Augurello here reproves all the people picking up metallic sulphur, nitre , salt, and wine and cook them distilling droplet by droplet or melting. Then they dissolve again and again, and again and again they reduce and fix, then wash and break, and calcine and reduce to earth, and when the thing is deprived of its vapors, in that moment the dry Spirits of body are raised to the top and reduced to ashes. These people laboratories are equipped with all kind of devices, evidences of infinite works quite often condemned to failure.
“The four Elements are often misinterpreted. Nature operates by means of dissolving and coagulating and in spite of these two movements the matter is always a single one and is never divided, in the same way has to be intended the theory of mutations from hot to cold, dry and humid. Thanks to this genital force from a perishable body you can make a body involving it in wonderful accords, as everything before being able to conquer has to undergo putrefaction. But not only you have to find the matter out of which to make this Quicksilver, but also the matter which will give a form to Quicksilver, since the last one is naturally bound to have any form.”
Augurello here seems to deprecate laboratory proceedings, but he’s simply searching for the ancient easy method. The following pages are a redundant disquisition on human tendency to get caught up in mysteries and fairy tales. But of course, Augurello cannot state of himself to be exempted from dreaming.
“We have the Nature and the way it develops metals in the inner of the earth. I will teach you the secret caves in which you can find this precious treasure. And how this inestimable matter clear and pure is rich in water drops. As well as illuminate you on how the Sky moves and asters heat affects a certain place where these flowing stone take their origin. And further I will demonstrate from where the so alluring precious gems come and, what’s more, how they get so hard and brilliant. And how the Lover can be harder than Iron.”
The following lines are the more convoluted, to an extent to make very hard not only to decrypt the hermetic purpose of the paragraph, but just to give a sense to phrases. Augurello talks here of the Lover, Iron and how the Magnet does join them together while unifying and dividing them. It is not a secret that the part of the alchemical art concerning the Mercurius Duplicatus, or alchemical marriage (2), has always been the most shrouded in the mystery, but I have hardly read a more inaccessible wording. Since the purpose of this site is to simplify Alchemy and try to get a sense out of the symbolism, I decided to spare you and try to get above and beyond the abyss. The main characters are here the Lover, Iron and Magnet, which are partitions of our Mercurius Philosophorum, to be then reunified. The main purpose here is the extraction of seed of gold ( but Augurello is so nasty not to tell us).
In poor word we need the seed of gold to be then reincrudated, or reduced in the same Mercurius which dissolves it. I have already explained that we don’t need any metallic gold at all to achieve a “seed of gold” since our Mercurius is often enough, being just a matter of Secret Fire, this ineffable substance coming from Suns and Stars and dwelling in our molecules. We plant Secret Fire to crop Secret Fire (3). Alchemists did not use a conventional vocabulary and so there were some arguing the Lover was the female Mercurius which main purpose was to dissolve, and the Iron conversely was the male which main purpose is to be dissolved. Other alchemists argue the contrary. In the footnotes links you can find more comprehensive articles on the concept (4).
Nevertheless they all agree on the Magnet purpose, which is the same substance, Secret Fire/Mercurius, its purpose is to join the aforementioned and prepared them to receive the influx from the Sky (5).
Agent and patient, or active and passive represent the same topic, but in a more chemical way: in fact one tends to dissolve, while the other tends to fix. Often instead of being two substances they are just two different stages of the same substance.
Augurello doesn’t mean to explain more than this, for the moment, in fact he suddenly resumes what he seemed to have left incomplete, that’s to say “ the secret caves in which you can find this precious treasure”.
Augurello: “I don’t mean here to veil our Emerald, whose green color is a symbol of its virtue, to an extent there is no more valuable color than that of the Earth when putting on springtime clothing, and its looks salubrious, if not thanks to this wonderful green color it wears. In fact there is not such green color as the green of our Emerald in its blossoming beauty.”
Emerald is an allegory for the Flos Coeli or flux of the Sky (6). And here we can understand why the poet starts this second book invoking Apollo as the god of light. Is this Emerald the precious cave of gold as well as pit of sparks? Now we can understand all the processes with the pelican tool indeed.
To be continued at Augurello and the Art of Making Gold. Second Book 2.
- See also Baro Urbigerus and the Circulatum Tree and Starkey Pyrotechnie & Volatilization of Alkalis 2 ;
- See also Atalanta Fugiens & Mercurius Duplicatus ;
- See also Atalanta Fugiens & Terra Alba Foliata and Atalanta Fugiens & the Golden Apples ;
- See also Introitus Apertus vs Open Entrance. Chap 4 ;
- See also Fulcanelli & External Influences and Introitus Apertus vs Open Entrance. Chap 2 ;
- See also Nicolas Lefevre and the Flos Coeli Medicine and Capello & Equinox Nostoc Collecting ;