The Instructed Beginner in Chemistry: A Hermetic Epistle

this reason, believe for certain that there is as great a difference between the foolish chemistry of poor chemists and the true Divine Science of the Adepts as there is between fire and water. And truly, those others understand nothing and do not know what they should do in the manner, number, and circumstance, in the beginning, middle, and end. They are in disagreement both in the matter and in the preparation. They wander as far as the heavens from the truth and the right road, as Your Excellency will be able to gather from this letter, and as experience also teaches. And because the Philosophers have bestowed all the names in the world upon their matter, and especially upon this salt, people imagine there are many simple materials. Therefore, Pythagoras says in the Assembly of the Philosophers original: "turba philosophorum", discourse 31: The Sages have named that salt with the names of all the bodies in the world; and hidden it under the name of a money or ore, tin or gold, iron or lead, etc., etc., until in its preparation it deviates from that color, etc.

From which innumerable names, which have been given by the Philosophers to both the body and the

spirit, you may please look up the treatise which is titled: A Methodical Explanation of Geber's Three Medicines original: "Enarratio methodica trium Gebri medicinarum", in the first part, etc., or Lullius likewise in the first part of his Newest Testament original: "testamenti novissimi". To this Albertus Magnus adds in Volume 4 of the Chemical Theater at the end, page 858: The envious Philosophers have called this our Stone, or our salt, by all the names of the metals. Therefore, says the Golden Dew original: "Ros Aurificus", a pupil of Bacon, in chapter 3: Therefore it is pure folly to work in the metals and minerals, since the matter of the Sages is a pure heavenly vapor that allows itself to be coagulated, with which Nature brings forth the metals in the womb of the earth. Because our minerals are our two resinous sulfurs, white and red, covered in one body, namely in our vegetable and mineral salt original: "sale vegetabili und minerali". As Ripley says in his Raymundine Accuracies and Practices original: "accurationibus & practicis Raymundinis", the hermaphroditic salt a substance containing both male and female principles, adorned with a twofold nature, is skillfully extracted from that heavenly joined vapor, as the Golden Dew said above.