the insipid bark & ​​vain surface of things. But the true Philosophy, which is properly the same Gymnosophy of the Indians, Magics of the Egyptians, & Kabbalah of the Jews, penetrates to the heart of the marrow, & leaves no particle of the composition of the bodies that it does not examine perfectly. That if we weigh it against scholasticism, we shall find more inequality in weight than between pumice and lead: for that leads it through the darkness of doubt, groping with the stick of mere conjecture.

Who made the most expert wander and leaving the true and plain path of Nature, led them astray in the detours of this labyrinth, deprived of the net of our Ariadne. What has deprived ordinary medicine of operating powerfully like spagyrics against fixed and rebellious diseases, not only because its possessors are not highly learned, but because its foundation is not seated in the center of things, but only on the surface. As for example, when they use the decoction of dry oat roots to relieve those afflicted with Calculus (for which they are truly very suitable, as I saw it practiced at the learned Pena) & do not dare to extract from this simple what causes it such an effect. Which drawn & artistically prepared, taken in small quantities, would give perfect healing to the dregs of mere relief.

Especially since without having fun with the vulgar axiom which wants that the opposite cures the opposite, the stone where the Calculus being hardened in the bodies by the Salt is the only coagulator, it must be cured by the salt of the individuals that the Heaven has endowed him with a properly effective and particular faculty against this evil. Then the opposite will truly be cured, even though salt was applied against an evil proceeding from Salt, which are two similar, but their effects are different, for the oil of Salt had hardened, so that one forces the other to yield to it. No longer unless it is seen experienced by those who, having burned their fingers, approach them & hold them as close to the fire as they can endure, so that the greater heat dissipating the lesser, the pain comes to their appease.

All that the laziness of vulgar physicists objects against these new remedies for them, and therefore very pernicious to take internally. What I would concede to them easily if they were taken alone & in excessive quantity. But those who know how to take & give laugh at such talk. but their effects are different, for the oil of Salt had hardened, so that one forces the other to yield to it. No longer unless it is seen experienced by those who, having burned their fingers, approach them & hold them as close to the fire as they can endure, so that the greater heat dissipating the lesser, the pain comes to their appease.

All that the laziness of vulgar physicists objects against these new remedies for them, and therefore very pernicious to take internally. What I would concede to them easily if they were taken alone & in excessive quantity. But those who know how to take & give laugh at such talk. but their effects are different, for the oil of Salt had hardened, so that one forces the other to yield to it.

No longer unless it is seen experienced by those who, having burned their fingers, approach them & hold them as close to the fire as they can endure, so that the greater heat dissipating the lesser, the pain comes to their appease. All that the laziness of vulgar physicists objects against these new remedies for them, and therefore very pernicious to take internally. What I would concede to them easily if they were taken alone & in excessive quantity. But those who know how to take & give laugh at such talk. No longer unless it is seen experienced by those who, having burned their fingers, approach them & hold them as close to the fire as they can endure, so that the greater heat dissipating the lesser, the pain comes to their appease.

All that the laziness of vulgar physicists objects against these new remedies for them, and therefore very pernicious to take internally. What I would concede to them easily if they were taken alone & in excessive quantity. But those who know how to take & give laugh at such talk. No longer unless it is seen experienced by those who, having burned their fingers, approach them & hold them as close to the fire as they can endure, so that the greater heat dissipating the lesser, the pain comes to their appease.

All that the laziness of vulgar physicists objects against these new remedies for them, and therefore very pernicious to take internally. What I would concede to them easily if they were taken alone & in excessive quantity. But those who know how to take & give laugh at such talk. & therefore very pernicious to take from within. What I would concede to them easily if they were taken alone & in excessive quantity. But those who know how to take & give laugh at such talk. & therefore very pernicious to take from within. What I would concede to them easily if they were taken alone & in excessive quantity. But those who know how to take & give laugh at such talk.





Sonnet on the conclusion of this book.

Who therefore seeks honor, glory, and the happiness of the world,
Be Philosopher, artist, and he will rejoice,
For Philosophy will finally lead him
At the top of the treasures with which Nature abounds.
Of him the night of error where vainly is based
The blind opinion it will dissipate,
And from the truth the day will brighten
Pulling her out of the bosom of the round machine.
When Jason had conquered this much desired good,
Who by experience made him sure
To live rich and healthy more than he would have dared to believe:
Disdaining misery, and braving death,
Equal to the demi-gods did he not possess
Of the universal world, honor and glory?

END.


Description of the Universal Spirit of the World.

He is a Spirit-body, first-born of Nature,
Very common, very hidden, very vile, very precious:
Preserving, destroying, good & malicious:
Beginning & end of any creature.
Triple in substance it is, salt, oil, & pure water,
Who coagulates, gathers, & waters, the low places
All by its unctuous, & moist, from the high Heavens
Able to receive any shape & figure.
The only Art, by Nature, in our eyes shows it,
It conceals in its center an infinite power,
Garnished with the faculties of Heaven & Earth.
He is Hermaphrodite, & gives increase
In everything where it mixes indifferently,
With reason that in itself all germs it encloses.

That the World is full of the Spirit by which all things live.

This great body, of the great first creature God,
Was filled with a Spirit from the beginning,
Omniform in seed, & lively in movement,
Of which he animates everything, & brings everything to light.
Of the earth & the Heavens it is the nourishing soul,
And of all that lives in them alike.
On earth it is vapour, in heaven fire properly,
Triple in one substance & first matter.
For from three, & in three, by Nature comes,
And returns every body, whose balm it contains,
Having as parents the Sun & the Moon.
Through the air it germinates below, and seeks above:
The earth nourishes it within its warm belly:
And of the perfections he is the common cause.



Commentary or exhibition of the table of Hermès Trismegistus. Dealing with the General Spirit of the World.

The text of which table is contained in the Sonnet below.

It is a sure point full of admiration,
That up & down are one and the same thing:
To make a single enclose everyone,
Wonderful effects by adaptation.
Of one alone mediated it all,
And for parents, womb, & nanny, we ask her
Phoebus, Diana, air & earth, where rests
That thing in which lies all perfection.
If we put it in the ground, it has its full force:
Separating by great art, but easy way,
The subtle of the thick, & the land of fire.
From earth rises to Heaven, and then to earth,
From Heaven she descends, Receiving little by little
The virtues of both that she encloses in her womb.

END