The Heaven of the Philosophers, or the Book of Vexations

supervenes, the external parts are coagulated, becoming hard and solid, which is the occasion for the remaining five metals, namely Jupiter, $\neq$ whose nature it completes Saturn, Mars, Venus, and Luna. $\neq$ In these five metals, cold dwells with dominion. Nor can Mercury, with its natural heat or liquefaction, assist the Sun or defend it against the coldness of these five metals: because the heat of Mercury is not sufficient to retain the Sun in liquefaction: wherefore it is necessary for the Sun to obey the five metals more than the single metal of Mercury: Mercury itself also has no duty of its own other than to always flow or be liquid.

49 It is made fluid by heat it is, and the nature of life: but the coldness of hardness, the condition of consolidation, and the nature of immobility possess that which is compared to death. For example, if certain cold metals—Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Mars, Moon, and Sun—must be liquefied, it is necessary that it be done by the heat of fire: but snow or ice, which are cold, cannot liquefy the metals themselves but will rather harden them: for immediately, as soon as the metals placed in the fire are liquefied by force, the snow will depart from them, and that coldness, seizing them, will render the metals themselves frozen, hard, and immobile.

Concerning Mercury

50 But regarding why Mercury remains always fluid and alive, I ask whether this is brought about by heat or cold? Whoever replies that it is done by a cold and moist nature, and that it has life from coldness, the advocate of this opinion, having no knowledge of Nature, has been seduced by the common herd original: "vulgus"; for the common herd judges nothing but the false in all things, and firmly holds to this: wherefore it is necessary that whoever desires to know the truth depart from it: for Mercury is not cold in the least,