Page 19 - Treatise on Salt

Chapter 4

How our salt is divided into four elements,
according to the intention of the philosophers.

As our stone, exteriorly, is humid, and cold, and its internal heat is a
dry oil, or a sulphur, and a living tincture with which the quintessence
must be conjoined and united naturally; it is necessary that you separate
from each other all these contrary qualities, and bring them to an
agreement: which our separation will effect, which is called in the
philosophic ladder, the separation, or depuration of the aqueous and
liquid vapour from the black faeces, the volatilisation of the rare parts,
the extraction of the conjoining parts, the production of the principles,
the disjunction of the homogeneity; which is what must be done, in
proper and convenient baths, etc.

But it is requisite first to digest the elements in their proper dunghill:
for without putrefaction, the spirit can not separate itself from the body,
and it is it alone that subtilises, and causes volatility. And when your
matter shall be sufficiently digested, in such manner that it may be
separated, it becomes more clear by such separation, and the quicksilver
takes the form of a clear water. Divide then the stone and the four
elements into two distinct parts, to wit, into one part that is volatile, and
another that is fixed. What is volatile is water and air, and what is fixed
is earth and fire. Of all these elements the earth and the water only
appear sensibly before our eyes; but not the fire and the air. And these
are the two mercurial substances, or the twofold mercury of Trevisanus,
to which the philosophers in the Turba have given the following names:

1 The volatile 1 The fixed
2 The quicksilver 2 The sulphur
3 The superior 3 The inferior
4 The water 4 The earth
5 The woman 5 The man
6 The queen 6 The king
7 The white woman 7 The red servant
8 The sister 8 The brother

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