The Instructed Beginner in Chemistry: A Hermetic Epistle

blackest black, from which the salt of the wisdom of the Sages is wisely extracted. After it has been perfectly purified, it is called a gold and a perfect body, as Guido Guido Montanor confirms in the place cited. But before its perfect purification, the Sages said it was a leprous gold unrefined or imperfect metal and an imperfect metal. Therefore, Antonius de Abatia wrote in his letters that our matter is extracted from a black body, namely from the aforementioned black tartar. After its calcination heating to a powder, says Lullius, it is blacker than the tartar produced from the grapes of Catalonia. Therefore, when the Sages speak of a perfect body or gold, they understood nothing other than this purified or perfected salt. They did not speak of common gold. You can see what Roger Bacon says about this common gold in his Mirror of Alchemy original: "speculo Alchem.", chapter 3. And these two things, namely the body and the spirit, come, as said, from this very same Magnesia a mystical primal substance, not the modern mineral of ours.

Although they are of different genders, because nothing in the world arises except from the moist and the dry, and the union of the woman and the man. Therefore, even if the Stone consisted of only one being, as the Sages say, no effect would occur in it. For it is obvious and certain that it is necessary for the active and the passive to be of the same kind and nature, yet of different genders, just as the man is different from the woman. For although they agree in the same kind, they have different effects, such as matter and form original: "Materia und Forma", the substance and its organizing principle, etc. Therefore, the Sages have extracted a spirit and a body, a man and a woman, as the active and the passive, from our air alone. This air is the universal fluid which is nowhere of a special kind or mixed. Both were extracted in a wonderful way through the mediation of our wine. After proper purification of the same, they joined the simple with the simple. Without this wine, nothing happens in this art, as Flamel Nicolas Flamel testifies in his notes