From the book
Sal Lumen and Spiritus Mundi Philosophici
Clovis Hesteau de Nuysement · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordReiteration is a return to treatment by stages, opposed here to forcing an effect through uninterrupted excessive action.
- In Sal LumenII.3.33 distinguishes watery washing from rising through an alembic and warns that continuous calcination can drive away the best part being sought.
- In this editionThe English preserves presqu'en toutes choses as “in almost everything.”
- A place to readRepeated treatment is contrasted with continuous coercive force that loses desired substance. The scope of necessary repetition is explicitly qualified as almost everything.
Meaning
Reiteration is a return to treatment by stages, opposed here to forcing an effect through uninterrupted excessive action. Patience and gentleness are operative judgments as well as moralized virtues. The claim is that repetition is necessary in almost everything, not an unrestricted rule for all materials.
Use in the book
II.3.33 distinguishes watery washing from rising through an alembic and warns that continuous calcination can drive away the best part being sought. What remains may be largely dregs, or may vitrify. Repetition is consequently not redundant labour: it is offered as a way to avoid both flight of desired substance and destructive fusion of the residue.
The author's common-crystal anecdote supplies the negative example. Prolonged ignition left the material vitrified with its dregs and useless for his purpose. He then attributes two advantages to repeated treatment: becoming accustomed to fire confers subtlety and permanence, while repeated dissolution gives swift entry and penetrating power. These are his explanatory and medicinal claims, not a validated modern procedure.
The phrase “not torture or violate Nature” makes the route's governing principle explicit. Art should follow natural capacities rather than treat more force and longer duration as automatically better. This principle connects to the later insistence upon retaining beneficial volatile spirituality while removing separable sulphur. The entry should therefore not turn the discussion into a stepwise recipe; its value is the contrast among repetition, continuous coercion, material loss, unwanted vitrification and the powers the author hopes to retain.
Places to read
- Book Two · Chapter 3 · Unit 33Repeated treatment is contrasted with continuous coercive force that loses desired substance. The scope of necessary repetition is explicitly qualified as almost everything.
- Book Two · Chapter 3 · Unit 34Repetition is said to confer subtlety/permanence and prompt penetration.
- Book Two · Chapter 4 · Unit 12The later preservation of useful volatile spirituality sharpens the rationale for gentle governance.
Translation
The English preserves presqu'en toutes choses as “in almost everything.” It also reads claire & flotante as “clear and floating,” following the imperfect printed type rather than silently substituting “flowing”; note 180 explains that distinct reading. The failed crystal treatment remains a failure, not a successful preparation retrospectively inferred from subsequent claims.
The subsequent account of successful-looking stages and repeated treatments is not said to recover the same crystal batch already declared vitrified and useless. The transition from failed anecdote to general claims must not be supplied as an unprinted recovery narrative.
Attested forms
reiteration; patiemment; reiterations; l'accoustumance du feu; souvent dissoult; La reiteration de cette practique est tres-subtile & necessaire, presqu'en toutes choses; accoustumance; presqu'en toutes choses; claire & flotante