A New Light of Alchemy

2To return to our subject—since our concern here is not with the stone alone—let us now discuss the matter of metals. A little earlier I said that all things are born from liquid air, or vapour, which the elements distil into the earth’s interior by perpetual motion. Once nature’s Archaeus receives it, he sublimes it through the pores and distributes it to each place with his own discernment, as we related above. Through the diversity of places, diverse things thus arise and are born. Some imagine that Saturn has one seed, gold another, and likewise the remaining metals; but these ideas are empty. There is only one seed: the same in Saturn as in gold, and the same in Luna as in Mars, and so on. The place in the earth was different, if you understand me rightly, although nature stopped earlier in Luna than in Sol, and likewise in the others. When vapour is sublimed from the earth’s centre, it passes through places that are dry or hot. If it passes through hot, pure places where the fatness of sulphur adheres to the walls, that vapour—which the philosophers called the Mercury of the philosophers—adapts and joins itself to the fatness, which it then sublimes along with itself. It then becomes an unctuous substance: it abandons the name of vapour and takes the name of fatness. As this later sublimes into other places already purified by the preceding vapour, where there is subtle, pure, moist earth, it fills the earth’s pores and joins itself to it; thus Sol is made. If that fatness reaches impure, cold places, Saturn is made. If such earth is pure and mixed with sulphur, Venus is made, and so forth.