express the same thing more clearly. But these spirits, on the contrary and by an opposing movement, repel every dart of love and impart to things only feeble passions and soft, empty inclinations toward pleasure. Therefore they give Venus Antheus as her son in place of Adonis, and give her herself the name of Medusa, so familiar among the poets. They also attribute to her a most evil origin, since she springs from the giant Typhon—that is, from sulfur—and from a monster with three bodies [four alchemical signs].

Spirits of armoniac.

The spirits of forests, of the salts of mercury and the moon—moist planets—are of a moist nature. These spirits are fluid and therefore lack the good qualities of their planet, because they are the essential causes of alteration, death, and corruption. Whatever cannot be corrupted by any other elementary power can readily be dissolved and altered by the moistures of these salts. But as they are the most declared enemies of all our life, they do not corrupt matter so that generation may follow, because

like an elementary fire they disperse the seminal powers those moistures contain. Thus they exercise extreme tyranny over all things, especially metals. They dissolve everything cast into them, like the waters of the Styx or Alpheus; they reduce even metals and mercury to liquids, though not the sun, and return to their first matter or ancient chaos or limbo. Since they remain perpetually in the fire and some of them melt, they can very readily bring their sharp and dissolving power to bear upon the perfect bodies of metals and destroy them in respect of their mutability, when they are in their perfection.

Is anything more harmful to the body or more destructive than strong waters and corrosive spirits? Can their hostility to bodies be denied? It is such that, traversing and penetrating all their parts, they disperse, break to pieces, and tear apart whatever life, animality, and spirituality is in them. Thus they are not regarded as a refuge for thieves, a retreat for executioners, or a lodging for traitors, but are taken as the receptacle of all the winds

which are nature’s guards, soldiers, and cruel ministers, always ready to execute her commands.

If, however, we cast the nitrous spirits out of the world—the Cyclopes of Vulcan, who fill the middle region of the air, the cavities of the earth, and the whole surface with thunder, lightning, pestilential diseases, hail, and whirlwinds, so that nature seems in a manner to suffer convulsions, shocks, and tremors—I shall say that it is not only humanity’s torment but the arsenal of every implement of war. Moreover, it is the dreadful sacrifice of Demons, for whom with unheard-of cruelty it sheds the blood of countless people whom it puts to death. I add, finally, that everything deadly, destructive, harmful, diseased, pernicious, and criminal, whether in art or nature, issues from it as from the cavern and abyss of every evil.