If you want an animal, take the earth dried in the sun and powdered. Pour on one part of water and two or three parts of heaven and air, enough to make it like thin melted honey. Put it in lukewarm air and mild solar warmth, so the sun does not shine too hotly upon it. Within a few days you will see it full of little creatures of different sorts, moving and turning about. If the water and moisture diminish, moisten it as before with fresh liquid, keeping it at its original consistency. Some of the first animals will disappear and others grow from them; some will feed upon them and become larger and larger. I could tell a manipulation by which all sorts of animals might be generated, whatever sort one wished. But lest people say I wished to interfere with the Creator’s creation, I shall keep it silent. They should reason better: God created everything from nothing and without matter, whereas, if we wished to imitate everything, we would everywhere need created things and already-made matter. God has not forbidden us to delight in his creatures and creation. Rather, he has commanded it and secretly revealed these holy commands and the cabalistic art, through which a human being comes increasingly to knowledge.

Anyone can therefore conclude that this water, or regenerated Chaos, world spirit, dew and rainwater, is the universal seed from which everything born from the first Chaos can also be born. This shows that the water and earth are fruitful and that everything can be generated from them. Few know the secret of this thing: what gives and causes its fruitfulness. Everyone knows, of course, and will say: “It is spirit, with water’s help, that makes things grow.” Certainly it is spirit; but as a volatile spirit it will accomplish little among sublunary things. Whatever is to bear fruit here in this bodily, earthly realm, in these visible bodies, must itself be or become bodily. It must be capable of being grasped, touched and seen. This volatile spirit must therefore have a tangible, visible body, just as animal, vegetable and mineral seed is visible and tangible. So must this seed be and become. Few know this, although they often handle it. Very few know this bodily spirit or seed according to its origin, although it can be obtained abundantly. The reason is that it has a name other than the one it ought to bear. According to its true stock and root it should be called semen macrocosmi, the sperm of the great world, the fruitfulness of the whole world. It deserves that title because it is the concentrated, bodily seed and world spirit in a transparent, visible body like crystal: a dry water that does not wet the hands; an earth, a watery earth full of heat and also full of cold, like ice; coagulated heaven and coagulated air, better than all the world’s treasures.

To place this spirit bodily before your eyes and put it into your hands for full consideration, take the putrefied rainwater from the barrel into a glass vessel or kettle and boil it down to one third. Let it cool, but while still lukewarm filter it cleanly. Then set it in a tin basin, glass dish or small wooden platter in a cold cellar. Overnight the world spirit will crystallize or appear in two forms. One is entirely crystalline, diamond-like and transparent, adhering to the vessel’s walls and sides; if little pieces of wood are laid in it, it adheres to them too. The other settles at the bottom of the vessel in a somewhat browner form. You now have the spirit, the universal world spirit and seed of the macrocosm, regenerated Chaos, bodily before you to grasp and inspect. Remove separately what adheres to the sides and keep it clean. Remove what sits at the bottom of the water too, dry it, and keep it thoroughly dried in the sun or a lukewarm furnace. Take these two to crooked Vulcan, and he will tell you their names. Throw the upper seed, which adhered to the sides, onto glowing coals: it will tell you its name at once. It is called—keep quiet—nitre. Throw the other onto the coals too. It has a very hoarse, rushing voice and gnashes its teeth all around. It calls itself salt, common salt, alkaline salt. You now have both names.

This nitre from rainwater fulminates like every other saltpeter and produces no different or better effect. The salt cracks and crackles like ordinary table salt and produces the same effect in every operation. Through this test you now clearly see the kernel and centre, the seed of all things, the sperm of the macrocosm, visibly and bodily before your eyes, and grasp it with your hands. Together these two generate, preserve, destroy and regenerate everything beneath the moon that comes visibly before us. In air the seed is volatile and produces volatile meteors; in water and earth it becomes bodily and produces bodily things, fixed or most fixed according to their degree. No thing beneath the moon can be found, when dissolved, without these two. Each and every thing consists of them, as will be stated and demonstrated further below.

One is nitre; the other is salt. One is acid; the other is alkali. One is spirit; the other is body. This is father; this is mother. Male seed; female seed. Universal agent; universal patient. Primordial sulphur and mercury; primordial salt. Heaven and air; water and earth. Steel; magnet. Hammer; anvil.

At first this thing was wholly volatile. We see this by distilling rainwater as soon as it is collected, before putrefaction: all of it passes over in a volatile state. Through putrefaction it gains a ground of fixation by the precipitation of the earth it contains. The volatility of this water generates animals; when it becomes a little more fixed it makes plants; when entirely fixed, minerals. Whoever wishes to generate minerals should therefore take the more fixed and coarser parts, water with earth, as stated above. Whoever wants plants should add some air and heaven. Whoever wants animals should add more of the volatile: more vital spirit from air and heaven. Plants stand between animals and minerals, for a mineral or stone can be made from them as readily as an animal, as will be explained in detail below. The test and master key that opens nature’s bonds and locks has enabled us to see and touch the universal seed: putrefaction. The cause of putrefaction is the implanted spirit that never rests or sits still. Whenever it has its instrument, water, through which it makes everything, it works without interruption, visibly or invisibly, perceptibly or imperceptibly. It causes putrefaction and makes the volatile fixed and the fixed volatile, continuing this alternating work without ceasing. It breaks the stones it itself coagulated into sand and dust; it rots trees and putrefies animals. From the stone reduced to dust it makes a tree again; from the rotted tree an animal; from the putrefied animal a tree; and from the rotted tree a stone or mineral, without interruption.

Descending ever further from the beginning, we have shown how primordial vapour became Chaos, and from it came the four—heaven, air, water and earth—commanded continually to regenerate primordial vapour and from it chaotic water. We have shown their volatile, invisible and intangible seed. We have made it visible from invisibility and tangible from intangibility, so everyone can now see it and, through further inquiry, marvel at its powers. I said that this universal seed from regenerated Chaos or rainwater—that is, the nitre and likewise the salt—is not much better than ordinary nitre and salt. Demonstration warrants this conclusion: every operation can be performed with one as with the other, and its effect shows no difference, unless one is more purified. At equal purity one is like the other. No practitioner should let himself be misled. To say, “This is common nitre, but that is the philosophers’ nitre,” is sheer superstition. If ordinary nitre shows me the same effect as the other, as I require it, then for me it is the philosophers’ nitre. To see that universal nitre from rain is no better than common nitre, and likewise the salt, the reader should consider that universal nitre generates and originates common nitre. He must then conclude that the child’s blood comes from its father’s and mother’s, that it consists of those same principles; and if it performs the father’s effects, actions and deeds, it is in its whole substance the father himself. Moreover, as I said and as the axiom states: “What a thing is made from, it dissolves into again.” If every single thing—animals, plants and minerals—is born from universal nitre, they must return and be dissolved and reduced into it, back to the remotest beginning. If everything is born from it and what is born dissolves back into it, there is no difference. That everything consists of this nitre and salt and is born from them must be demonstrated by finding the seed everywhere, present throughout all things. We test this in the following chapter.