Tyro-chymicus instructus epistola hermetica

III

-tia wrote in his Letters that our matter is extracted from the Black Body. He means from the aforementioned black Tartar. After its calcination reduction to powder by heat, Lullius says that it is blacker than Tartar born from the grapes of Catalonia. Hence, when the wise speak of the perfect body or of gold, they have always understood nothing other than this purified salt, reduced to perfection. They do not mean the gold of the common people. Regarding that common gold, see what Roger Bacon says in his Mirror of Alchymy chapter 3. And these Two things, namely the body and the spirit, both proceed, as was said, from our same magnesia. Though they are of different sexes, because nothing arises in the world except from the moist and the dry, and through the conjunction of the male and the female. For this reason, if the Stone also consisted of only one substance, as the wise say, no action would occur in it. For it is evident and certain that an agent and a patient are necessary. They must be of one and the same species and nature, but of different sex, just as a man differs from a woman. For even if they agree in one and the same species, they nevertheless have different operations, like matter and form, and so on. Therefore, the wise have extracted the spirit and the body, the male and the female, the agent and the patient, all from our unique aerial chaos the universal fluid. This is nowhere specified nor mixed. Both were extracted in a wonderful way by means of our wine. After their due purification, they joined the naked man with the naked woman. Without this wine, nothing is done in this art, as Flamel indicates in his annotations toward the end of the First Volume of the Theatrum Chymicum.