XXI

in his Mineral Work, Book 1, chapter 64: "This most precious salt has the soul hidden within itself." Therefore the ancients called it sal animatum animated salt. And Laurentius Ventura of Venice adds in chapter 11: "This salt is silver in the manifest and gold in the occult." And it is gummy, for which reason it is also called our gum, as is read in the Turba The Turba Philosophorum or Assembly of the Philosophers from the world-sermon 18, and it is also called so by Maria the Prophetess. And just as it is double, Maria wrote that there are two gums. These are the two sulfurs of nature joined together, and they are called our sun and moon. Hence it is said, as we demonstrated above, that the Stone consists of three, namely of soul, body, and spirit, just like a human being, or of sun, moon, and quicksilver mercury, because the spirit is called mercury or argentum vivum living silver. This soul, or most fixed golden tincture, is called the metallic soul by the philosophers, as Senior explains most clearly. These are the three principles of nature and art existing in every kingdom: animal, vegetable, and mineral, namely salt, sulfur, and mercury. Hence the wise have said that the matter of the Stone exists in every created sublunary thing, in you, in me, and in everything. But it cannot be extracted from every thing in its first nature, except in that unique subject of ours, just as it flows down from the universal heaven not yet specified, as we demonstrated above from Sendivogius. Therefore, according to the nature appropriate to each thing by the grafting in which they are implanted, it produces those things, in an ineffable combination known to God alone. There it is individualized, and according to its kind following God's