Symbols of the Golden Table of the Twelve Nations

TO THE READER.

For they would not devote themselves to magnificently performed deeds, despising all danger, unless they aspired to reach at last such a table of virtue, as if to the highest peak of dignity. It appears that the same goal was proposed in the various games of the Greeks—the Olympic, Pythian, Isthmian, and Nemean—to which the youth of Greece once flocked with such zeal that Xerxes The Persian King (c. 518–465 BCE) who invaded Greece. This anecdote is often used to contrast Persian greed for gold with Greek passion for honor., not without cause, wondered that so much effort and labor was spent for a crown of oak or poplar leaves, as much as might perhaps be spent for a golden crown. Nor were the gates wide enough to receive an Olympic victor, for he would enter his fatherland through torn-down walls It was a Greek custom to dismantle a part of the city wall for an Olympic victor, symbolizing that a city defended by such men had no need for stone fortifications., received most honorably by all.

The crowns of the Romans.

To say nothing here of the Roman crowns—Triumphal, Mural, Naval, Civic, and others—by which they were raised to such a height of Empire, as long as they established rewards for virtue and punishment for vice. For whatever is praised by a praiseworthy man tends to increase, while that which is despised tends to suffer decline. Thus, so that virtue may grow daily, it demands its own praise; but that crimes might be rooted out, they have earned infamy. But if the contrary should happen, then it is inevitable that almost all virtue is extinguished and vice flourishes. It is most lamentable that something not unlike this is happening in our own age, not only in military service and the camps of Mars, but also in the arts of Pallas Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom; here referring to scholarly and academic pursuits. and the more humane disciplines.

The dignity of the Chemical Arts.

Among these, nothing is more secret, sublime, and praiseworthy than Chemistry original: Chemiâ; in this context, Maier refers to the high art of Alchemy.; for, to speak of profane matters, it is the Art of Arts and Science of Sciences. This is established not by the common crowd of deceived alchemists, who do not understand even a letter of it, but from a long series of the most learned men of every age, who were otherwise famous in the other sciences. These men investigated it over a long time, finally obtained it after their investigation, and having obtained it, left proof of it to posterity, partly in their writings and partly by the labor of their hands. Nevertheless, many have been found who proclaim the art itself to be no art, and its practitioners to be most frivolous, vain, and deceitful men, for no other reason than that

Detractors of Chemistry.

they themselves, as judges, do not see or understand how that art can be true—that is, because they do not perceive how a natural work can be advanced through art, or an artificial one through nature. But I would wish the censorious rod of too-hasty judgment to be snatched away from these immature evaluators of the Gifts of God original: Donorum Dei; a common alchemical term implying that the Stone cannot be found by effort alone, but must be granted by Divine grace.. For the occult arts are not learned through insults or injuries...