It has now been explained how vapour and air are changed into heaven. Let us examine what this vapour is and what it contains. We know well enough that earth and water, when heated, steam, seethe and exhale. Anyone who does not believe it should ask the peasants; they will tell him the reason. No learned person denies that earth contains an implanted warmth. If it does, all doubt is removed about earth and water giving off vapour. This vapour is twofold—indeed fourfold. It is twofold because it consists of water and earth; fourfold because it consists of all four elements of the first origin and first matter from which the four—heaven, air, water and earth—arose. As stated, none can exist without the others. I divide these vapours into only two, earth and water, for this reason: in relation to heaven and earth they are fixed and fixated vapours. When movement makes them subtle, however, water and earth become air and heaven. Everyone will readily believe that such vapour was water; many will doubt that it contains earth. But once the knots have been untied, they will quarrel little more about it. Attend, therefore, to what I said before: one element guides another, and one dissolves and subtilizes another. Heaven dissolves and subtilizes air, air water; water dissolves, subtilizes and softens earth. Conversely, earth condenses and thickens water, water air, and air heaven. Thus each is the other’s magnet: attracting, dissolving, coagulating, volatilizing and fixing it.

Every practitioner must note this: just as Chaos was divided fourfold into its parts or degrees, the heaven nearest air is not as extremely subtle as the highest heaven bordering the Empyrean. Likewise, the highest air, bordering heaven, is not as thick and coarse as air adjoining the watery sphere. The uppermost water is not as thick as bottom water or the slimy watery substance that clings like gum or glue to stones and plants growing underwater. Earth too is divided into degrees. Stones and sand alone do not constitute earth: earthly juices, salt, resin, pitch and wax growing above and within the ground are also earth, differing only in degree—that is, in volatility and fixation. Not all earth is as extremely fixed as stones; there is also volatile earth on its way toward becoming fixed. Water softens, loosens and dissolves such volatile earth, taking it up into itself and carrying it high into the air, indeed through continual movement into heaven. It is easy to reason, and later to see in the trial and practice of regenerated Chaos, that thicker heaven becomes subtle air more readily than the subtlest heaven does. The subtlest air changes into thicker heaven more readily than thick, coarse, lower air does. Coarse air becomes water sooner than upper subtle air; lower, thick, slimy water becomes earth sooner than upper, excessively thin and fluid water. Conversely, volatile, readily soluble earth—especially virgin saltiness—is made into water sooner than a dried-out stone or sand. Thin water is made into air, or driven off as vapour by fire, sooner than coarse, thick water. It is the same with heaven and air.

We have now sufficiently shown nature’s first beginning: how, through the almighty and eternal word, it became water from that vapour; how the water was twofold and was afterward divided into four parts. As these four arose from vapour, mist, smoke, exhalation and steam, and received the command to multiply and bring forth fruits, so they must bring forth all births in the same manner in which they themselves were first brought forth. As they arose from primordial vapour, the four must continually generate just such a vapour, of exactly the same matter and substance, without any deficiency. Through regeneration this vapour must become chaotic water, from which every single thing is to be born anew, preserved, destroyed and regenerated, without interruption until the consummation of the age. It had to be God’s will that the four elements generate such a water; nor, according to appropriate natural reason, could it be otherwise. They were children of their mother and received from her the power to give forth such a seed again. Everything they produce, down to individual things, is in the image of these four kinds. All four, joining their powers, generate the universal seed for the generation, preservation, destruction and regeneration of all things.

As these four together in unanimous union awaken a universal seed, each of the four has also separately received the power to bring forth a birth like itself within its own sphere. Heaven is the subtlest, purest, most transparent and clearest above the lower realms. It therefore brought forth such fruits from itself without the lower realms’ assistance: its stars, full of life and light. Air brought forth its meteors; water and earth their animals, plants and ores. The kinds were made separately from the seed of their own spheres: stars and lights, meteors, animals, plants and ores. As each sphere brought forth its kind from its seed, that kind, divided into individuals, received the command, in the image of the very first matter, to seed itself anew and multiply. Thus each star not only obtained long life and the power to maintain itself for a very long time through its purity, but from age to age people have observed various new stars appearing while others disappeared. I leave this to the astronomers and turn to air. In air, new births of all sorts of meteors are hatched daily. Scarcely does one disappear or perish without the same matter giving occasion to another. This can be observed better with our eyes and the touch of our hands in the sphere of water and earth. Every animal and plant, when it reaches maturity, obtains a seed to bring forth its like again. The power of multiplication extends almost to infinity or innumerability: scarcely does one die or decay before another, or ten times as many, is born and generated in its place.

We see this in the apparently lifeless creatures, stones and ores. However many stones people dig from earth and use for great stone buildings over thousands of years, they would never reach an end. To this day not the slightest loss or diminution has been perceived that would prevent people from finding abundant mountains, stones and ores. From this, however, the reader should understand that although each sphere visibly gives birth to its individual things, and these appear distinct from one another, we must reason here as above: the kinds of upper heaven, air, water and earth differ only with respect to volatility and fixation. Each individual within its particular sphere differs from the others in the same way. Heaven produces luminous creatures because of its cleanness, purity and clarity. Likewise, the lower elements produce subtle and coarse creatures according to their degrees of subtlety and coarseness. All differ from one another, and that difference is again a matter of greater or lesser volatility and fixation.

Heaven is not so wholly volatile that it contains no fixed part. It contains a fixed something, subtle earth, and regulates its fixation according to the nature of this earthly stability; so do water and earth. Just as earth’s volatility, compared with heaven’s, is to be reckoned fixation, so heaven’s fixation, compared with earth’s, is volatility. Understand it in this way: wherever earth is present—as it is present in all things, like the other elements, in greater or lesser measure—there is fixation or a being to be fixed, according to the predominance of its quantity. Conversely, wherever heaven is present, volatility is to be inferred. Judgment and application must follow how much or how little a thing has of either. We have now discussed the regeneration of Chaos, or universal vapour. Next we shall make that vapour into water, into true regenerated Chaos as it was at the very beginning, and demonstrate in theory as well as practice its force and power, which it possessed at the beginning, possesses now, and will possess in future as long as God pleases. The practitioner will thereby grasp with his hands what he undertakes to work upon, so that, descending further, he may establish his certainty.