The Signature of All Things — trans. John Ellistone (1651)
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The translator’s English as printed (John Ellistone). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.
7. Now therefore we are to consider the Beginnings of all Things, for we cannot say that this World was made out of Something, it was only and barely a Desire out of the free Lubet, that the Abyss, viz. the highest Good or Being, viz. the eternal Will, would behold itself in the Lubet as in a Glass; therefore the eternal Will has conceived the Lubet, and brought it into a Desire, which has impressed itself, and figurised, and corporised itself both to a Body and Spirit according to the same Impression's Property, according as the Impression has introduced itself into Forms, whereby the Possibilities [or Powers] are risen in the Impression as a Nature.
8. This Impression is the only Mother of the Manifestation of the Mystery, and it is called Nature and Essence, for it manifests what has been from Eternity in the eternal Will; yet we are to conceive that there was in Eternity a Nature in the eternal Will, as an eternal Mind in the Will; but it was only a Spirit in the Will, and the Essence of its Ability was not made manifest, but only in the Looking-Glass of the Will, which is the eternal Wisdom, wherein all Things which are in this World were known in two Centres, viz. according to the Fire and Light, and then according to the Darkness and Essence; all which came with the Motion of the eternal Will through the Desire in the Will into a manifest Mystery, and so introduced itself into a manifest Possibility.
9. This is now the Essence expressed or made manifest out of Eternity into a Time, and consists in the fore-mentioned Forms in Sulphur, Mercury, and Salt, where the one is not divided or parted asunder from the other: It is one eternal Essence, and shapes itself into the Properties of the Desire according to the Possibility of the Manifestation; and we are to understand that one Property is not, nor cannot be without the other; they are altogether the same only Possibility: And now we will speak of their differences, viz. how this only Possibility introduces itself into Good and Evil, viz. into still Peace and constant Unquietness.
10. We find seven especial Properties in Nature, whereby this only Mother works all Things, which are these, viz. First, the Desire, which is astringent, cold, hard, and dark. Secondly, bitter, which is the Sting of the astringent hard Enclosure; this is the cause of all Motion and Life. Thirdly, the Anguish, by Reason of the raging in the Impression, where the impressed Hardness falls into a tearing Anguish and Pain by Reason of the Sting.
11. Fourthly, the Fire, where the eternal Will in this anxious Desire introduces itself into an anxious darting Flash [or twinkling Lightening], viz. into Strength and devouring of the Darkness, with which the Hardness is again consumed, and introduced into a corporeal moving Spirit.
12. Fifthly, the Egress of the free Will out of the Darkness and out of the Fire, and dwelling in itself, where the free Will has received the Lustre, so that it enlightens and shines as a Light out of the Fire, and the potent Desire of the free Will, which it has sharpened in the Fire (in that it is dead in the Fire to the Essence of the Darkness of the first Form, and consumed) does now in the Light's Desire draw into itself the Essence from the Dying of the Fire, according to its Hunger, which is now Water; and in the Lustre it is a Tincture from the Fire and Light, viz. a Love-Desire, or a Beauty of Colours; and here all Colours arise; as we have fully set it down in our other Books, but especially in the Threefold Life of Man.
13. Sixthly, the Voice or Sound, which in the first Form is only a Noise from the Hardness, and is dead or mortified as to that [Hardness] in the Fire, and yet in the fifth Form, in the Love-Desire, viz. in the pleasant Property, it is again received as a clear Sound out of the Dying of the Fire in the Lustre of the Light in the Tincture, wherein all the five Senses, viz. Hearing, Seeing, Feeling, Smelling, and Tasting, arise in the Tincture of the Light from the Fire.
14. Seventhly, the Menstruum, or the Seed of all these Forms which the Desire impresses into a comprehensive Body or Essence wherein all lies; whatever the six Forms are spiritually, that the seventh is essentially.