A New Light of Alchemy

Epilogue or Conclusion of These Twelve Chapters

1Reader and friend, I wrote the preceding twelve chapters for the children of the art, so that before putting their hands to the work they might know nature’s operation: how she produces things by working. They should not enter the gate without keys or draw water with a sieve. Whoever sets his hands to labour in this holy and most true science without knowing nature labours in vain. A person for whom the sun does not shine moves in nocturnal darkness; one to whom the moon does not appear at night is in dense shadow. Nature has a light of her own, inaccessible to our eyes. What is nature’s shadow appears to our eyes as body. But when nature’s light shines upon someone, the mist is immediately removed from his eyes, and without hindrance he can see the point of our magnet, corresponding to both centres of rays, namely the sun and earth. Nature’s light penetrates that far and discloses inward things. Take this example. Dress a twelve-year-old boy and a girl of the same age alike and place them beside one another: no one will recognise which is male and which female. Our eyes cannot penetrate, so our sight deceives us and takes false things for true. When their garments are removed and they appear as nature formed them, each is readily distinguished by sex. In precisely the same way, our understanding makes a shadow of nature’s shadow. The naked human body is the shadow of nature’s seed. Just as clothing covers the human body, the body covers human nature, whose covering and uncovering God has reserved to himself.