CONCERNING THE NATURE OF THINGS.
BOOK V.
Concerning the Death of Natural Things.
THE death of all natural things is nothing else but an alteration and removal of their powers and virtues, an overthrow of their potencies for evil or for good, an overwhelming and blotting out of their former nature, and the generation of a new and different nature.[1] For it should be known that many things which in life were good, and had their own virtues, retain little or none of that virtue when they are dead, but appear altogether fatuous and powerless. So, on the other hand, many things in their life are evil, but in death, or after they have been mortified, they display a manifold power and efficacy, and do much good. We could recount many examples of this, but that is altogether foreign to our purpose. Yet, in order that you may see that I do not write from my mere opinion, however plausible, but from my experience, it is well that I should adduce one example with which I will quiet and silence the sophists who say that nothing can be gained from dead things, nor anything ought to be sought or found in them. The cause of this assertion is that they value at nothing the preparations of the alchemists, by which many great secrets of this kind are discovered. For look at Mercury, live and crude sulphur, and crude antimony; as they are brought from the mines, that is, while they are still living, how small is their virtue, how lightly and tardily do they exercise their influence. Indeed, they bring more evil than good, and are rather a poison than a medicine. But if, by the industry of a skilled alchemist, they are corrupted into their first substance and prudently prepared (that is, if the Mercury be coagulated, precipitated, sublimated, resolved, and turned into oil; the sulphur be sublimated, calcined, reverberated and turned into oil; and, in like manner, Venus be sublimated, calcined, reverberated, and turned into oil), you see what usefulness, what power and virtue, and what rapid efficiency they afford and display, so that none can fully speak or write of it. For their manifold virtues are not to be investigated, nor can any one search them out. Every alchemist, therefore, and every faithful
- ↑ Death is the mother of tinctures, for tinctures proceed from the mortification of the body, in which the colours are contained, even as in a seed there are green, yellow, black, blue, and purple colours, which are, nevertheless, invisible until the seed has perished in the earth, and till the sun has prepared and produced them, so that what was first hidden from the senses is now revealed to them.—De Icteritiis.
