The Instructed Beginner in Chemistry: A Hermetic Epistle

earth, which is called sowing the gold upon a white purified earth, as the Sages have commanded. Sometimes those two resins, the white and the red, are to be reunited by means of the spirit. Therefore Maria the Prophetess an ancient alchemical authority said: marry resin with resin through a right union, and from two waters make one, which is composed of the dissolving spirit and the dissolved body. This is done through the mediation of our parson a metaphorical term for a mediating agent, namely the spirit or our mercury, which in truth is the means to reunite the dissolved tinctures. Without this means (therefore it is called the parson by some), a true marriage would never be made, because they would never be united in the smallest parts, nor would a true fermentation or impregnation happen, and consequently, no birth would follow.

Thus we need our mercury, namely the fiery universal spirit, in great quantity in our work, because of the many prescribed imbibitions and subsequent evaporations

which must be performed weekly for a long time. Therefore, in the first dissolution of the body and the eight-day very gentle evaporation, which must be repeated often with our vinegar, only the subtler part of the spirit of vinegar is made solid in the body. The rest disappears completely through evaporation and distillation, like tasteless well-water, as the Sages have truthfully written. Regarding this eight-day watering, as it is gently boiled away, that is, evaporated, one must always grind or calcine it for a long time after the evaporation. For grinding is our calcination. Afterward, it is made moist again, and this is repeated often in a single, identical vessel;

A simple woodcut illustration shows a mortar and pestle, the standard tools used for grinding, pulverizing, or calcining substances in alchemical laboratory practice.

until the salt no longer congeals, but remains behind at the bottom, dissolved into a black-red oil,