A New Light of Alchemy

3As for how colours arise in gems, know that this happens through sulphur as follows. If the fatness of sulphur is congealed by that perpetual motion, the passing spirit of water afterwards digests and purifies it through the power of salt, until, when the colour has been digested, it is coloured red or white. Advancing toward a better state, this colour has been refined by that spirit through so many repeated distillations that it is raised along with the spirit. The spirit then has the power to enter imperfect things, and thus introduces the colour. This subsequently joins the water, now partly congealed, fills its pores, and is fixed with it in an inseparable fixation. For all water is congealed by heat if it lacks spirit, and by cold if it possesses spirits. Whoever knows how to congeal water with heat and join spirit to it will certainly discover something a thousand times more precious than gold or anything else. Let him therefore bring about a separation of spirit from water, so that it putrefies and the grain appears. Afterwards, when the dregs have been discarded, let him bring the spirit back from above into the water and cause them to join together. That conjunction will generate a branch unlike its parents in form.