The Contest of Wisdom with Folly

In this we differ, for he uses the word fire, I use heat, which I call the effect of igneous light, the entire operation of which he took verbatim from Chapter 7, Book 1 of my history of the Macrocosmic physics. Whence the Oracles of the Chaldeans, etc., to the end of his text, he transcribed in the same sequence of words from Chapter 2 of the same second book.

Col. 109

Democritus indeed, and Orpheus, and the Pythagoreans judged that all things were full of gods, whom, however, they referred to a single Jupiter, because they perceived that the virtue of that divine nature was present in all inferior creatures, according to more or less.

He took all this from Chapter 2, Book 2 of my same history. Then he proceeds thus:

They call the first three days of the condition of the world Spiritual, because (they say) the Holy Spirit itself, in the manner of the sun, went around the entire mass for three days, so that on the first day it illuminated the supreme part, which is called the Empyrean heaven; on the second, the celestial part; on the third, this elemental part; whereby the whole world, with regard to these three diverse regions, was divided just as the decoration of the world was perfected by another triplet of days by the virtue of the sun. But that first triplet, referring to the Blessed Trinity, applied its hand to the megalocosm great world, the second to the Microcosm little world/man.

He treats the first three days of creation according to the tenor of Marin's words in Chapter 3, Book 2 of my same history throughout, and also concerning the three Spiritual days. The examples of how the Empyrean heaven was made by the operation of divine light are in Chapters 5 and 6, just as how the Ethereal heaven was made, and finally how that of the elements was made, are contained in Chapters 11, 12, and 13.

Col. 109.

They explain the production of the elements and of the sublunary world by a chemical example, for they extract the Spirit from wine, then the oil, which swims upon the Spirit, thirdly the Phlegm, after which the dregs remain, which they call the caput mortuum dead head/residue. When they have enclosed these in a round, hermetically sealed glass, with the vessel resting for an entire night, five regions appear, of which the lowest is black and veiled in obscurity, upon which a portion of phlegm resides, which the oil extracted from the dregs covers; the Spirit of wine follows, from which the extracted oil obtains the fifth order. By this reasoning, they wish the thickness of the spirit of darkness to be expelled from the Empyrean heaven, by which the element of fire would be constituted; which, when they were cast out from the middle region or ether, they were converted into the substance of the air. Finally, pushed from the lowest region, they produced the element of water. The dung-heap of all these, and the caput mortuum, is to be established as the earth, whose filth water follows as the lowest part of the air, then air, fire, and the fifth essence, which corresponds to the most subtle part of the wine—burning water—which, as parts, contains the fifth essence and a single fire of phlegm. That part which is called common water of life, having two parts of wine and as many of water, constitutes air. Finally, the phlegmatic part containing almost no Spirit constitutes water, [and] the caput mortuum residing at the bottom of the cucurbit represents the earth. Whence it is evident that earth is the dreg of any heaven whatsoever, and that water is the accumulation of the darkness—a thicker Spirit of the darkness of the lowest heaven, almost void of light—which, for a greater or lesser participation of light, are converted into various metals.