Lumen de Lumine

In plain terms, it is “melted and flowing water”; or rather, “the fusible substance”: a “fluid earth, and the loose or porous part of the earth”. It is an exceedingly soft, moist, fusible, flowing earth: a waxen earth capable of every form and impression. It is “an earth-born son moistened with water,” or, in Latin, “a son of earth mixed with water”; and, to speak as its nature requires, “mixed with earth, and earth in marriage” [the last Greek epithet is uncertain]. The learned alchemist defines it as “divine, living silver, a union of spirits in a thing.” It is a divine, animated mass, with a complexion somewhat like silver: the union of masculine and feminine spirits, the quintessence of four, the triad of two, and the tetrad of one. These are its physical and metaphysical generations. The thing itself is a world without form, neither mere potentiality nor perfected activity, but a weak virgin substance, a certain soft and fertile Venus: the very love and seed, mixture and moisture, of heaven and earth. This moisture is the mother of everything in the world, and the earth’s masculine, sulphurous fire is their father.