XX

since this salt keeps the soul hidden in its center. And these two are the materia proxima proximate matter of the Stone: namely male and female, active and passive, sun and moon, heaven and earth, sulfur and mercury, volatile and fixed, water and earth, Cabritius the alchemical King or sulfur and Beya the alchemical Queen or mercury, matter and form, and so forth.

With these, first well-cleansed of superfluities and philosophically prepared, and joined together, our Stone is perfected without any intermediate substance. Nothing is added at all, nor is anything taken away from the pure middle substance, except that after the final decoction heating or fixation, we join or "specify" it at the end with common gold, as was said above. In the beginning, we dissolve the salt with our vinegar; however, that vinegar comes from the same chaos raw first matter or second matter, and gold is also of its own nature, because gold was generated by nature with this salt and spirit. This salt, or fixed body, and the volatile spirit are called Rebis a double thing by the philosophers. Hence Richardus Anglicus says in his Correctorium The Corrector chapter 11: "These two things are called Rebis, that is, a 'Two-fold Thing,' namely the fixed Body and the volatile spirit, both bound together into one." Likewise Basil Valentine, in his Rhythms on the True Matter of the Stone in his twelfth Key, adds: "Body, soul, and spirit exist in two things, from which the whole matter proceeds: It proceeds, however, from one, and it is One Thing, volatile and fixed bound together." And so they are also called three, because the salt, as we declared above, is animated, double, and Hermaphroditum hermaphroditic or containing both sexes. For this reason Isaac Hollandus says