Adam and Eve

Meaning

Adam and Eve first establish a limit to the art: bodily death is the inherited punishment of the first parents, and no earthly thing can remove it. The restorative is itself destructible. Adam then serves a different purpose, as the conjectured first recipient of divine revelation and the ancestor through whom the patriarchs inherited the secret. The introduction expresses this very confidently, but its future-perfect phrasing still presents an inferred origin. Part Three explicitly attributes the conviction to certain godly philosophers. The English “must originally have been revealed” and “are said to have obtained” preserve important degrees of assertion. These passages construct an authoritative ancestry for the art; they are not independent evidence that Adam possessed a tincture.