8 Water and Its Outflow

Chapter outline

Water is the third principle, the female seed and menstruum of the macrocosm.

It mediates the incorporation and fixation of heaven within earth.

Practical conjunction may require more than one compatible intermediate.

Animals, plants and minerals transform into one another through nourishment and decay.

Heaven, air, water and earth cooperate as father, seed and maternal vessel.

Water and earth belong together, as heaven and air do; and all four belong together. Earth must have water, and water earth; likewise heaven must have air, and air heaven. All must embrace one another, for none can subsist or act without the others. Water is the third principle after the separation of the great Chaos and the first patient or receptive part: the female seed and menstruum of the macrocosm, which must bring nourishment to all births beneath the moon. Together with earth, it is the mother of all things. Water is coagulated heaven, thickened air and fluid earth. It is vapour turned into water. Water is an intermediate between air and earth, the second intermediate by which heaven captured in air is incorporated into earth, mixed with it, made earth and fixed. Once heaven has become air, and air water, or dew, rain or snow, these fall onto the lower, thicker waters and earth and mingle with them. They begin to heat themselves, ferment and putrefy through the primordial spirit implanted within them. One acts within another—the spirit within the water—until through certain appropriate matrices they bring forth and generate their appointed fruits.

From this the practitioner should learn wisdom from nature herself. She is not content to make heaven terrestrial through a single intermediate, air, but uses both air and water. The practitioner should likewise govern himself by nature and direct his art according to her rule. How often someone sweats over the conjunction of his work and cannot bring it together! It stands in layers like oil and water, or water and earth; or the two contend so violently, like two fires, that they shatter his glass. He should seek a medium of conjunction, which is readily found. The way and manner of finding such media will also be revealed below. If one intermediate is insufficient, use two; if they still accomplish nothing, take three. They must, however, be homogeneous, not heterogeneous: minerals agree with minerals, plants with plants, and animals likewise with animals. Minerals and plants also agree with one another, as do plants and animals. There is only a slight difference among them all, since they arose from one single matter. Minerals are fixed plants, plants volatile minerals; likewise plants are fixed animals, and animals volatile plants. One can readily be transformed into another.

Human beings and cattle eat plants as food and make them animal through their Archeus. When a person or an animal dies, it is buried in the earth, and plants grow from it again. Plants in turn consume mineral vapours that rise in a volatile state through the earth into their roots, where all become vegetable. When plants rot and acquire a nitrous, salty nature, waters dissolve them and carry them through the cracks and fissures of the earth, or by a river into the sea and thence to the centre of the earth. There they rise to the mineral nature. The lover of the art thus sees how naturally one is transformed into another. As often stated, the only difference is an accidental property: one becomes volatile, another fixed, and accordingly acquires a quality. From this arise their qualities and their differences from one another. Heaven and air are the father and male seed; water is the female seed and menstruum; earth is the vessel and mother within which the upper three accomplish every regeneration commanded them by the eternal Creator. How earth and water rise and ascend into the air to generate the common seed, world spirit, spiritus mundi, or regenerated Chaos, exhaling everything as vapour and smoke, will follow in detail in the chapter on earth.