Golden Fleece — Trismosin (Splendor Solis Author), 18th-Century MS

...superfluous and corruptible things evaporate and are drawn out as useless vapors and fuliginous sooty or smoky excrements. It is no more and no less than the food taken into the stomach, which is properly assimilated and converted into the same substance as the nature it nourishes. This happens when it is seasoned by a digestive and worthy coction a slow boiling or cooking process. Through the preparation and digestion performed in the ventricle stomach or digestive chamber, it attracts a certain substantial virtue and suitable moisture. Now, by means of this radical moisture the fundamental fluid believed to sustain life, nature is preserved and increased. Their superfluous and over-abundant sooty parts, like a corrupted sulfur, are rejected from them. But it must be noted that each of these parts seeks to be nourished according to its own nature. It delights in this nature and desires to remain there to preserve its individual self within its own species. We must understand this regarding the Stone of the Sages the Philosophers' Stone just as we do for the human body. By means of this natural and tempered fire, it changes lower forms and different conditions into the purity of its own substance. This fire is the true governor and the only conduct of our great vessel. A lesser fire wears everything away original: "minor ignis omnia terit," a common alchemical maxim suggesting that gentle, sustained heat is more effective than a violent flame. It is the pilot and the radical moisture where diverse natures live peacefully, where several contrary qualities and differing discords compose chords of harmony. They are assembled by the industry of a necessary concoction ripening through heat and a moist heat, which act in equal proportion upon these metallic bodies.

What one wishes to give it serves as food;
our work treats imperfect metals in this way,
making them equal to the most perfect kings a reference to gold, the "king" of metals.

Second Treatise Representing the Work of the Philosophers by means of two figures

An alchemical emblem featuring a double-headed eagle with outspread wings, wearing a crown and positioned above a large heraldic shield. Behind the heads of the eagle is a radiant sun. The shield itself depicts a golden sun with a human face, set against a dark blue background scattered with golden stars or sparks. The entire composition is contained within a square frame.

It must be known, says Morien Morienus, a legendary hermit and alchemist often cited in medieval texts, that our operation and the Art of which we wish to treat at present are divided into two principal doctrines. The extremities and the means of these are closely attached. They adhere to one another so closely and with such a reciprocal exchange that...