Preface.

)( 4

The various operations presented here have, up to this day, caused much incorrectness, error, cost, harm, and ridicule among the crowd of pseudo-chemists Turba Chimiastrorum; a derogatory term used by serious alchemists for those they considered charlatans or 'puffers' who followed false recipes without understanding the underlying principles. and sophistic process-mongers. This is to such an extent that whoever cannot provide themselves with a faithful guide or an Ariadne's thread In Greek mythology, Ariadne's thread allowed Theseus to navigate the Labyrinth; alchemists used this metaphor for the logic or secret key that leads a seeker through the confusing metaphors of alchemical literature. here, must very easily fall from one erroneous path into another. This is just as Johannes Pauperum Known as "John the Poor," an author to whom various medieval alchemical compendiums were attributed. writes in his Abridgment of the Secret of Secrets original Latin: Abbreviatione de Secretis secretorum; a reference to a popular medieval treatise on statecraft and occult sciences often attributed to Aristotle.:

Many paths have been
discovered and established by the great Philosophers,
and many are the measures and ways which they
themselves devised according to greater and lesser degrees,
just as they themselves possessed a more or
less clear intellect, one more so than
another. And therefore among the Philosophers there are
various opinions and various measures of
mineral things and bodies; and for that reason
one travels by one path and another by
another, and because of this the minds of men
remain clouded and obscured, so that
they cannot discern the true from the false, etc.

But so that I, for my own small part, might also [assist] the lovers of the chemical sciences original: Chimischen Wissenschafften / in one or [another...]