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.
72. Thus it is likewise with Man; of what Light Man lives, of that also comes his Cure; if he lives in the outward World, then the outward Goodness and Love, viz. the outward Jupiter and Venus with the Sun must be his Cure, or he remains in the angry Mars, and in the poisonful Mercury, in the earthly Moon captivated in the Impression of Saturn, viz. in the earthly Sulphur; which however is made manifest, and awakened in the outward Man by Adam, for whose sake the outward Man must die, putrify, and so enter again into the Nothing, viz. into the End, or as I Might better say, and signify it, into the Beginning of the Creation, into the Essence, out of which it went and departed with Adam.
The Tenth Chapter.
Of the inward and outward Cure of Man.
1. LET the Lover of God understand us right; we do not go upon an historical Heathenish Conjecture, nor only upon the Light of the outward Nature; both Suns shine to us. Understand us right, and see how God has cured Man when the Poison of the Serpent and Devil held him imprisoned in Death, and how he yet still Cures the poor Soul captivated in God’s Anger; the like Process also must the Physician keep in curing the outward Body.
2. The divine Light and Love were extinguished in Adam; because he imagined into the Serpent's Property, viz. into Evil and Good, so that the Poison of Death began effectually to Work in Mercury, and the Source of Anger was inflamed in the eternal Mars, and the dark Impression of the eternal Nature's Property took Possession of him: His Body became Earth in the dark Impression in the Poison of the enkindled Mercury, and was an Enmity against God: he was utterly undone, and there was no Remedy for him by any Creature, neither in Heaven, nor in this World; the wrathful Death captivated him in Soul and Body.
3. Now how did God do to Cure him, and tincture him again? Did he take a strange Thing thereunto? No, he took the Likeness, and cured him with that which was corrupted in him, viz. with the divine Mercury, and with the divine Venus, and with the divine Jupiter; understand; in Man was the expressed Word, which I call the eternal Mercury in Man; for it is the true ruling acting Life; it was inspired or in-spoken into Man's Image (which God created out of his Essence into an Image according to God) as into a creaturely Image, which was the Soul with the Property of all the three Worlds, viz. with the World of Light and Understanding, which is God, and with the Fire World, which is the Eternal Nature of the Father of all Beings, and with the Light, Love-World, which is heavenly Corporality; for in the Love-Desire is the Essence, viz. the Corporality.
4. The Desire of Love is Spirit, and is the Heart of God, viz. the right divine Under-standing: In the Love-Essence Mercury is God's Word, and in the fiery Nature he is the Wrath of God, the Original of all Mobility and Enmity, also of Strength and Omnipotence; the fiery Property makes the Light, viz. the Liberty desirous; so that the Nothing is a Desire, and this Desire is the Love of God, which Adam extin-guished in him: For he imagined after Evil and Good, that is, after Earthliness; the Earthliness came forth into a Being both out of the Wrath, and out of the Love-Being, and that through God's Motion, that the Wonders of the Abyss and Byss Might be made manifest, that Good and Evil Might be made known and manifest: And this Adam, being the Image of God, should not do, for God had created him to his Image: He should have tinctured the Fire-World and outward World with the Word of Love, that so none of them should be manifest in him, like as the Day holds the Night swallowed up in itself.
5. But by false Imagination he has awakened and manifested the dark and poisonful Mercurial Fire-World in him, so that his bodily Essence of the dark Impression is fallen to the Evil Part in the poisonful Mercurial Property, and the Soul is become manifest in the Eternal Nature in the Father's Fire-Property, viz. in the poisonful hateful Mercury; according to which God calls him an angry and zealous God, and a consuming Fire.
6. Now to help and restore this again, viz. the Image of God, God must take the right Cure, and even the same which Man was in his Innocence: But how did he effect it? Behold, O Man, behold and see, open thy Understanding; thou art called.