They call the extract sulphur of the Sun and Moon. Yes, it is a sulphur; and this is supposed at once to be the strength of great lords and to renew old women as true potable gold. Some philosophers indeed say—although perhaps to dazzle others—that it is the sulphur, but that the salt and mercury must be extracted from the residue. But I ask an honest, faithfully learned, and compassionate chymist: how much time, expense, delay, vexation, waste, lack, and loss of all kinds of costly materials and waters used for it, and how much coal do they burn, before they merely separate sulphur and salt and bring them into a liquid? I will hear nothing at all of running mercury. It is an imagined folly, a thing held out to laboratory workers in the greatest deception to keep them from more direct works. I do not say that running mercury cannot be made from a metal, but that it is empty and utterly vain, costly, lengthy trouble and labour. I do not know why authors have settled upon a metal’s running mercury, or so eagerly demand it from ores and metals, when in all ores, except mercury’s own ore, no running mercury is found, but rather saline acids, alum, sulphur, arsenic, marcasite, and so forth. From these the metals gradually grow and consist, and not from running mercury, as was also mentioned above.

O you alchymists! I tell you, do not strive to extract the sulphur: you greatly deceive yourselves, for it is only a part of the subtilized metal and nothing more. Everything—yes, the whole body of the metal—must be dissolved, brought into a liquid, made to pass over, and become a sweet spiritual oil or a spiritual salt. For human medicine it must be, mark well, volatile rather than fixed, so that the archeus of the stomach may immediately turn it into smoke and vapour, and in this form it may penetrate into the blood and with it through all the vessels to marrow and bone. It must be a true medicine; for if the medicine is fixed, the archeus must first make it volatile and do preparatory work upon it. Make it volatile and homogeneous beforehand if you wish to revive the dying in their last gasps. Although I have spoken of the fixation of medicines through almost the whole book, I did so because everyone cries “fixed, fixed,” and does not know or notice that the animal itself makes all things volatile for its nourishment. But you should not understand me to demand a medicine as supremely volatile as spirit of wine. It should be volatile in such a way that it is neither too volatile nor too fixed, but half of each and in the middle state, like all acids. It should be an acid nominally in quality, but sweet as sugar, because nature eagerly and greedily draws all sweetness to itself. Thus it should be, as I have also taught repeatedly here. For if a medicine is supremely volatile, like spirit of wine, heat drives it too quickly through all the vessels and out again through the pores of the skin without even a slight effect. But if it is fixed and the archeus cannot dissolve it, it is again useless, for it passes out in the stool. If it is in the middle state, however, it attaches and unites itself to the blood, travels with it through all the vessels, and expels all diseases chiefly through urine and sweat.

If you do not make your medicine thus, but remain with your extracted sulphur, you will bear the loss yourselves. Even if the best philosophers hold this opinion, I remain with nature, which does not join heterogeneous things or dregs together, as some suppose when they say: “Extract the soul and leave the body, for it is dregs.” Yes indeed—the dregs are in your head, not in the body! I say this: “Take the soul together with the body if you wish to cure the human body and spirit.” They contradict themselves. If the disease is in the blood or liquid parts, the soul cures it; accordingly, the body should cure the body in turn, and one spirit the other. Such follies have crept into the noble art, through which so many—I will not say a thousand, but countless people—have lost their possessions, died, and perished; who knows where their souls have gone? When someone has acquired through ten years’ labour a practical knack that he might perhaps have achieved in a quarter of an hour, had fate not stood in the way, he makes as much of it as if he had concentrated heaven and earth. He proclaims that there is no other way, and that even if an angel came from heaven and taught differently, it would be a lie—as if God did not have a thousand ways of helping! Yet they alone wish to be masters, and drag all other parables toward their own work. Paper, pen, and ink must immediately be fetched, and whole folios scribbled about one single thing to which the writer attaches an entire philosophy. These will contain nothing but hieroglyphics, perplexities, transpositions, and highest secrets of which the world is unworthy—yet they are written for the world. A few old recipes are then appended, entirely obscure besides, concerning the universal tincture and philosophers’ stone. In puzzling over them, many stake and spend possessions, property, money, indeed body and soul. But when the matter is examined in daylight, one often finds the writer’s arcanum openly in an old manuscript on the junk market. Then the treasure lies open and is little esteemed or wholly disregarded.

To do the lover of the art this further service, just as I prescribed various modes of proceeding in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, I will oblige him here too. If anyone wishes to practise any of them, I give it to him briefly and directly, without obscure speech, so that everyone may see and find a Christian incentive to contribute his experiments also to the common good. For what use is speaking in parables and riddles? I would rather keep it straightforward, so as not to deprive poor people—already persecuted by the arch-enemy Satan—of time, labour, expenses, and their already hard-earned livelihood. Everyone who writes books should heed this, and either do what he intends to write about or refrain from publishing it to mislead the world. For I can understand my own riddles, but another person cannot look into my head to see what I meant. Hence everyone interprets and explains them as he sees fit, and manifold explanations produce confusion and disorder, from which arise the misfortune and ruin of all laboratory workers. Therefore let the reader attend only to this: reduce metals and minerals to their first matter by a menstruum of whatever kind he wishes, corrosive or otherwise, mercurial, sulphurous, aluminous—whichever seems best to him and acts fastest. With it let him bring the mineral and metal back to their first saline matter; that is, let him give the metal a salty nature, a vitriolic condition or a mineral salt, which afterward can be dissolved in alcohol of wine or rainwater and deposits no undissolved earth. Even if it does deposit some, this is a sign that it has not had enough menstruum. Dissolve that earth with fresh menstruum and likewise make it into salt, vitriol, alum, and so forth. Then dissolve such vitriol, salt, or alum in the dulcifying acid taught above, and likewise in spirit of wine, and proceed in every respect as previously taught. The more often you dissolve with fresh vinegar and spirit of wine and coagulate again to an oil, the sweeter and more volatile they become. They can very readily be distilled over, entirely oily and with little veins, like spirit of wine or a spirit. After being dephlegmated, this coagulates and fixes itself in a childlike warmth: fluid like wax in warmth, like ice in cold, dissolving like sugar in all liquors and resisting precipitation; lovely, sweet, pleasant, penetrating everywhere like smoke. Countless simple and compounded menstrua are described here and there, which I disregard. Instead I remain with nature and follow her, and tell the reader that, whatever he undertakes, without a corrosive he will scarcely achieve a good mineral dissolution. Even if he should have an alkalized menstruum and other radical mercurial menstrua, all must nevertheless be, and are, made from the root of the corrosive. In sum: the corrosive is master of the matter, and remains so as long as the world stands. Grasp it, if you can grasp it.