Centrum Naturae Concentratum

Source forms: Vegetabilischen Saamen, zäher Schleim.

Read in context: the historical work.

See also: Regeneration, Tessa.

Microcosm

The microcosm is the little world of the human being, read as a place where the greater world’s powers meet. Breath is received from above; nourishment from below. Digestion makes the body a scene of visible multiplicity arising from common food, and that activity helps the main work argue for a wider continuity of nature.

The call to self-knowledge follows this material account. It asks a reader to recognise the powers and matter already present within the human being, while retaining a religious requirement of humility. Isolating the maxim from its bodily and cosmological setting would change what the book asks the reader to know.

Passage CNT-MAIN-P044: “Once you know the little world well, nothing in the great world will afterwards remain unknown to you.”

Source forms: kleine Welt, Grossen.

Read in context: the historical work.

See also: Macrocosm, Knowledge.

Macrocosm

The macrocosm is the greater world in relation to the human little world. The Delle discourse joins salts and spirits from both in an argument about one root and a receptive matter. It uses a relationship between scales to explain how an apparently local subject may receive a wider power.

The analogy requires differences as well as likeness. A body’s digestion, a field’s growth and a spirit received from the air do not become the same observed event merely because they are compared. Reading macrocosm together with microcosm preserves the traffic between scales while allowing each local process its stated conditions.

Passage CNT-DELLE-P007: “He said that it was the salt of the macrocosm obtained through the salt of the microcosm, Bernard’s doubled Mercury, the highest and most fixed: two mercurial substances from one root, namely the world’s hyle.”

Source forms: macrocosmi, microcosmi, Hyle Mundi.

Read in context: the historical work.

See also: Microcosm, Universal.

Tessa

Tessa is the main speaker’s name for the matter or seed described within the human being. It appears after the account of upper and lower powers and the image of the human mine. Its importance lies in the way it gathers the preceding discussion into a named subject of inquiry.

The name should not be mistaken for a demonstrated identification. The source itself continues by distinguishing salts and preparing a further offspring, and later withholds the continuation to the finished work. Preserving Tessa as a historical term keeps that sequence visible. It does not license filling the word with a proposed modern bodily substance as though the identification were already settled.

Passage CNT-MAIN-P050: “The world in which the wise find their highest and nearest matter for their masterpiece—the human being—is the mine in which lie the ore-bearing opening and ore: the best and worst, most precious and least worthy water, air, and earth together, yet none of them alone; rather, a son and seed born from these three purest body, spirit, and soul within the human being for its good and necessities, and called TESSA.”

Source forms: TESSA, lote Loch und Ertz.

Read in context: the historical work.

See also: Seed, Centre.

Astral Salt

The astral or upper salt belongs to a pair developed in the main work. It is described as volatile, sweet and silvery, and is related to the saline mercurial spirit. These predicates establish its place in an argument about differentiated powers arising within a common matter.

Its relation to the central salt gives the description force. One term cannot be understood simply by removing it from the other and translating astral as an unrestricted promise of celestial influence. Read the preparation and union of the pair, along with the source’s distinction between philosophers’ mercury and the completed regenerated salt.

Passage CNT-MAIN-P052: “The astral or upper salt is very volatile, sweet, and shines like fine ☽.”

Source forms: Astralische oder obere Saltz, flüchtig.

Read in context: the historical work.

See also: Central Salt, Salt.

Central Salt

The central salt is the main work’s companion to the astral salt. It is called a philosophical vitriol and credited with a power of coagulation. The text also describes an unattractive covering that must be removed before its beauty appears. The figure of concealed worth therefore joins an account of preparation.

The phrase does not decide a modern chemical composition. It locates a member of a pair, describes what the speaker says it can do, and places it within a process of purification and union. Keeping those roles distinct helps the reader compare the main work’s vitriol with the different account of vitriol in the testament.

Passage CNT-MAIN-P052: “The central salt is a vitriol of wonderful and inexpressible power, able to coagulate ☿ and make it into fine ☽.”

Source forms: Centralische Saltz, Vitriol.

Read in context: the historical work.

See also: Astral Salt, Vitriol.

Putrefaction

Putrefaction is a change that opens an earlier condition to a further work. The testament explicitly applies it to gold becoming black in butter of antimony; the main work describes a related blackening in its account of a water-fire, and the Delle narrative invokes putrefaction as an essential philosophical process. The term therefore gathers material descriptions and a model of productive breakdown.