6 What Is Finally to Be Concluded From the Preceding Long Chapter

Chapter outline

The universal operation as a rule for all particular subjects

The order of preparation, separation, and reunion

Volatile, acid, oil, coal, ash, and alkali distinguished

Reading and judgment before practice

The homogeneous water and the different requirements of soft and hard bodies

Mineral dissolution and ascent through the three kingdoms

The previous chapter speaks only briefly and universally of the destruction, breaking apart, and rebirth of all natural things, but principally of regenerated chaotic water. All plants, animals, and minerals must conform to this rule and necessarily follow this path, because they have all sprung from one natural origin, their first mother. In the previous separation of universal water, the practitioner separated one volatile part after another from the more fixed part. In the same way he must proceed with his specific and individual subjects, all animals, plants, and minerals: separate them in this order and reunite them in the order in which they parted, forging a quintessence from them. There can be no separation without putrefaction, whether natural or artificial: whether practised by nature's slow way or by swift manual operations of art, as each person wishes and is able. The faster one advances putrefaction, the faster one completes the work. I have given sufficient guidance in the first part on nature's own procedure. Since no body can come to perfection before separation and regeneration, neither can a perfect separation of volatile parts from fixed be undertaken without distillation. There are indeed many kinds of separation, but they are not required here. Only the one that nature always demonstrates and sets before us is required: first preparation, then putrefaction or solution, fixation, and afterward imbibition, inceration, augmentation, fermentation, and application. These are nature's stages, as taught repeatedly in this treatise and the preceding one.

Therefore, when the practitioner separates, he should always reckon the volatile parts as the highest, heaven and air, and the more fixed parts as water and earth. He may divide them into mercury, sulphur, and salt; into soul, body, and spirit; or into the four elements according to the Aristotelians, fire, air, water, and earth, as he chooses. The purpose of the distinction is to prevent him from confusing his principles, changing and entangling them in coagulation, and thereby bringing forth a contrary result. What depends upon the terms themselves? When he has brought the things he separates into four or three divisions, he can, by rectification, undertake a subtler preparation of each of those four or three and divide it into its parts, as I taught concerning rainwater in the previous chapter: subtle, subtler, subtlest; likewise coarsest, coarser, coarse; most volatile, more volatile, volatile; most fixed, more fixed, fixed; giving each its name accordingly. Once he has separated them, he can immediately undertake coagulation, conjunction, and fixation, which never require and consume as much time as putrefaction and solution or separation. Once someone perceives the advantage, they can shorten the work by their own reflection more quickly than I could have described in writing.

As for the volatile parts, he should regard them as a volatile seed. Vinegar or acid he should regard as the intermediary, or half-fixed and half-volatile seed: as salt or the nitrous principle in universals, and in specified subjects as the essential dissolved salt, oily or acetous. The same applies to oil: oil is a coagulated, condensed, concentrated acid, and acid is a dissolved oil. He should consider coal the more fixed part, an earthy or coagulated oil. But if it is changed into ash or alkali salt, he should regard it as the most fixed part, a precipitated, alkalized, fixed salt. For violent, swift calcining fire can make coal entirely fixed and resistant to fire, as ash. If oil and coal are rubbed together, and the material is deprived of its moisture in a cucurbit in ashes, it too becomes coal. But if driven strongly, an acetous liquor, or vinegar, distils over from the oil. If the coal is brought into an open fire, it becomes ash and salt, with a loss of material. A practitioner must know these principles, especially in this treatise. For if a laboratory worker does not know what the volatile, acid, coal, ash, and alkali are, how can he help himself and recover when errors arise?

From the preceding chapter, therefore, one must grasp the general aim of all separation, coagulation, and fixation. Everything else must and should follow this as a most certain rule, as a people follows its king: the universal seed, or watery rain-chaos. The reader should guide himself in what follows by the reasoning already given, arguing, reflecting, reasoning, and putting it into practice if he wishes to profit and attain the aim. Books are published so that one may first grasp and understand well what the author intends at this or that point, and ponder it a hundred times before setting hand to work. Then one need not regret a failure afterward and revile an author who intends one's good. Since the author cannot show everyone the manual operations, he publishes his writings so that his practice may benefit his fellow Christians too and they may draw advantage from it. Hence I have put rainwater—generated chaotic water—and its separation and coagulation first. Everything grows and comes to be from it. The lover of the art thus has, from the universal aim, an example and rule by which to guide all other specific and individual subjects, judge them, and arrange them in the same way. For this much is certain: in the beginning the whole of nature was one water, and through water everything was born. Through this same water, this regenerated chaotic water, everything must be destroyed again. Where there is no water, there is no separation in this art of ours by which the subtle can be distinguished from the coarse.

Thus nature regenerates, preserves, and destroys everything through chaotic water, and from what has been destroyed she generates and corrupts everything anew, with and through this water alone. We must follow it closely and follow its example. With this water, homogeneous and sympathetic to each and every thing in the whole world, we must destroy all coagulated and generated things again and bring them to birth anew as a noble being and an eternally enduring quintessence. But this water is divided into its parts, volatile and fixed. We must therefore resolve, prepare, putrefy, and corrupt volatile things such as animals and plants, which are not so tightly closed, compact, and hardened as minerals, with volatile chaotic water or its like. With the more fixed parts of this water, the nitrous and alkaline salt parts, we must dissolve and corrupt minerals and other harder coagulated bodies, because they too were composed and generated from these more fixed parts. Necessarily, a penetrating sharpness is required to release stone-hard bodies from their bonds. Yet each and every thing carries its own dissolving and coagulating agents with it. Since these alone are not powerful enough to destroy its body, we assist its downfall, dissolution, or putrefaction with its first mother, universal chaotic water: rainwater, snow-water, dew-water, and so on. With this homogeneous vehicle, we awaken its own coagulated sharp spirit, its own innate destroyer, so that after undergoing pain, or the purgatory of putrefaction and separation, it may be glorified and attain, through coagulation and fixation, the immortal glorification of the quintessence.

Some subjects do indeed possess by nature an abundance of their own destructive moisture. They carry on their own backs a sufficient destroyer, their own death, and therefore need no assistance from chaotic water or rainwater. Animals and plants, for example, are very juicy, moist, and liquid by nature. Once reduced to small pieces or crushed, they immediately enter putrefaction, corruption, and fermentation through their own juice. If their moisture is deficient, volatile rainwater can be added to help them, giving them sufficient fertility—moisture—to enter putrefaction sooner. Stones, metals, and minerals, by contrast, whose moisture has become so dried and strongly coagulated, will not obey this volatile water. But when fixed and half-fixed chaotic water—that is, salt and nitre—is brought into the nature from which minerals themselves were born, the gates of hell are broken and their inhabitants set free. In the first treatise, on the generation of minerals, I said that minerals were generated from a dissolved saline-spiritual acid: nitre and salt soured by powerful fermentation in the great stomach of the earth, then driven upward spiritually by central heat into the entrails of the mountains as spiritual vapour. There it gives birth to all sorts of minerals. Such vapours are a universal seed, dissolved salt and nitre, and saline-nitrous spirits, possessing a universal homogeneity with all minerals.