The Wayfarer

Hence, very many either damn the entire art preposterously or fall into despair themselves, when they have suffered the loss of their goods, age, reputation, and country, or see others suffer it. To set some Alexicacon remedy against evil, as far as possible, against all these evils—which, although they stem from the good intention of both the writers and the practitioners, we must be anxious about the true gate before we thoroughly enter this Labyrinthum chymicum chymical labyrinth. Once it is found, we should not doubt the more prosperous progress. This gate is nothing other than the beginning of the work, that is, the true and one materia Philosophorum matter of the Philosophers, about which it can truly be said: "Half is more than the whole, and he who has begun well has half the deed." For he who takes what he ought to take has already entered the royal way of truth, from which he will not allow himself to be seduced, even if it is necessary for him to stray now to these, now to those digressions. But on the contrary, there is no hope of finding truth for him who strives to work and reduce to his own whim what is against nature and art. To dissuade the former and confirm the latter, we shall betake ourselves from the Egyptian THEBIS Thebes with one hundred gates—which because of their size lie open too diffusely—to those Boeotian or Cadmean ones of seven gates. That is, from the nearly one hundred materials that either could be taken for the work, or have been taken by others, albeit in vain, we shall consider seven, namely the Metallic ones, and among them we shall institute a choice, having proposed a convenient one; and thus we shall divide this treatise into as many, or seven, chapters, to each of which we shall complete a particular course, or a descent into a mountain rich in minerals, the beginning always made from one of them, produced into the tortuous folds of the chymical Labyrinth, not without the aid and thread of a rational Ariadnes Ariadne, which we entrust not so much to the hand as to the mind of each, and commend him to God.