Although in the mercurial essences of even the purest metals we encounter pure spirits useful for some purpose through nature's beneficence, anyone can nevertheless find impure spirits in their sulfurous parts. These are very harmful and compared to evil Demons of the third kind because they share the nature of antimony's spirits and the character of quicksilver. But they participate in the evil inclinations of all spirits and all hell's furies, especially those called Saturnian, that is, of lead. They are said to be the spirits that attend to and examine every metal as those latter spirits examine crimes. Apart from the sun and moon, which they recognize because of their sovereign property, they reduce the rest to ashes. Since this spirit contains mercury and sulfur very like common quicksilver and sulfur, everything we have granted the others above must be granted to it with still greater reason. Everything that Saturn's good spirits do, whether in heaven or on earth, especially to

give bodily form to the ideas of sperms and seeds containing within themselves the forms of things meets resistance in these evil spirits. Through a contrary instinct and diabolical antipathy they seek to extinguish their germinative spirits by their harmful coldness, which they multiply infinitely.

For this reason the ancients placed a scythe in their hands to show that they destroy and exterminate everything. As though with a gaping, hungry mouth, they devoured what the good spirits had generated. They are compared to the dragon of Lerna, which, born in cold, muddy waters, had devoured Cadmus's seven companions, who are the seven metals. If their strength is weighed in a just balance, they will not seem much below this latter venom in cruelty and inhumanity. This spirit hostile to lead is the cruel eagle gnawing Prometheus's ever-regrowing liver. By the eagle we understand its raw quicksilver; and when it is said that Sisyphus continually rolls a rock to expiate his crime, this means that he is condemned by nature within the coagulation of stones;

This is why the ancients represented Saturn holding in his hand, as an adornment, a serpent that devours and regenerates itself.

They called it the watchful dragon guarding the golden apples in the gardens of the Hesperides, which must be killed if we wish to gather them. Its venom is colder than that of toads, and its presence more harmful than cold hemlock, apium, mandrake, and henbane, which demons use in their illusions. It renders not only trees but other things barren; its evil nature makes it employ all its power and continually meditate ways to contrive their death.

In niter, or in its marcasites, spirits are discovered that are no less injurious or dangerous. They assume the nature of spirits, either remain in the air or mingle with thunderbolts and thunder, corrupt the air, and cause plagues and diseases. For while it claims the dominion of Jupiter, its first fashioner, it raises all the phenomena of stormy air filled with lightning; and there is nothing in all nature destined to generate

the vital spirits of the air, the motive, sensitive, and animal spirits, that it does not seek to destroy as their most bitter enemy. It fills euruchōrias—that is, the vast region of the air—with the coldness of its mercury, the fiery and volatile heat of sulfur, and dry vapors or meteors whose opposing qualities make them vomit forth so much lightning and so many thunderbolts that they seem to overturn and destroy the universe from top to bottom. This is why the poets represent them armed with thunder; and, as Claudian says, ‘The whole universe falls silent at the mere sound of his voice.’

It prepares its weapons against its own father, namely Saturn, and raises its head against him. Wishing to seize his sovereign throne as if by hereditary right, imitating the pride of the prince of darkness and exalting itself above the other spirits, it arrogantly claims the glory and name of King. Not one of these spirits fails to strive for, or boast of possessing, the foremost places. This produces among them an eternal and unending war, which afterward spreads through all created things. It is through so

astonishing a prodigy that Adam’s fault has passed even into insensible things, that the malice sustaining human sin spreads throughout nature, and that this mire and pus of contagious corruption or death has multiplied without limit.

This appears still more clearly in Mars or in its sulfurous spirits. Although far beneath the others, through a pride born with it and never to die, it nevertheless dares shamelessly and tyrannically to claim the foremost places. Covered in iron, it seeks war against all, and has the impudence to challenge Saturn, Jupiter, and Mercury even in heaven, and to attack lead, tin, and quicksilver in the family of metals, stripping them of their qualities. It makes Vulcan and the Cyclopes its slaves and styles itself with the names of the Most High.

Anyone with even a little instruction in the elements of chemistry readily sees that its sulfur and its flashes of flame rise violently into the air. The same must be understood of Saturn and of gold, which has the brilliance of lightning. It is compared to Cacus the thief