Universal and Special Stones

Use in the book

On the first of Khunrath’s two roads, metallic seed and its catholic field are worked together. Their outcome is regenerated, more-than-perfected silver or gold: a silvern and silver-making, or golden and gold-making, Stone. Page 96 gives its consequences in three domains. Such a Stone allegedly works medicinally in human and other animal bodies, transmutatively upon lower metals, and restoratively or preservatively upon plants, but always according to its silvern or golden kind.

The second road preserves universality through the preparation. The purified catholic matter is worked by itself, without silvern or golden addition from beginning to end. The resulting Stone is the universal glorified Stone, also called the great catholic Elixir. Its described range includes vegetables, animals, stones, gems, minerals and metals. “Little,” then, is relative to this catholic range; it does not mean that the special Stones are trivial, fraudulent or merely incomplete.

Specification can occur at two different moments. The special road joins the catholic matter with metallic seed in the initial composition. Alternatively, the finished universal Stone can subsequently be united by fermentation with a specified material. Pages 100–1012 extend that later specification beyond silver and gold to prepared mineral, vegetable and animal materials. This is why the distinction cannot be reduced to two different colours of a single metallic agent.

For reading the rest of the treatise, the consequence is decisive. A denial that gold yields the universal matter does not entail a denial that gold belongs in the special Stone. Conversely, the use of metals in a special Stone cannot establish that the universal subject was originally a metal.

Places to read

1. 1599 p. 95The first route joins metallic seed and the catholic field in a common preparation.
2. 1599 p. 96The specified Stones work according to silvern or golden properties.
3. 1599 p. 98The second route excludes all silvern and golden additions throughout the preparation.
4. 1599 p. 99Great and little explicitly distinguish the universal and specified Stones.
5. 1599 p. 100The finished universal Stone can subsequently receive specification.
6. 1599 p. 101The later union determines the joined material’s mode of action.

Translation in this edition

Keep “special or specified” together where Khunrath pairs them. In the modern note to page 98, the gloss “neither corporeally nor spiritually prepared, nor unprepared” is applied to the catholic matter; its placement in the primary text instead qualifies the excluded silvern or golden additions. The article follows that immediate syntax.