XI

...in his Correctorium The Corrective, chapter 10. Hence Avicenna Ibn Sina, though the alchemical works attributed to him are often pseudepigraphal says to his son Aboali after chapter 8: "Our gold is a celestial metallic vapor, primordial in potential, and gold in the making." With which vapor Nature produces metals under the earth by gently coagulating it, digesting it, and so forth. Just as we, above the earth, by imitating Nature itself, also perfect metals by dissolving and coagulating this vapor, and gently digesting it.

Wherefore Sendivogius adds in his New Light, Treatise 4: "That Alchemists seek in vain to reduce metals to the first matter, which is only a vapor unknown to them, already dried up in dead metals, and so forth." It is true that at the end of the work, we may join the Stone (already perfected and spiritually multiplied by means of our vinegar) to common gold for the red work, and to common silver for the white work. This joining, although it is called fermentation the process of making the Stone specific to a metal by some, is nevertheless not true fermentation, but rather an enablement, which is properly called specification directing the universal power toward a specific metallic form. Regarding this, see Isaac Hollandus a Dutch alchemist in his Mineral Work, Book 1, chapter 136. This metallic conjunction is that three-day work of Maria Prophetia Mary the Prophetess, an early alchemical figure, as Isaac declares in the same place.

Because the true ferment is the sulfur or our gold, as Paracelsus confirms in his cited Collections of Chemistry, chapter 8. And see Ripley George Ripley, an English alchemist in his Ninth Gate, and Dionysius Zaccarius in Part 2 of his Opuscule, and so forth. This aforementioned conjunction, or specification, is done for three days in an open fire in a crucible, as Avicenna chapter 8, Roger Bacon...