The Fire-Stone of Basil, or the Golden Apple

nature also sometimes not be able to tolerate any alteratives, comfortatives, hot or cold, and there is no such entirely temperate medicine to be found as our aurum potabile drinkable gold, but it is not known to everyone? Is there not also danger in the administration of comfortatives?

A rapid condition perhaps seizes a person unexpectedly; is it not possible that he cannot have medications or a physician, or if he already has medicines with him, he can do himself as much harm as benefit? Or if he perhaps obtains a physician who is supposed to advise him in a hurry, the physician does not know his nature, complexion, and body constitution at all, and hits the white just as soon as the black, makes it just as soon crooked as straight; does it not seem to you that there is danger in this?

In the Universal, the above is not to be feared at all; it acts according to the will of God, and with the spirit of man cooperating, it performs everything that the hindered and damaged microcosmic spirit should effect, operate, and work, with wonder.

And this supernatural effect comes, as it were, from the general world-spirit, the microcosmic spirit, which has a special secret analogy, sympathy, and proportionable virtue, and dwells generally in the substitute of our Catholic medicine, and lets itself be found therein, which is titled by the philosophers as the spirit of the terrestrial sun, essence of gold, star of gold, [and] mercury of the sun.

Truly, the philosophers say, as the sun holds the first light among the planets of the great parent, so also gold holds [the first place] among metals, and it is the subject of all elementary, celestial, and super-celestial powers. However, from the celestial and super-celestial influence, they fall downwards into this world and sphere by concentrating, and flow into this unique metal, in which they are preserved in the tightest connection and held tied in an indissoluble bond and included. And just as the sun communicates and shines before all stars and planets, and they receive all light and vicarious work from it as from a King, by rising or accommodating themselves through the variation of motion, while in apogee or in perigee, now fast, now retrograde, now appearing direct: so the others obtain their value and their price from gold, which in turn yield to it in honor, in durability, and in virtue.

In the sun is the most secret and celestial spirit, granting life, substance, and essence to all creatures of the whole world, whence it most closely bears the image of God.

That same spirit, diffused most freely in the sky, is in the morning most tightly contracted and condensed in the earth as in its center, and is incorporated, as it were, into the substance of those things that arise in the center of the earth.

Gold