A New Light of Alchemy

2For example, one passage reads: Afterwards mix these waters together. Someone else added not. He added little, yet reversed the whole chapter. Still, let the diligent student remember that the bee gathers honey even from poisonous plants. If he directs his reading by what nature can accomplish, he will readily separate out the sophistries. Yet he should not stop reading, because one book opens another. I have understood, however, that the books of the philosopher Geber—and who knows whether those of other authors too—have been bewitched with the greatest enchantments, so that they cannot and should not be understood until the thousandth reading, and then only by an intelligent reader. Fools are altogether excluded from reading them. Many people interpret him, as they do other authors, but I find the explanation harder than the text. My advice is to stay with the text, to apply everything you read to what nature can accomplish, and first of all to investigate what nature is. Everyone writes that the thing is cheap, easy and common. This is indeed true, but they ought to have added: for those who know. A knowledgeable person recognises it even among dung; an ignorant one does not believe it is present even in gold. All those who composed obscure books of this kind, if they did not know the art but had to seek it in such books—which are indeed entirely true—would discover it with greater difficulty than present-day seekers do.

2.2I do not wish to praise my writings. Whoever applies them to nature's possibilities and course will judge them. If someone cannot learn from my writings, counsels and examples to recognise nature's operation, her servants, the vital spirits that bind the air, and the first matter of the subject, he will scarcely understand it from Raymond Lull; for it is hard to believe that spirits have such power in the belly of the wind.