The Instructed Beginner in Chemistry: A Hermetic Epistle

Therefore, the Sages have not unfairly described this wonderful salt of nature, found in our buried universal dew, as the first beginning of all things, a universal seed of nature, and the seed of the world. It is adorned with a salty, sulfurous, fiery, mercurial spirit, imprinted into our dewy electric chaos the initial unformed state of matter or into the other remote matter from the beginning of things. It is destined for the completion and assembly of all things by the Highest Divine Architect. Indeed, there is nothing in the three kingdoms of nature, neither in the animal, nor vegetable, nor mineral kingdom, which does not consist of this threefold power: namely, the sulfurous, salty, and mercurial powers contained within that single salt of nature. For this reason, the Sages meditated deeply on what that chaotic universal matter might be, in which alone the seminal power of all created things is contained. Finally, they found that a dewy, heavenly, mercurially-salty-sulfurous spiritual vapor is the

true, universal, and pure seed of all things, arising from the elements, which was created by the Highest God in the beginning. Sendivogius Michael Sendivogius, a famous Polish alchemist speaks of this very profoundly in his mentioned epilogue, and also confirms it in the third treatise of his New Light original: "Princip. Tract. 3. sui novi luminis". And that vapor of heavenly wisdom is truly divine, of which Solomon spoke in the seventh chapter of the Book of Wisdom original: "lib. Sap. cap. 7.", and few understand it.

Since the salt of nature, wonderfully animated and adorned with a twofold nature, is white on the outside and red on the inside, it is called our two coloring sulfurs and two resins, which are our gold and silver and our minera mineral ore. It is no wonder that the Sages have always spoken so wonderfully of this Sun and our Moon. Lullius and Geber have written in clear words in the first volume of the Chemical Library original: "Tom. 1. bibl. Chym." by Jo. Jacob Mangetus, in the Dialogue of Bracceschi original: "Dialog. Bracceschi", page 915, at the end: Just as the first mineral matter of metals is a single salt, so also we, who wish to imitate nature, transform our subject through calcination reduction to powder by heat