Chemical-Philosophical Treatise on Natural and Supernatural Things

Now how the Archæus the active, formative principle in nature proceeds in its operation by the benefit of the spirit of Mercury in the earth or its bowels, understand that as soon as the spiritual seed is conceived by the heavenly impression of the stars and nourished through the Elements, this sperm is immediately born and turned into Mercurial water, just as in the beginning also the Macrocosm was founded from nothing; for the spirit was carried over the waters, and a certain celestial heat was bound to animate the cold, earthly, watery creature. In the macrocosm, divine virtue and the operation of the celestial luminaries reigned; in the microcosm likewise, supreme virtue and force will sustain the regimen of working in the earth by the benefit of its most divine and holy spirit. Furthermore, the Almighty established the means of perfecting all those things, so that one creature might receive the faculty of influencing another, and one might promote another in the works of the perfecting Lord. Thus, a certain influence of the luminaries of the sky was granted to the earth for generating, and likewise an internal heat for fostering and cooking, which the excessive cold of the earth brought because of its wateriness, a singular genus according to its species to every creature whatsoever, so that by that reason a certain subtle exhalation might be elicited through the sidereal sky; not that vulgar one, but a clarified and pure vapor, separated from others, which joins itself with the Mercurial substance, by whose property of heat the humidity is so evidently dried up over a long time. But when the animal property approaches, which exhibits the body and the balsam for conservation, and touches the earth first through spiritual and sidereal influx, the generation of Metals arises therefrom, as the mixture therefore stands