Sal Lumen and Spiritus Mundi Philosophici

Morien, that holy and learned Roman hermit, reverently and frequently cited by all the natural philosophers who have written these past fifteen hundred years, says as much of the fixed grain to which Nature has given the power to perfect and multiply metals. He says that unless it is putrefied and blackened it cannot be completed, and will be reduced to nothing. I have allowed myself to say this in order to teach the less instructed how to recognise the creator through his simple creatures. Ordinary people beg this knowledge from more remote things, behaving like those who ask pupils in the lowest class for perfection in the sciences instead of consulting the ancient oracles of the wisest teachers. Through these straightforward conceptions I have therefore wished to entreat them to employ the excellence of the reasoning soul given to them, in order to inquire into this sovereign principle through the most excellent things which give and preserve life in us and in every mortal creature. Mortification therefore necessarily precedes every entrance into life, especially in this firstborn spirit of Nature once it has taken a body. There is no other way to separate from it what prevents its regeneration into life and the purification of its essence. This death does not mean that it loses its body through burning and destruction by fire, or through putrefaction. Rather, just as in the germination of seeds putrefaction does not annihilate what acquires a body within them, so the precious body of our Redeemer was in no way impaired, destroyed or corrupted. It always contained that centre and germ of life through which he rose again. Within it the two natures were so joined together that they never abandoned one another: the bodily nature retained the spiritual here below for as long as our salvation required, and the spirit bore the body into heaven for its glory after the mystery had been accomplished. Accordingly, in the exaltation of mercury, or universal spirit, after the first stage accomplished in its preparation through separation, everything bodily and spiritual that remains within it is made volatile, because the elevating power still overcomes the fixing power. In the end, however, the fixed retains the volatile with itself through the action of assisting heat. By increasing the strength of the two nobler elements, that heat entirely extinguishes the power of the two weaker ones.