A New Light of Alchemy

2But this cannot happen while the spirits remain unmanifest in the congealed metallic body. The body must first be dissolved and its pores opened so that nature can work. As for what this dissolution should be, I wish to warn the reader here that dissolution is twofold. Although there are many other dissolutions, they are useless. Only one is truly natural; the second is violent, and all the others fall under it. Natural dissolution opens the body’s pores in our water, so that the digested seed is emitted and placed in its own womb. Our water is heavenly water that does not wet the hands, no common water, but almost rain-water. The body is gold, which gives seed. Ours is Luna—not common silver—which receives gold’s seed. It is then governed by our continuous fire for seven months, sometimes ten, until our water consumes three and leaves one, and this in a double proportion. It is then nourished with the earth’s milk, or its fatness, born in the earth’s breasts, and governed or preserved from putrefaction by nature’s salt. Thus that infant of the second generation is generated. Let us now proceed from theory to practice.