Gold ordinary

Use in the book

At p. 142 the author ranks the coagulated and fixed essence of water, the philosophers’ stone, above gold and below only the human soul (II.142.2). The following page draws the consequence. Those who prepare the stone or natural tincture from gold err against the principles, because nature cannot be raised beyond its terminus once that terminus has been reached (II.143.1). Metallic excellence and tincturing power are different capacities. Ordinary gold cannot spare some of its perfection and pass it to another metal merely by possessing that perfection itself (II.148.1).

The rejection of a supposed reduction into gold’s first matter and seed follows. Such reduction would require corruption and putrefaction, described in the philosophers’ language as killing and annihilation. Yet the author says gold is subject to neither corruption nor putrefaction (II.143.2). He invokes the rule that nature admits no return. That rule was already used in Part One against turning particular creatures back into the universal principles in practice. A theoretical tracing of origins is not the same as a successful reversal in the laboratory.

The next paragraph sharpens the argument: gold has no life, and where life is absent no killing can take place, since privation presupposes possession (II.144.1). “Dead” is consequently relational. The finished metal lacks the relevant life and generative capacity, unlike the living philosophical metals. The point is not a modern biological classification of every substance but a restriction on the proposed process.⁵⁸

The polemic becomes economic at p. 145. Common alchemists’ killing and annihilating gold means making it disappear from the patron’s chest and purse (II.145.1). The joke depends on a double sense of destruction: a claimed philosophical operation is exposed as the loss of money and material. This passage belongs with the book’s concern for wasted time, heavy costs and fraudulent particular processes. It is not a detailed report that every treatment physically destroys metallic gold.

Yet the author immediately distinguishes a legitimate later use. If the medicine has first been prepared in the best manner and is then fermented with gold, one part is said to tincture a thousand parts of common metals (II.145.2). Thereafter the work cannot be multiplied. The reference is to Basilius’s twelfth key. The order of clauses matters: the medicine precedes the gold fermentation. Gold is not thereby reinstated as the original universal subject, and the process carries a limitation absent from the unrestricted language of the universal root.

The Mercury discussion prevents another mistaken route. Ordinary mercury is said to remain volatile even after ten years of common heating, alone or with gold or silver, because no proper inner agent is manifest within it (II.146.2). A mixture of two familiar substances does not acquire the necessary universal principle simply because both have impressive names. The author’s argument concerns inward nature, not the duration or cost of unsuccessful labour.

Finally, a Sendivogian warning contrasts common metals, especially aurum vulgi, with living metals possessing spirit (II.148.2). The next pages direct the search toward water and the gold-essence contained in it. Thus the negative account of ordinary gold serves a positive purpose: it redirects the reader from the completed product to the generative root, without claiming that a root must resemble its eventual product in outward appearance.

Places to read

1. Part II · II.142.2; II.143.1; II.143.2; II.144.1234The causal and terminus arguments against preparing the stone from ordinary gold.
2. Part II · II.145.1; II.145.22The economic polemic followed by the qualified allowance for gold fermentation.
3. Part II · II.146.2; II.148.1; II.148.2; II.150.1234Failed common mixtures and the contrast with living gold.

Translation

Aurum vulgi is “common” or “ordinary gold.” “Dead” and “living” are kept where the quoted authorities use them, rather than paraphrased into modern chemical inactivity and reactivity. Terminus is translated as a limit or endpoint; it marks the author’s theory of determination, not a measured laboratory threshold.

The edition also preserves the difference between ordinary gold being dissolved and its alleged radical reduction to first matter. The author can discuss dissolution while denying that a familiar metal is practically restored to a universal seed. English should not turn every loosening, dissolving or opening into the same operation.

Connections

Gold ordinary is a necessary companion to Gold living, not a rival topic. Universal and particular explains the difference between a finished mineral and the universal root. Ferment and Azoth and Multiplication explain why gold may appear after medicine is prepared while closing off further increase. Labour and patience concerns perseverance under right principles, which this entry shows cannot be replaced by indefinite heating of a wrong subject.

Cautions

The author’s assertions about gold’s resistance to putrefaction are historical claims in his system. They should not be expanded into statements about every chemical reaction involving gold. Equally, the later fermentation is not a complete reproducible process and supplies no modern guarantee of transmutation. Its importance here is logical: a material excluded as origin can still have a limited subsequent role.

aurum vulgi

aurum vulgi — ordinary or common gold. II.148.2.

Gold

Gold — gold. II.143.1; II.145.2.

Terminum

Terminum — limit or endpoint; inflected Latin form. II.143.1.