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swallow, that he may consume them, and at length he also dying may be burnt. He makes
an end of describing the whole magistery in these terms: Let his ashes be strewed in the
water; boil it until it is enough, and you have a medicine to cure the leprosy. You must
not be ignorant that Our Old Man is our Mercury; this name indeed agrees with him
because He is the first matter of all metals. He is their water, as the same author goes on
to say, and to which he gives also the name of steel and of the lodestone; adding for a
greater confirmation of what I am about to discover to you, that if gold couples with it
eleven times it sends forth its seed, and is debilitated almost unto death; but the Chalybes
conceives and begets a son more glorious than the Father.
24. Behold a great Mystery which I reveal to you without an enigma; this is the secret of
the two mercuries which contain the two tinctures. Keep them separately, and do not
confound their species, for fear they should beget a monstrous Lineage.
25. I not only speak to you more intelligibly than any philosopher before has done, but I
also reveal to you the most essential point in the Practice; if you meditate thereon, and
apply yourself to understand it well; but above all, if you work according to those lights
which I give you, you may obtain what you seek for.
26. And if you come not to these knowledges by the way which I have pointed out to you,
I am very well assured that you will hardly arrive at your design by only reading the
philosophers. Therefore despair of nothing -- search the source of the Liquor of the Sages,
which contains all that is necessary for the work; it is hidden under the Stone -- strike
upon it with the Red of Magic Fire, and a clear fountain will issue out; then do as I have
shown you, prepare the bath of the King with the blood of the Innocents, and you will
have the animated Mercury of the wise, which never loses its virtue, if you keep it in a
vessel well closed,
27. Hermes says, that there is so much sympathy between the purified bodies and the
spirits, that they never quit one another when they are united together: because this union
resembles that of the soul with the glorified body; after which Faith tells us, there shall be
no more separation or death; because the spirits desire to be in the cleansed bodies, and
having them, they enliven and dwell in them.
28. By this you may observe the merit of this precious liquor, to which the philosophers
have given more than a thousand different names, which is in sum the great Alcahest,
which radically dissolves the metals -- a true permanent water which, after having
radically dissolved them, is inseparably united to them, increasing their weight and
tincture.
THE FOURTH KEY
The Fourth Key of the Art is the entrance to the Second Work (and a reiteration in part
and development of the foregoing): it is this which reduces our Water into Earth; there is
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