The Wayfarer

might not have the need to break the same ice or wander in errors. This treatise, which has not proceeded from idle speculation (like a sailor from a map), which is often futile and fantastical and does not agree with reality, but rather has been progressed and deduced from the experience and use of the things here conveyed, will be able to prove most useful to the reader, if any other, so that it ought not unjustly be considered as an Ariadnean thread, or a Cynosure the star used for navigation, a guiding light, or a trivial index in this longest study and course, or rather, in this most intricate Labyrinth and immense Ocean. For it will bring back anyone wandering in the mountains and not recognizing the materia philosophica philosophical matter (as Arnoldus Arnold of Villanova complains in the first chapter of his New Light, even though, by the same witness, it is sold openly at a high price) to the place where the Apis or Egyptian Ox is hidden, in the manner of that Battus the guide, and it will send and return the wavering person through the tortuous and multiple deceptions of the ways into the inner sanctuaries and penetralia of the art, just as much as it will lead and place the wanderer on the sea waves, like a certain Cynosure, at a happy harbor. Although it does not demonstrate which is the individual and infallible species of this matter (which would be alien to all reason), yet it proposes most clearly which is not, and many other things observed by us—things otherwise incredible and not sufficiently explored by a novice—with this caution, lest anyone fall into those multiple and fruitless digressions of labor at the beginning, or if they have fallen, by what signs they may know it, so that they may turn their foot back in time, and seek other entrances into this Labyrinth