Splendor of the Sun

...of the very finest pearls. The second is called by the Philosophers foliated earth original: "Terra foliata"; a term for the purified alchemical substance or "white earth" ready for fermentation. The third fruit is the very finest gold. This tree also gives the fruit of health. It makes warm that which is cold, and that which is warm it makes cold; it makes the dry moist, and the moist dry; it makes the hard soft, and the soft hard; and it is the end of the entire Art. Regarding this, the Author of the Three Words speaks: the three fruits are the three precious words of the entire mastery. And this is also what Galen Claudius Galenus, a famous Roman physician whose works influenced medicine for centuries means when he speaks of the herb Lunarica Moon-wort or Berissa. Its root is a metallic earth; it has a red stem spotted with black; it grows easily and also fades easily. It gains star-flowers after three days. If one puts this into Mercury original: "Mercurium"; the liquid metal quicksilver, it changes itself into a perfect silver, and if one boils it further, it converts into gold, which then converts a hundred parts of Mercury into the very finest gold. Of this tree Virgil speaks in the sixth book of the Aeneid original: "Eneidos" when he relates in a fable how Aeneas and Silvius went to a tree that had golden branches, and as often as one broke a branch off from it, another grew in the same place.