I
The dark Chaos had come out as a confused mass from the depth of the
Nothing, on the first sound of the almighty Word, and one would have said
that disorder made it, and that it could not be the work of a God, formless
as it was. All things in it were in a deep rest, and the elements in it
were confused, because the divine Spirit did not yet distinguish them.
II
Who could now tell in which way the Heavens, the Earth and the Sea have
been formed so light in themselves, and so vast, taking into account their
wide spread? Who could explain how the Sun and the Moon have received the
movement and the light, and how everything we see down here, has its form
and it’s being?
Who could eventually understand how everything has received its own
denomination, has been animated by its proper spirit, and while coming out
of the impure and unordered mass of the Chaos, has been regulated by a law,
a quantity and a measure?
III
O you, children and imitators of the divine Hermes, to whom the science of
your father showed the nature discovered, only you, only you know how this
immortal hand has formed the Earth and the Heavens out of this formless
mass of the Chaos; since your Great Work shows clearly that God has created
all things in the same way that your Philosophical Elixir is made.
IV
But it does not belong to my weak pen to draw such a great picture; I am
only a puny child of the Art, without any experience. It is not that your
savant writings didn’t make me perceive the real goal one should go for,
nor that I don’t know this Ilias, which has in it all we need, as well as
this admirable composite through which you could bring the virtue of the
elements from power to act.
V
It’s not that I do not know your secret Mercury, which is no other than a
living, universal and innate spirit, which, in the form of airy vapour,
comes down ceaselessly from heaven to earth in order to fill its porous
belly, which then is born in the middle of impure sulphurs, and while
growing, changes nature from volatile to fixed, giving itself the form of a
radical fluid.
VI
It is not that I do not know yet, that if our oval Vessel is not sealed by
Winter, it will never be able to keep the precious vapour, and that our
beautiful child will die at birth, if it is not promptly rescued by an
industrious hand and by the eyes of a lynx, since otherwise it will not be
able to feed on its first humour, to the example of man, who, after feeding
on impure blood in the mother’s womb, lives on milk when he comes on earth.
VII
Even if I know all these things, I do not dare yet to prove them to
you, the errors of others always making me incertain. But if you are more
touched by pity than by envy, dare to remove from my mind all doubts which
embarrass it, and if I can be happy enough to explain distinctly in my books
all which concerns your magistry, make, I conjure you, that I have from you
as an answer: Work hard, since you know what has to be known.
