Fermentation

Use in the book

Pages 99–10123 move from the universal Stone’s catholic powers to their determinate applications. Upon metals it more-than-perfects through fermentation; the metals can afterwards multiply their own kind through projection upon lower metals. The sequence distinguishes preparation of a specified active medicine from its subsequent employment.

The finished universal Stone can receive specification not only from silver or gold but also from prepared mineral, vegetable and animal materials. Page 101 describes an indissoluble union whose joined members continue to act together according to the character of the associated matter. The Proteus gloss names this adaptability: through fermentation the universal ferment displays itself in many shapes. Universality is therefore a capacity for various warranted applications, not a claim that every application remains without a specific character.

The same page supplies a crucial exception to the earlier route of metallic regeneration. The already perfected universal Stone is said to exalt silver and gold at once without their previous reduction into first matter. This does not repeal the universal ground; it presupposes that ground in its completed form. A reading that imposes the first road’s prior reduction on this passage would erase the point of having two roads.

Fermentation appears again in the operation list on page 160, there qualified as metallic. The list rebuts the boast that unprepared matter already transmutes. It is not a reason to collapse all earlier distinctions into a single fixed sequence. The treatise has already shown why the timing of specification matters: either metallic seed enters at the beginning of a common preparation, or the universal Stone is prepared first and receives its particular application later.

Places to read

1. 1599 p. 100Fermentation more-than-perfects metals before their multiplication by projection.
2. 1599 p. 100Specification after completed preparation can involve several kinds of material.
3. 1599 p. 101The indissoluble union acts according to the joined matter and can exalt metals without preceding reduction.
4. 1599 p. 101 · marginThe Stone is named universal ferment and Proteus of the natural philosophers.
5. 1599 p. 160Metallic fermentation appears in the polemical list of necessary preparations.

Translation in this edition

“Fermentation” retains the historical operation-name without importing a modern mechanism. The Proteus designation is Khunrath’s primary marginal gloss, not an editorial embellishment. The book’s hostile leaven or sourdough images elsewhere must not be mistaken for statements about this positive operation.