Hermes: A Journal in Occasional Issues

Assurance, "that if this salt were not present, the elixir could not be prepared." (§ 23. 24.) This foundational moisture or the hermetic universal balm is the hermetic gold, which carries its own solvent—its water, its mercury—within itself, and is therefore called the "gold of the thing" by the mundane Likely referring to the Philosophia Mundani, a specific alchemical worldview or text focused on the natural world., that is, the gold of EVERY thing, because through an ordinary distillation the volatile constituent can be separated from every substance, and with it the radical moisture original: "Humidum radicale." The essential, life-sustaining fluid believed to exist within all matter. can be extracted from the ashes.

Everything that the hermetic writers say about the reduction of things is to be understood solely as an ordinary separation, through which, as they say, the hidden becomes manifest, the invisible becomes visible, the spiritual nature is turned outward; in short, the first matter original: "prima Materia." The primordial, formless base of all substance. of every thing is that into which it is decomposed after this separation. — No expression is therefore more common than the term "viscous," which applies to all fixed salts. Sometimes these are the incombustible oil of nature, sometimes the radical moisture, sometimes the salamander A symbolic creature in alchemy representing the element of fire and the ability of a substance to remain unchanged by heat., sometimes the slippery dragon The dragon often represents the volatile or acidic "spirit" that dissolves the "body" of the metal..