Biolychnium or The Lamp

PRÆFATIO.

For he truly strives with a step toward the summit and peak of this Wisdom, who can bring forth that seed-bearing or life-giving Spirit of Gold from that earthen, dense, and impure prison, as if resurrected from the underworld, into a freer act, and can compress it into a Regenerating virtue, which, beset by no pollutions, exerts the powers of all elemental, supercelestial, and celestial influences that have flowed together into this, as it were, Heart of the Earth. Those are truly for me the interpreters of that Emerald Tablet and the legitimate initiates of the Hermetic mysteries, who separate in this manner, and bring to maturity, so that the Occult may become manifest and vice versa; and at last, it may return into favor with the Fire and the Water. They are the heirs of the great Ostanes legendary Persian magus, the Spagyri alchemical practitioners who are so dear to Vulcan the Inventor of all Arts that, by his benefit, they draw almost anything from anything, and they subtly draw out whatever is in Vegetables and Minerals of that more abstruse Spirit: Nor is there anything that escapes their snares, except the Animal Spirit, which is subjected to the hands or actions of no Artificer.