Page 21 - Book of Crates

Then I asked the Eternal of the Eternals to recommend me to this
angel, so that I could finish obtaining from him the revelations that he
had begun on the nature of the things. I started fasting, praying and
remaining in contemplation, until finally the angel appeared again to me
and said: “Do you know that when we speak of ouaraq money, we
want to indicate our silver and our gold only. When these substances
are mixed in the vessel and they whiten, we call them silver; we call
them gold, when they are red. If one adds sulphur to it and that one
produces it, we give it the name of gold ferment then, or some name of
this kind.

“Write: Take the minerals in the desired weight; mix them with
mercury and operate until the product becomes an igneous poison, and
you will have what we call the molybdochalque. When the bodies will
have been burnt and they will be fixed, we will call it the product of the
dry sulphur. Then it will produce pure gold and will dye the silver to
gold. (We do not intend to speak here of the vulgar silver, but of silver
compounded by the philosophers and to which we give the name of
silver, ouaraq.) If we add the remainder of poison to it, it will tinge
gold, and it will not be the gold of the vulgar, but the compound that
tincts in red and that we call gold. We will indicate the weights later to
you. As for the bodies, they have all a shadow and a black substance,
which are on the surface, in all metals that possess them. Mercury, like
all the other bodies, has a shadow and a black substance. It is advisable
to extract this shadow and this black substance from it, as one extracts
them from the other bodies.”

I asked him how we could extract the shadow from mercury. He
answered me: “By mixing it with the other bodies, because then it is
whitened.”

“How is that?” I asked him, “Since the philosophers say that
mercury alone is able to whiten the copper.”

“They should rather say”, he retorted, “That mercury is whitened;
because the bodies that resist fire do not let anything be emitted, and
there only the mercury gets free and volatilises under the action of fire.
When it is extracted by means of fire, it volatilises, and the other

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