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

The Great Art page 70The Key of the WorkBasil Valentin, (Addition aux Douze Clefs), says that he who has flour will soon have dough, and hewho has dough will soon find an oven to cook it. It is as if he said that the Artist who possesses thetrue Sophic Matter will not be troubled about working with it; it is true, if one believes thePhilosophers, that the execution of the Work is a very easy thing, and that more time and patiencethan expense is required; but this must doubtless be understood of certain circumstances of the Work,and when one has reached a certain point. Flamel says (Explication des Figures Hiéroglyphiques);that the preparation of the agents is more difficult than anything else in the world. Augurellus,(Chrysop., 1. 2), assures us that an Herculean work is necessary.Alter inauratam noto de vertice pellemPrincipium velut ostendit, quod sumere possis;Alter onus quantum subeas.And d’Espagnet does not hesitate to say that there is much work to be done, (Can. 42): “In thePhilosophical Sublimation of Mercury, or the first preparation, the work of a Hercules is necessary,for without it Jason would never have dared to undertake the conquest of the Golden Fleece.” Yet wemust not imagine that this sublimation is made in the same manner as chemical sublimation. So hehas been careful to call it Philosophical. It must be understood, from what he says afterwards, that itconsists in the dissolution and putrefaction of Matter; because this sublimation is nothing else than aseparation of the pure from the impure; or a purification of Matter, which is of such a nature that itcan be sublimated only by putrefaction. D’Espagnet then quotes the following words of Virgil. Thepoet, says he, seems to have touched something of the nature of the quality, and of the culture of thePhilosophical Earth in these terms:Pingue solum primis extemplo a mensibus anniFortes invertant Tauri:... Tunc zephyro putris se gleba resolvit. - Georg. I.Thus solution is the Key of the Work. All Philosophers agree and all speak in the same manner onthis subject. But there are two labours in the Work, one to make the Stone, the other to make theElixir. It is necessary first to begin by preparing the agents; and of this preparation Philosophers havenot spoken, because all depends on it, and because the second work is, according to them, onlychild’s play and an amusement for women. Yet the operations of the second work must not beconfounded with those of the first, although Morien, (Entretients du Roi Calid.), assures us that thesecond work, which he calls ‘Disposition’ is only a repetition of the first. Yet we may believe that itis not such a painful and difficult thing, since they do not say a word about it, or speak of it only toconceal it. Whatsoever this preparation may be, it is certain that it must begin by the dissolution ofMatter, although several have given to it the name of calcination or sublimation; and since they havenot wished to speak clearly of it, we may, at least, from the operations of the second ‘disposition’,draw inductions by which we may enlighten ourselves concerning the operations of the first.The first step is to make Sophic Mercury, or the Solvent, from a matter which encloses in itself twoqualities, and which is part volatile, and part fixed. That which proves that there must be adissolution, is that Cosmopolita tells us to seek a matter from which we may be able to make a Waterwhich dissolves gold naturally and without violence. But a matter may be reduced to water only bydissolution, unless one employs the distillation of common chemistry, which is excluded from theWork.It is well to remark here that all the terms of common chemistry, which the Philosophers employ intheir books, must not be taken in the ordinary sense, but in the Philosophic sense. This is why