Pernety - A Treatise On The Great Art.pdf - cyjack.com

The Great Art page 53This circular succession of spirits is made by two means, rarefication and condensation, whichNature employs to spiritualize bodies and to corporify spirits; or, if one wishes, to thin the grosselements, to open them, to elevate them to the subtle nature of spiritual matters, and then make themreturn to the nature of the gross and corporeal elements. They undergo continually suchmetamorphosis. The air furnishes water a thin aerial substance which begins to corporify; watercommunicates it to the earth, where it is corporified still more. It then becomes food for mineral andvegetables. In the latter it becomes stalk, bark, leaves, flowers, fruit, in a word, a corporeal palpablesubstance.In the animal, Nature separates the most subtle, the most spiritual part of the solid and liquid food,to change it in the principle of nourishment. It changes and specifies the purest substance into sperm,flesh, bone, etc., and leaves the grossest and most heterogeneous parts for the excrements. Artimitates Nature in her resolutions and compositions.Of The Moist Radical 40The life and preservation of individuals consists in the close union of form and matter. The knot, thebond, which forms this union, consists in that of the Innate Fire with the Humid Radical. Thishumidity is the purest, the most digested portion of matter, and an oil extremely rectified by thealembics of Nature. The germs of things contains much of this Moist Radical, in which a spark ofcelestial Fire is nourished; and when placed in a suitable matrix, causes, when constantly aided, allthat is necessary for production.We find something immortal in this Humid Radical; the death of the Mixts does not cause it tovanish or to disappear. It resists even the most violent fire, since it may be found in the ashes ofburned corpses.Each Mixt contains two moistures, the one of which we have just spoken, and an elementarymoisture, in part aqueous, in part aerial. The latter yields to the violence of fire; it vanishes in smoke,in vapours, and when it is entirely evaporated the body is only ashes, or parts separated the one fromthe other.Not so with the Moist Radical; as it constitutes the basis of the Mixts, it braves the tyranny of fire, itsuffers martyrdom with insurmountable courage, and remains obstinately attached to the ashes of theMixt; which indicates plainly its great purity.Experience has shown to glass-makers, people usually very ignorant concerning Nature, that thisMoisture is concealed in ashes. They have found by means of fire the secret of manifesting it, so faras art and the violence of artificial fire are capable. To make glass the ashes must be fused, and therecould be no fusion where there is no moisture.Without knowing that the salts extracted from ashes contain the greatest virtue of the Mixts,laborers burn the stubble and grass to increase the fertility of their fields. Proof that this HumidRadical is inaccessible to the attacks of fire; that it is the principle of generation, the basis of theMixts, and that its virtue, its active fire, remains torpid only until the earth, common matrix ofprinciples, develops its faculties, which we see daily in seeds.40 Or Viscous Moisture. It is the Mercury of the Philosophers, which is the basis of all the beings of the three kingdoms ofNature; but which is more particularly the seed and basis of metals when philosophically prepared for Hermetic Work. -Pernety. Dict. Myth. Herm. P. 202.