The Golden Fleece

...always aspire to more perfection, and to the continuation of a longer life.

Figures 6 and 7.

A rectangular hand-colored illustration depicts an alchemical or royal figure. A bearded man wears a crown and voluminous, ornate robes of gold and red. He stands in a green landscape, holding a long staff. In the upper left corner, a radiant sun with a human face shines down. In the background to the right, a small nude figure is shown mid-leap or flight over rolling blue and green hills.

Fourth Similitude

Menaldus an alchemical authority often cited in the "Turba Philosophorum" evidently demonstrates the necessity and close communication that living things have with dead things in these words: "I wish," he says, "and intend that all those who give themselves to our Serious Study, and who desire to absolutely follow the same order and the path that we have held and duly observed to our satisfaction, should act in such a way...

The Golden Fleece

...that spiritual things become corporals, and that corporal things also become spiritual by a reciprocal conversion and dissipation of their first forms. This is done in order to acquire a more excellent form, rising from this death, which is putrefaction, much more glorious than before by a light and single decoction a process of boiling or heating to extract essences. Several others of the best Philosophers, unanimous in this proposition, all pay us with these similar words, Solue & gela original Latin: "Solve et coagula," meaning "Dissolve and congeal", dissolve and congeal, or as said in:

"If you dissolve the fixed and make [the unfixed] fixed,
And fix the flying one, it will make you live safely."
original Latin: "Si fixum Soluas faciasque fixum, / Et volucrem figas, faciet te vivere tutum."

says the "Fountain of Lovers" likely referring to a poetic or alchemical text on the union of substances.
Make the earth light, and give weight to the fire.
If you want to encounter what few encounter,
as we have already shown above in various places; imitating here also Senior Senior Zadith, a 10th-century Arabian alchemist who invites us, as do all the others, to the necessary nuances of contrary matters.
"The spirit," he says, "delivers the body, and by this deliverance the soul draws itself out of the bodies; then these same bodies are reduced into the soul, the soul then changes into a spirit, and the spirit again becomes a body."
For if it remains firm in the body, and if it makes the bodies of themselves terrestrial, massive, and coarse, become spiritual again by the strength of these spirits, that is...