Cleansing and Sweetening

Use in the book

The fore-work on page 46 combines due cleansing with separation of superfluities. The subsequent recomposition concerns the pure parts. In the positive account, therefore, purification is an indispensable condition of the true subject’s further preparation, not the discovery of an unrelated ingredient. The universal road begins on page 97 with the catholic matter most limpidly purified.

The negative catalogue employs the same family of terms. Metal workers dissolve silver and gold, carry out sweetenings and make subtle preparations. Page 70 grants their products the status of excellent medicines, but denies that the purified solutions are consequently first matter. The same limit applies to metallic embryos: page 78 expressly imagines purified materials turned into transparent clear water and still rejects them as the regeneration field.

Pages 125–1262 sharpen the distinction with alleged metallic salts. Some are praised as medicines; other products carried up by corrosive additions retain a sharpness to which sweetening bears witness. Their staining of wood or skin is then wrongly taken for the tincturing power that would transmute metals. A purification vocabulary cannot bridge the gap between colour, medicinal use and radical metallic transformation.

The lesson is neither that cleansing is useless nor that every clean product is genuine. It is that cleansing acts upon a matter whose nature must already be judged. Khunrath’s priority of recognition remains in force throughout the laboratory work. On page 106 the right resolution and purification are indeed foundational, but the matter being resolved is expressly Magnesia, not any substance which a laborant can wash or render transparent.

Places to read

1. 1599 p. 46Cleansing and the removal of superfluities belong to the fore-work.
2. 1599 p. 67Sweetenings occur within the catalogue of ordinary metallic preparations.
3. 1599 p. 70Dulcoration does not make those preparations pri-material.
4. 1599 p. 78Purified, transparent solutions of embryos remain un-pri-material.
5. 1599 p. 97The positive universal preparation requires limpidly purified catholic matter.
6. 1599 p. 126Sharpness and staining undermine claims for alleged tinctorial metal salts.

Translation in this edition

“Sweetening-off” conveys a historical process-word, not a statement about flavour or safety. The modern note on page 126 supplies a procedural explanation; the primary text’s evidential point is narrower, namely the corrosive sharpness revealed in relation to dulcoration. No inference that a preparation is safe to consume follows from the term.