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Book 8 On the Separation of Natural Things
Latin witness: Frankfurt 1605, printed pp. 236–248, SUB Göttingen PPN578052199. Source facsimile: https://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/id/PPN578052199?tify=%7B%22pages%22%3A%5B220%5D%7D
BOOK EIGHT ON THE SEPARATION OF NATURAL THINGS.
Chaos is the matter of the world.
At the creation of the world, the first separation began with the four elements, when the first matter of the world was a single chaos. From that chaos God established the greater world, separated into four distinct elements: fire, air, water and earth. Fire will be the hot part; air the cold part alone; water the moist part; and earth, finally, the dry part alone of the greater world.
What separation is taught here.
To understand, very briefly, the purpose of this eighth book, you should know that we have not proposed to discuss here the separation of the elements of all natural things. We have already taught those arcana fully and completely in the Archidoxis, in the treatment of the separation of elements. Here, however, we teach the separation of natural things by which each is materially and substantially separated and set apart on its own. This happens when two, three, four or more things have been mixed together in one body, although only a single matter is touched and seen. Frequently nobody can recognise a bodily matter of this kind or give it a specific name until a process of separation is undertaken. Then two, three, four, five or more things sometimes emerge from one matter, as daily experience in the science of alchemy makes evident.
What electrum is.
How many metals there are.
Electrum offers you an example. It is not a metal in its own right, yet it conceals all metals in a single metal and body. If it is anatomised and separated by alchemical skill, all seven metals emerge from it, pure and unmixed: gold, silver, copper, tin, lead, iron and quicksilver, and so forth.
What separation is.
To understand what separation is, observe that it is simply the setting of one thing apart from another, whether two, three, four or more have been mixed. I mean the separation of the three principles, mercury, sulphur and salt; the extraction of the pure from the impure, or of the pure and noble spirit and quintessence from the gross elemental body; the preparation of two, three, four or more things from one; or the dissolution and release of things bound and tied together which are naturally opposed and continually resist one another without end, until they kill and destroy each other.
How many kinds of separation there are.
Separations are various and manifold, and we certainly do not know them all. Those which we have investigated in dissoluble elemental natural things will be arranged and described here according to their kinds.