Book of Mercuries

ON ALCHEMY

TO THE WRITERS

gs, that by the King's command, he made the most excellent gold. I was shown a type of coin which they still call the Raymond Noble. The "Noble" was a English gold coin. A popular legend claimed Raymond Lull created the gold for King Edward's coinage through alchemy. It is made of pure and refined gold of the highest quality. In the book he calls his Testament, Lull himself admits that he learned this art from Arnold of Villanova, his contemporary. Giovanni Andrea, in the legal chapter titled "On the Crime of Forgery," original: "de Crimine falsi" testifies that Lull struck gold plates. These plates were not inferior in quality to gold sought from deep mines or extracted from gold-bearing pits. The author uses the term "arrugia," an ancient term for a deep mining shaft or a technique involving high-pressure water to wash away earth.

Many others have also written about this art, but their books are not yet printed. Among these authors are Rosinus the Philosopher and Roger Bacon. Roger Bacon was a 13th-century Franciscan friar and scientist. Many alchemical works were falsely attributed to him during the Renaissance. I have read Bacon’s Mirror of Alchemy.

Zosimus, a Greek author, is preserved in the Royal Library. Zosimus of Panopolis was a 4th-century Egyptian-Greek alchemist. He is one of the earliest known historical writers on the subject. He wrote about the Sacred Art, about the composition of waters for gold-making original Greek: χρυσοποιίαν (chrysopoeia), the art of making gold, and about instruments and furnaces.