Library of the Sages — Valentine, Khunrath, Hollandus, Bernard

Last Will and Testament was, which I have drawn up
for the poor lovers of science. And although
it did not belong to me so much to write, yet
I could not hold myself back without offending my
God from driving a clear light through
the clouds so that the day might be known, and that
the darkness of night and the troubled and
obscure time of many be driven away. You will therefore be warned
further how the archee Archaeus; formative nature operates further
within the earth or in its veins by the spirit
of mercury, after the spiritual seed
has been formed below by the impression of the
stars from above and nourished by the elements.
Such seed has become and is transmuted
into a marvelous water, just as the grand monde great world
was in the beginning made from nothing,
except that the spirit hovered over the waters.
A celestial heat had to awaken this
cold, watery, and terrestrial creature into
a life. But in the great world was the power
of God and the operation of celestial elements.
In the small world, there is also the power of God
to operate in the earth by his holy
and divine breath. Furthermore, God has ordained
and made such a means so that creations
would have acquired the power to operate one

within the other and that one might help the other to
fill and perfect all the works of God.
Thus was given to the earth an influence by
the lights of Heaven, of a kind of same interior heat
to warm and décuire cook down; digest by heat what was
too cold to the earth because of the wateriness.
That is, to each creature a particular kind
according to its nature, so that by the heaven awakened
there would be awakened a subtle vapor, pure, clarified,
and separated from the others. This joins with the
mercurial substance, by which heat
nature's excessive humidity is
dried out by the length of time. And when
therefore nature or salt comes to join,
which gives the body and the balm that
maintains it, and which previously operates in the earth
by the influence of the stars, there is made from that
a generation of metal according to how the
mixture of the three principles meets,
and according to the greatest part of the three
that it takes to itself, and according to that is made the
body. But if the spirit of mercury is directed
from above onto animal nature, there is made
an animal. But if it is directed onto the
vegetables, there is made from it a vegetable
work. But if it falls because of its