The Instructed Beginner in Chemistry: A Hermetic Epistle

has no need to pay attention to the names bestowed upon it, as long as all the properties, signs, and corresponding marks belong to it. For this reason, Sendivogius speaks with all the others in his Treatise on Sulfur original: "Tract. de Sulph." in the Discourse on the Three Principles of All Things: There is also no other than this single matter in the world from which, and through which, the Philosopher's Stone is prepared. In this, all Sages, both old and new, agree. Since this matter is now unique, no one but a fool could conclude otherwise than that so many names of metals, minerals, and stones which have been bestowed upon it are fictional and deceptive. Isaac Hollandus repeats in the first book of his Mineral Work original: "opere minerali", chapter 14, that our Stone cannot be extracted from metals and hard bodies.

The Sages unanimously add, however, that this Subjectum material is a universal mixture of a heavenly origin, and which exists in its first nature, but contains in its belly a mineral salt, namely of a metallic nature: which, however,

is in no way specifically encountered in the vegetable kingdom, nor in the animal kingdom, nor in the mineral kingdom. As it appears among others from the words of Sendivogius in Epistle 54, where one reads: All Sages testify that their matter is neither vegetable, nor mineral, nor animal, nor does it come immediately from them. Although it is improperly called animal and vegetable because only the cause is known to us, as Paracelsus testifies in his Alchemical Collections original: "Congeriis Chymicis" chapter 7; and that indeed not unfairly, as those who know such matter will testify with me. For it was not without cause that Lullius, Roger Bacon, St. Thomas, Parisinus, etc., have written that our matter arises from vegetable and animal things. But someone will say, how? But I answer with the Philosophical Mercury the secret solvent of the Sages from Paracelsus in the location cited above: this is permitted to be understood only by the prophets of God and the Adepts those who have mastered the Great Work; and those who understand the matter. Paracelsus chapter 7 of the cited Collections.