The Signature of All Things — trans. John Ellistone (1651)

56. The dark Hunger desires Essence according to its Property, viz. earthly Things, all whatever resembles the Earth; and the bitter Hunger desires bitter Raging, Stinging, and Pain; it receives into itself such an Essence (as the Poison-Source) out of the Elements: And the Hunger of Anguish desires anxious Hunger, viz. the Anguish in the Brimstone; also the Melancholy [takes] the Desire to die, and continual Sadness; and the Fire-Flash receives into it Anger, Aspiring, Ambition, Pride, a desiring to destroy all, and make it subject to it, a Desire to domineer in and above all, to consume all, and to be peculiar; and it takes the Bitterness from whence the Flash arises to Envy and Hatred, and the Astringency to Covetousness, and the Fire to Anger and Indignation.

57. Here is the true Desire of God's Anger and all Devils, and of all whatever is against God and Love; and this Hunger draws such an Essence into Self; as it is to be known and searched out in the Creatures, and also in the Herbs.

58. Now the Fire-Flash is the End of the first Desire, viz. of the dark Nature, and in the Fire the Dying of the first Hunger and Will begins; for the Fire consumes all Grossness of the first Forms, and casts them into Death; and here is the Separation of both Wills, viz. the one which enters back again into the Property of Death, and is a Will in the Life of the dark Desire; as the Devils have done, who would domineer in the Fire-Flash in the Salnitral Sude over Time and Eternity; but they were driven back by the Spirit of God, and spewed forth out of the Love-Desire as an Abomination: And thus also it happens here to the wicked Soul of Man, upon which the Election follows. Here is the [Aim] or scope of the Election of Grace, of which the Scripture speaks, that God knows his; and here the eternal Lubet of God's Liberty apprehends the Will-Spirit, which is arisen in the dark Centre, and brings it through the Dying in the Fire into the Element.

59. In the Salnitral Flagrat lies the Possibility backwards and forwards; if the Will of the Desire goes back, then it is as to the Kingdom of this World [earthly], and as to the Kingdom of the eternal World it is in God's Anger, and cannot see God unless it be converted, and enters into the Dying in the Fire, and wholly dies to its Selfness, and enters into the Resignation of the eternal Will in the Salnitral Flagrat into the Element, viz. into the heavenly Essentiality and Corporality, so that the Hunger may eat of the pure Element; and then it has further no other Desire; for it is in the Fire dead to the austere dark Hunger, which is Evil; thus from the Dying in the Fire arises the Light, for here the Liberty is enkindled, that it becomes also an Hunger, and a Desire; this is now a Love-Desire, a Love-Hunger.

60. In the outward World it is the Light of the Sun in the four Elements; and it is the bestial Love-Desire, viz. after the Sulphurean Body and Essence, from whence the Copulation and Multiplication arise, viz. the vegetative Life; and from the Mercury in the Salniter (in which the sensible Life is) therein the Astrum gives the Reason in the Animals from the Properties of the Salniter.

61. For the whole Astrum is Nothing else but a Salniter in the Verbum Fiat in the Motion of the Being of all Beings in the fiery Flagrat, comprehended in the Properties of the Salts, wherein all the Powers of the Element stand as an external Birth, which continually boil in the four Elements as a Salnitral Salt, and introduce their Property in their Desire in the four Elements into the Essence of Bodies, as is to be seen in Trees, Herbs, Grass, and all growing Things.

62. Thus understand us farther concerning the second Centre, which is manifest in the Dying of the Fire in the Light, whereby the Abyss of God's Liberty introduces itself into the Byss of Nature, both with the inward World in the Kingdom of Heaven in the Eternity; and then also with the outward Kingdom in the Time.