19. The Mastery Of The Sun-b

Hermetic Science, like all real sciences, is mathematically demonstrable. Even its material results are as exact as a well-worked equation. Hermetic gold is not only a true doctrine, a shadowless light, truth unalloyed with falsehood; it is also material, actual, pure gold, the most precious which can be found in the veins of the earth; but the Living Gold, Living Sulphur, or true Fire of the Philosopher, must be sought in the House of Mercury. This fire feeds on air; to express its attractive and expansive power, a better comparison is impossible than that of lightning, which primally is a dry and terrestrial exhalation united to humid vapour, and afterwards, assuming an igneous nature, in virtue of its exaltation, acts on its inherent humidity, which it attracts and transmutes into its own nature, when it falls rapidly to earth, where it is drawn by a fixed nature similar to its own. These words, enigmatic in form but clear in essence, express openly what the philosophers understand by their Mercury fructified by Sulphur, which becomes the master and regenerator of Salt. It is AZOTH, universal magnesia, the Great Magical Agent, the Astral Light, the light of life, fertilized by animic force, by intellectual energy, which they compare to Sulphur on account of its affinities with Divine Fire. As to Salt, it is absolute matter. All that is material contains Salt, and all Salt can be converted into pure gold by the combined action of Sulphur and Mercury, which at times act with swiftness that transmutation can take place in an instant or in an hour, without labour for the operator and almost without expense. At other times, when the tendencies of the atmospheric media are adverse, the operation requires several days, months, and occasionally even years. As we have said, there are two palmary natural laws - two essential laws -which, balanced against another, produce the universal equilibrium of things. These are fixity and motion, analogous to truth and discovery in philosophy, and in absolute conception to necessity and liberty, which are the very essence of God. The Hermetic philosophers give the name of fixed to all that is ponderable, to all that tends by its nature towards central rest and immobility. Whatsoever obeys more naturally and readily the law of motion, they term volatile; and they compose their Stone by analysis, that is, the volatilization of the fixed; then by synthesis, that is, the fixation of the volatile, which they effect by applying to the fixed -called their Salt-Sulphurated Mercury or light of life, directed and rendered omnipotent by a secret operation. They become masters in this manner of all Nature, and their Stone is found wherever there is Salt, which is the equivalent to saying that no substance is foreign to the Great Work and that even the most apparently contemptible and vile matters can be changed into gold, which is true in this sense, as we have said, that all contain the fundamental Salt, represented in our emblems by the cubic stone itself, as may be seen in the symbolic and universal frontispiece to the KEYS of Basil Valentine. To know how to extract from all matter the pure Salt which is concealed in it is to possess the secret of the Stone. It is therefore a saline stone, which the Od, or universal Astral Light, decomposes or recomposes. It is one and many, for it can be dissolved and incorporated with other substances, like ordinary salt. Obtained by analysis, it may be termed the UNIVERSAL SUBLIMATE; recovered by the synthetic way, it is the veritable PANACEA of the ancients, for it cures all diseases, whether of soul or body, and is termed in an eminent manner the Medicine of all Nature.