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THREE WHEELS OR CIRCLES OF CIRCULATION.
Nature completes the circulation of the volatile element through a threefold action, as though through three instruments: sublimation, descent or pouring back, and decoction, which require different temperings. Thus Nature’s well-ordered intention, ranging through varied motions, directs her interrupted works towards their proposed end and tends towards the same goal by opposite paths.
THE FIRST CIRCLE.
Sublimation is the conversion of a moist and heavy nature into a light one, or its exhalation into vapour. Its purpose and benefit are threefold. First, through attenuation, a gross and impure body is cleansed and gradually stripped of its dregs. Next, through sublimation, it more abundantly acquires the powers of higher things, which flow down continually. Finally, through such evacuation earth is relieved of superfluous and oppressive moisture, which fills her passages, impedes the action of heat and the passage of natural spirits, and indeed violently suffocates them. This removal of excess moisture takes away the cause of obstructions, relieves earth’s nauseated stomach, and makes it fitter for digestion.
Moisture is sublimed by the impulse of heat. Nature uses her own fire as her proper instrument to rarefy moist bodies. Hence vapours, from which clouds and rains are generated, rise more frequently in winter and spring, because earth’s womb then abounds more in heat and moisture. Moisture is the material cause, and heat the efficient cause, of vapours and exhalations. In subliming, Nature applies a somewhat intensified heat, provided it is kept within the limits and range of tempering.
THE SECOND CIRCLE.
Descent, Nature’s second wheel in the circular work, is the reduction of spirituous vapour to a dense and watery body: the pouring back of moisture that has been rarefied and sublimed and then condensed again, and its descent into earth to moisten her with enriched liquor and imbue her as though with a heavenly drink of nectar.
Nature intends three things in irrigating. First, she means to distil her enriched moisture gradually rather than pour it out, lest a flood arise and an abundance of water close the ways through which the life-giving spirit passes in earth’s entrails, and extinguish earth’s inward heat. For that wise and just governor bestows all her benefits by weight, number, and measure. Second, she means to distribute moisture through different droppings and under varied forms: rain now denser, now thinner; now dew, now frost; pouring it out now more generously, now more sparingly, so as to offer drink according to the appetite or necessity of earth in her greater or lesser thirst. Third, irrigations are to occur in turns, with other operations interspersed, rather than continuously. Sunshine succeeds rain and rain sunshine, day succeeds night and night day, alternately.
A very slight cold—or rather, failing and expiring heat—loosens the vapours raised into the middle region and condensed there, and makes them fall. Excessive heat disperses them and prevents their condensation; intense cold, too, so binds and freezes them that they cannot yield falling moisture.
THE THIRD CIRCLE.
The last wheel or action of Nature’s circle is decoction: nothing other than the digestion, maturation, and conversion into nourishment of raw moisture instilled into earth’s bosom. This seems to be the goal and end of the others, because it is the relaxation of labour and the reception of food obtained through preceding labours. For, almost motionless and seized by sleep, she crushes, cooks, and digests the raw moisture she has received through the power of inward heat, setting secret fire—Nature’s proper instrument—in motion in profound silence and rest, so that it may convert that raw liquor, tempered with dryness, into nourishment. This is Nature’s whole circle, which she turns through different degrees of labour and heat.
These three operations of Nature are so connected and related to one another that the end of one is the beginning of another; in a necessary order they succeed in turn according to Nature’s intention. Thus the laws of alternation are interwoven and linked together, working in concert for the universe’s benefit and lending one another mutual service.