Salt, Mercury and Sulphur

Use in the book

At p. 54 the triad appears within the sequence of one, two, three and four, all contained in one natural subject. Body, spirit and soul are followed by Salt, Mercury and Sulphur of Nature, Wisdom and the Wise. This setting makes the triad an articulation of an already comprehensive unity. It is not a list of three ordinary products to be separately bought and combined in order to manufacture Magnesia.

The later objection shows how easily a similar vocabulary can conceal a different material situation. At pp. 113–116234 some Artists claim to extract metallic sulphur as soul, reveal Mercury as spirit in clear water, and recover salt as body. They would then sow those sulphurs into their own mercuries and salts and complete the work by further operations. Khunrath grants some of the proposed separations and questions others, but his decisive answer does not depend on disproving every manipulation. Even if all three were separately available, they would remain essential parts of specified silver or gold.

At p. 117 he calls these parts things principiated rather than pri-material principles. Their constitution derives from an already generated fruit, so division alone does not restore the original condition. The universal first matter, separately subsisting outside the metals, remains necessary to the regeneration claimed here.

This account also prevents isolating metallic identity in sulphur alone. Silverness or goldness is in the other parts too, whole in the whole. The seed, if that analogy is used, is the purest whole of Salt, Mercury and Sulphur together, and must be sown in its proper field rather than back into itself. The triad consequently serves both constructive cosmology and critical analysis: it explains unity, yet cannot authenticate a work unless origin, specification and relation to the field are also right.

Places to read

1. 1599 p. 54The chymical triad follows body, spirit and soul within one natural subject.
2. 1599 p. 113The opponent begins an account of metallic separation under the soul–sulphur equation.
3. 1599 p. 114Mercury–spirit and salt–body complete the opponent’s threefold scheme.
4. 1599 p. 117The separated parts are things principiated, not restored pri-material principles.
5. 1599 p. 120Metallic identity is present throughout the triad rather than in sulphur alone.
6. 1599 p. 124The purest whole of all three is the appropriate metallic seed.

Translation in this edition

The genitives “of Nature, of Wisdom and of the Wise” may grammatically qualify all three or Sulphur alone; the supplied English leaves the ambiguity open. The authorial errata also correct the conjunction and order of the three terms at p. 116. No modern chemical identity is imposed on the philosophical triad.