The Instructed Beginner in Chemistry: A Hermetic Epistle

into a white shining salt, like silver, which is called the Moon by the philosophers. In its depth, it contains the hidden vapor, which is reddish, sulfurous, and very solid, namely the soul, which is called gold. It was this gold and silver that the Sages always meant and spoke of. Therefore, in this science, one must not rely on common gold and silver, because all the Sages commanded that this medicine be made from a very humble thing, according to the aforementioned Sages.

Therefore, since the Sages understood no other gold or silver, nor any other mineral, than this wonderful salt of a true metallic nature, the father of all metals, our living solar and lunar body, and our foliated virgin earth; why should one search in so many metals and dead minerals, against the warnings of all Sages and against the possibility of nature, since this is the only living, universal seed of

metals? These two sulfurs of nature, which are contained together in this resinous salt, are alone the true seed of gold and silver, and the true fermentum ferment of our stone. After the final purification by means of our mercurius mercury, or the aforementioned spirit, they are reunited and thus fermented together. For the water or spirit is the ferment of the body, and on the contrary, the body is the ferment of the spirit, as one reads in the Ladder of Philosophers original: "Scala Philosophorum" by Guido de Montanor at the end of the ninth gradus degree. Therefore, of the two aforementioned sulfurous resins, the white and the red, they are finally divided after a very long preparation through frequent dissolving and congealing, imbibition and evaporation, grinding and calcination. Thus the soul remains in the red oil at the bottom of the vessel, and the soulless body, or the whitened laton unrefined metallic matter, floats above this oil. Then we must pour its soul, or the golden dissolved tincture transformative extract, drop by drop over the body or the white foliated