Nature keeps this rule, and so should we. Do not try to coagulate earth by flooding it with water. Imbibe it, gently distilling away the surplus as nature itself does, and continue cohobating until earth can endure greater heat. Then it needs no further moisture: it must increasingly take on dryness and proceed to coagulation and the highest fixation. Everyone clearly sees that water is only a covering or house of the universal seed, as already said, and is not itself the seed or spirit. Therefore not all that water can be coagulated, only what the seed actually needs and itself desires. Nature wants no more than it needs. Pour a hundred buckets of water over one lot of earth: all the volatile water and moisture will pass away by distillation, leaving earth alone. Earth retains and coagulates within itself no more than it needs and releases the rest. If the water also contained earth or fixed portions, those remain with earth as their like.

So it is with seed or universal spirit, in universal, specified, and individual things alike. Once this spirit is fixed, it takes a volatile spirit of its like and draws it to itself, making it like itself and fixing it too. The superfluous water in which that volatile spirit lay is released in almost the same quantity. Like thus joins its like and draws it to itself, according to the saying: “Nature seeks and embraces nature; nature rejoices in nature.” Conversely, one contrary repels the other when a lasting unity is to be made. As long as recolaceous water, seed, and spirit remain together in one body without proper stability and union, there is no immortal unity, permanence, or fixity. This appears in easily decaying and dissolving animals and plants, which abound in recolaceous water, and in many minerals not fully deprived of it. As long as recolaceous water, or insipid superfluous moisture, has not been separated, they remain subject to mortality or decay, resolution, and alteration.

Animals and plants readily putrefy and decay through the recolaceous portion grown with them, especially when more comes from outside, such as rain and snow. Minerals likewise decay because such moisture is everywhere mixed in to a greater or lesser degree and also arrives from elsewhere. Let the reader recognize recolaceous water as the implanted spirit or seed’s hammer and anvil, by which it is awakened to act. In waters it can never rest, but brings one alteration after another to light. When spirit is coagulated and fixed, however—an operation removing and drying away its superfluous moisture, as seen in minerals, metals, stones, and glasses—it is put to sleep, concentrated, and brought to its highest power. It remains permanent and inconsumable until awakened again by a like moisture. Then it strives to resolve that coagulated body back into the first state, returning to its workshop and tools. Through these it makes corruption from what was regenerated, until it regenerates something else from it.

Someone may object that the excrements of animals, plants, and minerals, expelled by nature through their proper outlets, are not recolaceous water or a being without power or substance. Such waters are full of spirit and seed and participate powerfully in the body expelling them: human urine, gums and resins from trees, and mineral waters according to their ores. I answer, first, that nature found these superfluous to preserving the body produced or generated and therefore wished to expel them. Second, by the Creator’s will nature has not yet intended to undertake quintessentiation here, as a person can through art. Third, nature diligently directs people toward excrements that flow out spontaneously without harming the body, so that they may seek their bodily support from them. There is no need to attack the body itself, only its excrements, each full of power and virtue according to its property.

In the animal kingdom nature has given chiefly urine and dung, then sweat and mucus, stomach and lung saliva, tears, earwax, and seed. In the vegetable kingdom there are spontaneously exuding gums and liquors, flowers and seeds, leaves and stalks. There is no need to take the animal’s whole body or dig the plant’s root from the earth, since the things mentioned contain the root’s powers. Likewise nature has destined metals for many other human uses, making it unnecessary to destroy them and raise the price of goods for poor people. Instead of gold, laboratory workers have gold-bearing marcasites, solar vitriols, solar sulphur-pyrites, and fixed and volatile embryonic sulphurs such as antimony, bloodstone, emery, and lodestone, all participating in the solar kind that strengthens heart and courage. So with the red stars iron and copper: take their products and discharges rather than their metallic bodies. So too with silver and all white stars. As iron holds the volatile embryonic sulphur of the sun, bismuth holds the volatile embryonic sulphur of the moon; likewise calamine, tutia, and fixed lunar vitriols.

The lover of the art thus sees that nature has provided not one subject for sustaining human nature, but many kinds, more than necessary. Unless we wish, we need not take subjects with their whole bodies, roots and all: their excrements offer abundant help, if only we knew how to use them properly. Where nature ceases, the practitioner should begin, separating superfluous moisture from these things. Nature goes before us in mountains and supplies examples of how to attain quintessence and imperishable permanence. Thus she forges the most enduring bodies, consumed not only by water and air but even by fire not at all, or only very slowly. Let the practitioner take this to heart and learn from his grandmother herself—whom most have hitherto bypassed and denied—how to forge a long and healthy life.

Someone may ask: if recolaceous waters are distilled away, does nature possess them in vain? Are they wholly deprived of spirit, power, and virtue, so that they should serve no use? Further, does spirit or seed ever become recolaceous, or the recolaceous become seed? To answer briefly—since this is less essential to the main substance and more a pleasure of speculation than a profitable discourse—I say that recolaceous water can never be separated totally and absolutely from spirit or seed so as to contain none of its hidden powers or rays. Conversely, spirit or seed cannot be separated totally and absolutely from recolaceous water: however stonily fixed and dry it is coagulated, it always participates in some water. Water and spirit are one. As I said above, the smallest drop of water and smallest speck of earth are filled throughout with spirit, and spirit throughout with water.

Someone will say: “This contradicts itself. If water is wholly spirit and spirit wholly water, then water is nothing but seed.” That is right and must be so. Understand, as I have said sufficiently, the distinction and the terms of distinction. Water and spirit are one matter proceeding together from God. In essence spirit is not different from water, nor is water divided from spirit. They are one and remain one forever, whether liquid or dry. The distinction and confusion of things are caused by people themselves: we have divided this subject or first matter into two in name, not in power; those two into four; those four into innumerable individuals. Yet all is only one thing, differing, as often said, only in fixity and volatility. The more fixed and coagulated spirit—or water—becomes, the more potent its power of action. If in its utmost solution, as dew and rain, it had the power possessed in the extreme coagulation of gold or the philosophical carbuncle, crude rainwater itself would be a universal medicine. People need no further trouble to dissolve individuals or coagulated seeds and bring them into quintessence or magistery.

But it does not have that power as dew and rain. It does so only when, as Hermes says, “Its power is complete if it has been turned into earth.” Therefore the expanded spirit and water must be concentrated, coagulated, and fixed; then it has complete power and the strongest strength. Calling such water recolaceous concerns its outward condition, not its inward nature: the placement of a term, not the power inherent within it. Someone says, “This thing is useless to me.” Must it therefore be negatively, totally, universally useless? No: useless to you, it may be useful to another; unsuitable for this, suitable for something else. As the rejected cornerstone finally became the building’s most useful stone and support, so recolaceous water, though entitled useless phlegm, still possesses power of action. It is the concentrated spirit’s own vehicle. Through it, spirit or quintessence administered to a sick body is awakened again and mixed with the diseased Archeus, strengthening the Archeus to expel its disease or enemy. Let the reader understand my intention correctly rather than immediately calling me contradictory.

We separate recolaceous water because it is a seed or spirit still too far within hyle or first matter, not yet sufficiently disposed or made salty through putrefaction and fermentation. Saltiness is the beginning and ground of all coagulation and the next condition toward transformation in earth into precious stones. Deprived of saltiness, this water cannot be coagulated and made earthly, or only very slowly. Spirit, however, is salty, spermatic, and coagulating. However volatile, it coagulates much sooner than recolaceous water. If fermentation makes that water salty too, it likewise coagulates like seed and spirit. Because it coagulates not at all or incredibly slowly, we separate it by distillation to hasten and shorten the work—not rejecting it as useless, but because it hinders and delays this work. The Creator made even the smallest speck of earth and drop of water for his honour and glory and the benefit of all creatures. When we call them useless, we mean superfluous and unsuitable for our particular work.

The reader should grasp this discourse well: not a word in it is idle. If he does not understand it at once, let him reflect until he does. Someone may still ask whether recolaceous water becomes seed or seed recolaceous water. That has been resolved above: seed and the recolaceous are one, distinguished by people through multiplying combinations of terms. To see with his own eyes that this is so, and that only sharp, salty seed coagulates quickly, not the recolaceous portion, let the reader accept the following palpable example. In hylean or chaotic subjects we cannot distinguish the water by sight, for their separated volatile watery portions are almost entirely alike in taste and smell. Wine, however, offers a perceptible difference, showing how insipid recolaceous water separates from the sapid or perceptibly sharp spirit.