The Fire-Stone of Basil, or the Golden Apple

defects and diseases and to preserve the body from conditions is of no use at all. Therefore, through labor consistent with nature, art has been discovered to liberate the same from the bonds of the principiorum principles, namely of conjunction, union, and—through long, protracted, and most accurate concoction—of the most tight combination, without the speciebus specific ingredients and corrosivis corrosives harmful to human nature, and to seduce it into a liquor potabile drinkable liquid by means of its own solvent, which new form is also called aurum potabile drinkable gold—though not that universal one, of which more below—by the philosophers. When the philosophers, physicians, both old and new, praise the virtue of gold, they do not mean this by the leafed and unprepared gold. They report that it strengthens and gladdens the heart, consumes all superfluity around the heart, tempers and purifies the blood, prevents putrefaction, drives away melancholy and insanity, and refreshes all natural spirits original: "per symbolissimum auri cum sole statutum sic, quòd veluti sol sit fons omnium elementorum, à cujus regimine, & influentia totius universi, tota conservatio pendeat, eodem modo aurum cum ipso symbolizans, esse conservando microcosmo, omni intemperiei ejusdem elementari corrigendae, omnique infirmitati materiae tollendae." by the most symbolic agreement of gold with the sun, established such that, just as the sun is the fountain of all elements, from whose rule and influence the conservation of the whole universe depends, in the same way gold, symbolizing with it, serves to conserve the microcosm, to correct every elemental intemperance of the same, and to remove every infirmity of the matter.

More about this is to be read in the works of the highly learned men: Joannes Fernel, Marsilio Ficino, Bernardo Penoto, Mattioli, Cardano, Raymund Lully, Basilius Valentinus, Joseph Quercetanus, Julius Palmarius, Arnold, Paracelsus, and Crollius, etc. Now direct your intention purpose/focus toward a proper, nature-consistent solution of corporal gold, and you will lack nothing in the aforementioned operation. I want to assure everyone that the aurum potabile drinkable gold of Franciscus Antonius of England, whose method of preparation I know, is such a medicine that—even if it proceeds from perfect gold—the likes of which is not to be found in the world at present. But truly, this is not to be called the universal, since it makes no dent in the astral, very fixed diseases at the foundation, much less can the gold be the subject of our catholic medicine.

Gold, like other six metals, is generated from the principles of our universal subject, according to the diversity of the place and the disposition of the earth (let the chemical treatises of Michael Sendivogius on the degeneration of metals be read), and perfected by the spiritum mundi Catholicon universal spirit of the world according to the will of God, which inhabits the mineral kingdom most powerfully, as can be seen from the masterful work of the perfect bodies; and after they have become metal, their unconquerable astrum star/stellar influence (as the words of Bombastus a reference to Paracelsus sound) departs and leaves the metal lying there, which is then not even a thousandth part as powerful as when the still-vegetating virtue and the operating spirit of the world were to be found therein entirely, and they participate in the...