The Chemical Basilica or Alchemical Royal Jewel

...have been reminded that the door of wisdom should always stand open to sincere minds. Since it is entirely praiseworthy and fitting for everyone to show the way to their erring neighbor, and to keep those who are not erring on the right path. For this reason, I bring forth and share with you, good-hearted reader, for the honor of God—as whose unworthy instrument and pen for all His mercies and proven deeds I desire and wish to be in this publication—for the use of my neighbor and the advancement of the entire Alchemical community, these Spagyric Secrets alchemical/medicinal preparations from the innermost shrine of my heart. Their preparations I have myself experimented with at great cost, long time, and no small effort, and the like of which I have to this day found in no writer, nor heard of, nor learned from any of the ancients. I have always avoided loading the reader with lies and uncertain claims, of which the present world is full. Likewise, I have also avoided publishing a large book full of laborious and tiresome recipes—of which I have collected a great many through my long-term work—with which I find students of Medicine overloaded and so confused that they are practically suffocating under their great heavy burden. What I have learned and obtained, however, in nearly twenty whole years during my manifold, dangerous, and laborious travels in France, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Bohemia, and Poland from the most famous chemists and learned people—partly through begging, partly through great gifts and the exchange of my own secrets (not to speak of my own practice and discoveries)—through unremitting diligence and careful investigation, in this I put the common good before my own. And out of Christian love and pity for the sick, according to the loyalty with which I am attached to the Medical Republic, I have wanted to test everything beforehand through the help and assistance of Vulcan the god of fire/alchemy, and with "seeing hands," so to speak, to touch them, before I finished them in print and published them to everyone. So that the lovers and diligent investigators of such an art might now find and enjoy that which I have learned at my great cost and loss, in a beautiful and useful compendium summary, and in the briefest possible excerpt, and indeed in it no deceptive opinions (as they have hitherto been frequently lamented), but the wished-for truth itself, attained through manifold experiments. And thus some may, after they have completed the course of the great Platonic Year a long celestial cycle, arrive at their own with great profit and in a much better adorned attire and habit, in which habit and clothing I received them nearly torn from the authors and had to purchase them for money. Since with some, to whom the great clamor and fame of many secrets incited me through distant and arduous paths not without great expense, the presence—as is often the case—greatly diminished the great fame, such that I considered that which they published as secrets to be either common and stale goods, or else found them entirely imperfect.