Page 21 - Compound of Compounds

1 The setting in motion and purification of the elements;
2 Conjunction.

N.B.: the matter of the Philosophers’ Stone is cheap; we find it everywhere; it is a
viscous water like mercury that is drawn from the earth. Our viscous water is found
everywhere, even in latrines, suggested a few philosophers, and some imbeciles
interpreted this literally and sought it in faeces.

Nature operates on this matter by withdrawing something, its earthy principle and
by adjoining something, the Sulphur of the Philosophers, which is not the sulphur of
the vulgar, but an invisible Sulphur, the red tincture. To tell the truth, it is the spirit of
the roman vitriol.

Prepare it thus: Take saltpetre and roman vitriol, 2 lbs. each; grind subtly.

Aristotle was right when he stated in his Fourth Book of Meteors. “All the
alchemists know that the form of metals can in no way be altered if they are not first
reduced into their first matter.” That is easy, as we shall soon see. The Philosopher
says that we cannot go from one end to another without passing by the middle. At one
end of our philosophical stone are two luminaries, gold and silver, at the other end is
the perfect elixir or tincture. In the middle runs the philosophical living water, naturally
purified, decocted and digested. All these matters are close to perfection and preferable
to bodies of a more distant nature. As ice melts into water by means of heat, for once
having been water, so do the metals resolve themselves into their first matter, our
Living Water. The preparation is indicated in the following chapters. Only it may
reduce all the metallic bodies into their first matter.

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