The Living Return to Seed

In the Pythagorean Synod, consisting of seventy philosophers, all masters of the art, it is written: “The dense part of fire falls into air; the dense part of air, together with what is gathered from dense fire, falls into water. The dense part of water, together with what is combined from the dense parts of fire and air, rests in earth. Thus the density of these three rests in earth, and in it they are joined. Earth itself is therefore denser than all the other elements, as is plainly apparent and can be seen.” [Vaughan’s English:] the thickness or sperm of fire falls into air. The thickness or spermatic part of air, containing the sperm of fire, falls into water. The thickness or spermatic substance of water, containing the two sperms of fire and

air, falls into earth, where they rest and are conjoined. Earth itself is therefore thicker than the other elements, as is openly apparent and manifest to the eye. Remember what I told you earlier about earth: what a universal hospital it is, receiving everything—not only beasts and plants, but proud and glorious humanity. When death has ruined a person, the coarser parts remain here and know no other home. This “earth to earth” is precisely the Magi’s doctrine. Metals, they say, and all things can be reduced to that from which they were made. They speak the very truth: it is God’s own principle, which he first taught Adam: “Dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” But lest anyone be deceived by us, I think it right to tell you that there are two reductions. One is violent and destructive, reducing bodies to their extremes: properly, it is death, or the ordinary chemist’s calcination. The other is vital and generative, resolving bodies into their sperm, or the middle substance from which Nature made them. For Nature makes bodies not immediately from the elements, but from a sperm which she draws out of the elements. I shall explain by an example. An egg is the sperm, or middle substance, from which a chick is generated,

Genesis 3:19.

and its moisture is viscous and slimy: a water and no water, as such a sperm ought to be. Suppose Dr Coal—I mean some broiler—wanted to generate something from this egg. He would undoubtedly distil it first, with a fire strong enough to roast the hen that laid it; then he would calcine the dead residue and finally produce his nothing. Here observe that bodies are nothing but coagulated sperm; consequently, whoever destroys the body destroys the sperm. To reduce bodies to the elements of earth and water, as in our example of the egg, is to reduce them to extremes beyond their sperm. The elements are not the sperm: the sperm is a compound made from the elements, containing everything needed to frame the body. Be well advised, therefore, before distilling and quartering particular bodies. Once you have separated their elements, you can never generate anything unless you can make a sperm from those elements; and that is impossible for humanity. It belongs to the power of God and Nature. Labour, then, you who wish to be considered wise, to discover our Mercury. Through it you will reduce things to their intermediate, spermatic chaos; but avoid the destruction of broiling. This doctrine will spare you the futile task of distillations if you remember this

truth: sperms are made by the composition of elements, not their separation. To bring a body into sperm is not to distil it, but to reduce the whole to one thick water, keeping every part in its first natural union. To return at last to my earlier quotation from the Synod: all those elemental influences, united in one mass, make our sperm or our earth, which is earth and no earth. Take it, if you know it, and divide its essences through natural putrefaction rather than violence, bringing about a genuine dissolution of the compound. Here you will find a miraculous white water, an influence of the moon, which is our chaos’s mother. It rules in two elements, earth and water. After this appears the sperm or influx of the sun, which is its father. This is a living, celestial fire embodied in a thin, oily, airy moisture. It is incombustible, being fire itself and feeding upon fire; the longer it remains in fire, the more glorious it grows. These are the two mineral sperms, male and female. If you place both upon their crystalline base, you have the philosophers’ flying fire dragon, which, at the first sight of the sun, breathes a poison before which nothing can stand. I do not know what more to tell you, unless, following the fashion

of some authors, I gave you a dull description of the entire process; and that I can dispatch in two words. It is simply a continuous digestion, the volatile essences ascending and descending until at last they are fixed, in accordance with that excellent personification of the stone:

I do not die at once when my spirit goes out, For it continually returns, though often it withdraws; Now my soul has great power, now none.

I have endured more than one body should; I had three souls, all held within me. Two departed; the third almost followed.

I am not dead, although my spirit is gone, For it returns, and is both off and on; Now I have life enough, now I have none.

I suffered more than one could rightly do; Three souls I had, all my own, but two Have fled: the third had almost left me too.

“What I have written, I have written.” I have written what I have written. And now allow me to look around. Is there no Gunpowder Plot, no conspiracy? What has become of Aristotle and Galen? Where are the scribe and Pharisee, the disputers of this world? If they tolerate all this,