Alchemy and Remedies — Chemical Recipes

...[you] find [it], hold it in honor; the calcined earth remains to be infused, which is said to be of a fiery nature; likewise from the above-mentioned positions you have the four elements.

Afterwards, the ferment is added to the aforesaid water; this the philosophers call “ferment” because without it nothing is of value. For the ferment converts the separated body to its own nature. And there is no ferment except the Sun and the Moon; whence Morienus says: “Unless you have cleansed the unclean body and rendered it whitened, and have put the soul into it, you have directed nothing in this mastery.” Therefore, let there be a mixing of the ferment with the cleansed body, and then the spirit is joined with them, and rejoices with them, because they have been altered from their nature, and thus have been made subtle. For the spirit, by means of the soul, is joined and bound to the body, and together it is converted into the color of the ferment and becomes one with them.

Therefore the philosophers have spoken truly, namely that our stone is from the four elements and is from body, soul, and spirit. For they joined the imperfect body to the perfect body for this reason: because they called the ferment “water” and “spirit,” and by the power of the spirit and the ferment they called [it] the “soul,” which grants life to the imperfect body which it did not have before, and leads it into a better form. Certain philosophers also said: “Unless you convert corporeal things into incorporeal things, you have not yet held the rule of operating.” And it is true, for first there occurs the joining of the smoke and the wine, which is corporeal, which through sublimation

becomes incorporeal. Then in the mixing of spirit and water, that incorporeal thing becomes a body. And some have said: “Convert the natures, and you shall find what you seek.” This is true, for in our mastery we first make the slender from the coarse; the soul from the body; the moist from the dry; and afterwards, the dry from the moist—that is, earth from water; and the spiritual from the corporeal, and vice versa; and that the superior may be as the inferior, and vice versa; and that the spirit may be a body, and vice versa, just as in the sixth [operation] of our work, and in the solution that which is lower becomes upper, and the whole is turned into earth.

Our stone also, as the philosophers say, is from one thing, and it is a true saying. For our whole mastery is performed with sea-water and from earth. For it dissolves the bodies—not by a common solution, such that they are converted by imbibing water, but by a true physical solution—and the bodies are converted into the water from which they were at the beginning. This same [water] calcines and reduces them into earth; this same [water] transmutes the bodies into ash and incinerates and whitens them, and purifies them, and washes away the Laton, and utterly takes away its darkness. Now the Laton is the unclean body. And it [the water] is also quicksilver, and joining the divine bodies, it prepares them in the aforesaid manner by such a mixing that the fire cannot harm them in any way, and it defends itself from the combustion of fire and even converts one into another. It sublimes the bodies, not by a common sublimation, such as they intend who say...