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

49. But we tell the Seeker, and sincerely and faithfully warn him as he Loves his temporal and eternal Welfare, that he do not first set upon this Way to try the Earth, and restore that which is shut up [in Death,] unless he himself be before born again through the divine Mercury out of the Curse and Death, and has the full Knowledge of the New-Birth in divine Regeneration, else all that he does is to no Purpose, no Learning [or studying] avails; for that which he seeks lies shut in the Curse, in Death, in the Anger of God: If he will make it alive, and bring it into its first Life, then that Life must be before manifest in him, and then he may say to the Mountain, Get thee hence, and be cast into the Sea; and to the Fig-Tree, No Fruit grow on thee henceforth; and it shall come to pass; for if the divine Mercury lives, and is manifest in the Spirit, then when the Spirit of the Soul's Will imagines into any Thing, Mercury also goes along with it in the Imagination, and enkindles the Mercury fast apprehended in Death, viz. the Similitude of God, or the Manifestation, with which the living God has made himself manifest.

50. I know and see, that the Mocker in the Devil's Vizard will yet bring my Writing into a Misapprehension, and make me more dark and doubtful, because I write of the inward and outward Mercury, and understand by the inward the Word of God, or the divine Voice, viz. the Manifestation of the Eternity of the Abyss; and by the outward [Mercury] I understand the Officer in Nature, viz. the Instrument, which the inward, living, powerful Word, or divine Voice uses, wherewith it Forms and Works. Now the Sophister will falsely interpret it, and say, that I mix them both together, making no Difference, and hold Nature for God, as Babel has already done to me: But I bid him view my Words well, and learn to understand them right; for I speak sometimes from the heavenly Mercury, and see that only, and then presently I Name the Instrument of the heavenly, therefore let him have Regard to the Sense: I write not Heathenishly, but Theosophically, from a higher Ground than the outward Faber is, and then also from the same.

The Ninth Chapter.

Of the Signature; shewing how the internal signs the external.

1. THE whole outward visible World with all its Being is a Signature, or Figure of the inward Spiritual World; whatever is internally, and however its Operation is, likewise it has its Character externally; like as Spirit of each Creature sets forth and manifests the internal Form of its Birth, by its Body, so does the Eternal Being also.

2. The Being of Beings is a wrestling Power; for the Kingdom of God consists in Power, and also the outward World, and it stands especially in seven Properties or Forms, where the one causes and makes the other, and none of them is the first or last, but it is the eternal Band; therefore God has appointed fix Days for Man to Work, and the seventh Day is the Perfection wherein the fix do rest, it is the Center to which the Desire of the six Days tend; therefore God calls it the Sabbath or Resting-Day, for therein the six Forms of the Working Power rest: It is the Divine Sound in the Power, or the Kingdom of Joy, wherein all the other Forms are manifest; for it is the Formed World, or divine Corporality, by which all Things are generated and come forth to a Being.

3. This Formed world has manifested itself with the motion of all forms with this visible world, as with a visible likeness, so that the Spiritual being might be manifest in a corporeal comprehensive essence; as the desire of the inward forms has made itself external, and the internal being is in the external; the internal holds the external before it as a glass, wherein it beholds itself in the property of the generation of all forms; the external is its signature.