The Hermetic Museum, Vol. II — trans. A. E. Waite (1893)
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The translator’s English as printed (A. E. Waite). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.
manner, gold, if mixed with common Mercury, or with anything except its own essential humour, is not dissolved, because such waters are too cofd, crude, and impure ; for which reason, being utterly unlike gold,they cannot amalgamate with it, or attain with it to a far nobler degree of development. Our Mercury, indeed, is cold and unmatured in comparison with gold ; but it is pure, hot, and well-digested in respect of common Mercury, which resembles it only in whiteness and fluxibility. | Our Mercury is, in fact, a pure water, clean, clear, bright, and resplendent, worthy of all admiration.
If you wish for a more particular description of our water, I am impelled by motives of charity to tell you that it is living, fluxible, clear, nitid, as white as snow, hot, humid, airy, vaporous, and digestive, and that gold melts in it like ice in warm water ; moreover, that in it is contained the whole regimen of fire, and the sulphur which exists but does not predominate in it. This water is the true Keeper of our Gates, the Bath of the King and of his Queen, which warms them incessantly, but is not taken of their substance, and is distinct from the whitening substance of the water, though the two are united and appear under the same flowing form and colour. It is our vessel, our fire, the abode of our furnace, by whose continuous and gentle warmth the whole substance is digested. If you know this water, it will be seen to contain all our fires, all our proportions of weight, all our regimens. [It is Bernard of Trevisa's clear pellucid Fountain, in which our King is cleansed and strengthened to overcome all his. foes. All you have to do is to find this water and to put into it the purified body ; out of the two Nature will then produce our Stone.
"This mineral water can be extracted only from those things which contain it; and that thing from which it is most easily obtained is difficult to discover, as is also the mode of its extraction. It dissolves gold without violence, is friendly to it washes away its impurities, and is white, warm, and clear Without our Mercury, Alchemy could not be a science, but only a vain and empty pretence. If you can obtain it, you have the key of the whole work, with which you can open the most secret chambers of knowledge. Its nature is the same as that of gold, but its substance is different, and the preparation of it causes a great stench. Weigh well the possibilities of Nature; refrain from introducing any heterogeneous element into our Magistery, and do not blame me if you fail to understand my words.
Our Stone is produced from one thing, and four mercurial substances, of which one is mature ; the others pure, but crude, two of them being extracted in a wonderful manner from their ore by means of the third. The four are amalgamated by the intervention of a gentle fire, and there subjected to coction day by day, until they all become one by natural (not manual) conjunction.
Afterwards, the fire being changed, these volatile substances. should be fixed and digested by means of heat which becomes a little more powerful every day (ze&, by means of fixed and incombustible Sulphur of the same genus) until the whole compound attains the same essence, fixity, and colour.
There are twelve degrees or phases of this our process, which I may briefly enumerate and describe as follows. The first is Calcination.
Calcination is the first purgation of the Stone, the drying up of its humours, through its natural heat, which is stirred into vital action by the external heat of water—whereby the compound is converted into a black powder, which is yet unctuous, and retains its radical humour.
"This calcination is performed for the purpose of rendering the substance viscous, spongy, and more easily penetrable; for gold in itself is highly fixed, and difficult of solution even in our water; but through this calcination it becomes soft and white, and we observe in it two natures, the fixed and the volatile, which we liken to two serpents. In order that a full dissolution may be made, there is need of contrition, that calcination may afterwards produce a viscous state, when it will be fit for dissolution.
When the substances are first mixed, they are at enmity with each other, by reason of their contrary qualities, for there is the heat and dryness of the Sulphur fiercely contending with the cold and moisture of the Mercury. They can only be reconciled in a medium which partakes of both natures, and the medium in which heat and cold are reconciled is dryness which can co-exist with both. Thus cold and heat are brought to dwell peaceably together in the dryness of the earth, and dryness and moisture in the coldness of the water. This reconciliation of contrary qualities is the second great object of our calcination.
Its sufficient cause is the action of the inward heat upon the moisture, whereby everything that resists it is converted into a very fine powder; the moving and instrumental cause is the fire contrary to Nature, which, being hidden in our solvent water, battles with its moisture and digests it into a viscous or unctuous powder.