The Hermetic Museum, Restored and Enlarged

PREFACE.

What shall I say now about the most necessary (art), for the various uses of life, the working of minerals and metallic veins, and other countless advantages of this art, which I omit for the sake of brevity, since it will be enough to signify what it would be too much to elaborate on. Different people approach it with different aims. The Philosopher is driven by the love and pursuit of acquiring wisdom, rejoicing in knowledge itself, and by an elegant and copious discourse on divine miracles in nature for the glory of the omnipotent creator. This fruit is sufficiently generous and fruitful for a Philosopher, for whom also, for acquiring wealth, there are not lacking the most expeditious means, if he wished to use them, and not rather, inflamed by the love of Philosophy, had proposed to himself to devote himself to this, having voluntarily neglected other mockeries of fortune.

With such a mind, we see the wise men of the Saracens, Egyptians, Arabs, and Persians to have been, who, when they were oppressed by the cruelty of tyrants and everywhere were driven as exiles from their homes, consulted for themselves by the remedy and protection of their art, and acquired for themselves not only sufficient sustenance through the discovered metallic transmutation, but also an honorable and royal one.

For wherever gold and silver could be reached, they demonstrated by the very fact that a way was open to them also. About this true transmutation of metals, which is perfected by the Elixir alone, or the Philosopher's Stone, here our discourse is primarily, concerning which, although books by many authors exist, as this very book, called the Hermetic Museum...