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.
9. But seeing that Time has Beginning and End, and the Will with the Desire has given up itself to the temporal Leader, therefore the Dominion of Time destroys its own contrived Spirit, and so the Body also dies and passes away, and this is that which God said to Adam, That he should not eat of the Tree, or Plant, of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, of both Properties, lest he died; as it also came to pass, he died in the Sulphur; the Sul in the Kingdom of God, viz. the Lubet of the divine Liberty, out of which the Light of God shines, and in which the divine Love, viz. the Love-Fire burns, [disappeared and withdrew from him.]
10. Now there was no Remedy for him, unless God's Desire entered again into his dead Sulphur, that is, into his Sul, which was dead, viz. into the dead [or mortified] Essentiality, and again enkindled it with the Love-Fire; which came to pass in Christ: And there the heavenly Body, wherein God's Light mines, did again arise. But if this must be effected, then the Love-Desire must again enter into the Desire of the enkindled Anger, and quench and overcome the Anger with the Love; the divine Water must enter again into the Soul's burning Fire, and quench the wrathful Death in the astringent Fiat, viz. in the Desire to Nature, that the Love-Desire, which desires God, Might be again enkindled in the Soul.
11. For Man's Happiness consists in this, that he has in him a true Desire after God, for out of the Desire springs forth the Love; that is, when the Desire receives the Meekness of God into itself, then the Desire immerses itself in the Meekness, and becomes essential; and this is the heavenly or divine Essentiality, or Corporality; and therein the Soul's Spirit (which lay shut up in the Anger, viz. in Death) does again arise in the Love of God; for the Love tinctures the Death and Darkness, that it is again capable of the divine Sunshine.
12. And as this is done in Man, so likewise it is in the Transmutation of Metals: The Sulphur is shut up in Saturn, viz. in the Death, and yet there is no Death, but a vegetative Life; and the outward Mercury is the Life thereof. Now if the metalline Body shall come to the highest Perfection, then it must die unto the external Dominator, viz. to the Elements, and come again into such a Sulphur as it was, when as yet it had not the four Elements on it, but lay only in the Element in Unity.
13. But now none can reduce it into such a Body, but he only who has generated; he that has given it the four Elements, he alone can take them away; and he that at first made it corporeal, he must bring it to himself, and transchange it in himself into another Body; and this is the Sulphur, which has Mercurius, as its chief Faber in itself. He must again take it out of dark Saturn's Bowels in the Fiat, and introduce it into his own, and with his own Fire separate the four Elements from it, and reduce it into one, as God at the last Day will in the Enkindling of his own Fire separate the Essence of the four Elements from the pure Element, that the eternal Corporality in the pure Element may arise and spring forth: And as in the Death of Man the four Elements separate from the true Man (who is the Element of God) and the heavenly Body remains only in itself; so it goes in the Transmutation of Metals.
Process.