Putrefaction, or destruction of the previous form. The stage where everything degenerates and prepares for transmutation or the arrival of spirits. My translation from the original french edition of 1722.
On General Putrefaction
Aphorism I
Putrefaction is the purification of the radical humid through natural and spontaneous fermentation of the homogeneous principles with the impure and heterogeneous ones, with the help of natural and innate fires, or external heat and against nature heat.
II
Fixed pure earth is crystalline and easy to resolve into liquor.
III
The impurity of the earth consists of two earths, one is black and the other white.
IV
One and the other impure earth prevent the two roots from immediate contact and perfect union.
V
The mixed’s purification cannot occur without its death or putrefaction.
VI
According to Aristotle, the principles must be simple, and according to the Spagyrists, they must be pure and sensitive, that is, freed from their heterogeneous shell.
VII
Every mixed body is immediately composed of humid and dry.
VIII
Every mixed body is reduced to a continuous powder in proportion as it loses its radical humid.
IX
Both wet and dry contain salt, sulfur and mercury as well as the four elements.
X
In these three principles the qualities of the four elements dominate differently. In salt, frigidity and dryness predominate. In mercury frigidity and humidity, and in sulfur heat and drought.
XI
This dominance of qualities is easy to discover in the exterior of the three principles through the senses. But in their interior, they are all three hot and dry.
XII
Principles cannot part without putrefaction.
XIII
Putrefaction is the principle of the generation of a similar mixture. This does not mean for the intimate putrefaction of the principles and the proper substance of the mixed, but for that which produces the solution of the external semen which bound and connected these principles, not of the whole putrefaction, but only of the average.
XIV
Because if the mixed were corrupted in its intimate substance, it could no longer generate a similar mixed.
XV
The different species of mixed mutually degenerate into each other, like wheat into ryegrass. And this happens due to the action of heavenly spirits.
XVI
The spirit within keeps the mixed, and this spirit is often driven from its seat by another spirit more powerful than itself.
XVII
No mixed can reach its ultimate perfection without accidental death.
XVIII
When the mixed has reached its complete perfection, it no longer has any movement, and the parts that compose it are in their most perfect rest. And thus then the spirits of its magnetism, free from all obstacles, are in their most perfect state, and lively action, and suffer no interruption in their motion.