Page 22 - Treatise on Salt

Chapter 5

Of the separation of Diana whiter than the snow.

It is not without reason that the philosophers call our salt, the place
of wisdom; for it is replenished with rare virtues, and divine wonders: it
is from it chiefly that all the colours of the world may be drawn. It is
white like the very snow in its exterior; but it contains interiorly a
redness like that of blood. It is replenished moreover, with a very sweet
taste, a vivifying life, and with a tin cture that is altogether celestial,
although all these things are not in the proprieties of the salt, because the
salt gives only an acrimony, and is but the band of its coagulation; but its
internal heat is pure, a pure essential fire, the light of nature, and an oil
most beautiful and transparent, which is of so great a sweetness, that no
sugar nor honey can equal it, when it is entirely separated, and divested
of all its other proprieties,

As to the invisible spirit, which resides in our salt, it is by reason of
the force of its penetration, like and equal to the thunderbolt, which
strikes vehemently, and which nothing can resist.

From all these parts of the salt united together, and fixed in a being
that resists the fire, there results so powerful a tincture, that it penetrates
all bodies in the twinkling of the eye, after the manner of a furious
thunderbolt, and drives away immediately what is an adversary to life.

And thus it is that the imperfect metals are tinged, or transmuted into
Sol: for from the very beginning they are gold in potentia, having drawn
their origin from the sole essence of the sun; but by the anger, and
malediction of the deity, they were corrupted by seven different leprosies
and maladies: and if they had not been gold before, our tincture could
never turn them into gold, as we see man does not become gold
notwithstanding he swallows a dose of our tincture, which has a
sufficient power to drive all maladies from the human body.

One also plainly sees by an exact anatomy of the metals, that they
partake in their interior, of gold, and that their exterior is environed with

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