Chemical-Philosophical Treatise on Natural and Supernatural Things

of the three principles, and as much as it acquires for itself from these three, so also is the body produced. If the spirit of Mercury is carried from above to Animals, the nature of the animal also results therefrom; if it tends to vegetables by its own concession, a vegetable thing rises from it; but if its infused nature is inclined toward Minerals, Minerals and Metals are born from it, each however with its own distinction, as they are elaborated. Animals by themselves, vegetables by another reason and form by themselves, Minerals likewise by themselves, each by a certain singular way, about all of which many things would have to be written in detail and very many things handed down separately.

Here someone perhaps, and not unjustly, will ask how such a spirit of Mercury is to be obtained or elaborated, by what reason and way it is to be prepared so that it may put to flight diseases, and as if generating all kinds of lesser Metals in the microcosm, be able to alter them through transmutation and the augmentation of the seed. Not a few perhaps will eagerly await the answer to this question, which I will not hide from them, but will teach faithfully, as much as has been permitted to me by divine command and judgment, in this way: Take original: "℞" red hydrargirum mercury, bearing the color of cinnabaris cinnabar/mercuric sulfide, with the best gold, of which you will have an abundance; grind these together analytically before they have experienced fire; pour over them the oil of Mercury, finished by itself from lightning-bright, purified, and sublimated mercury; place it to digest for one month, so you will possess an extraction more celestial than terrestrial; distill this slowly in a Balneo Mariæ water bath and the phlegms will emerge, with the heavy oil left behind in the bottom, which summons all Metals in a moment.