THE COMPOSITION OF METALS.[1]
IF any one denies that there is great efficacy in the Composition of Metals so far as relates to supernatural affairs, we will answer him, and bring forward so many proofs as shall support our own opinion and force him to subscribe thereto. For if the seven metals were, in just and due order, compounded, mixed together, and united in the fire, you must certainly hold that in one body were conjoined and linked together all the virtues of the seven metals. It has been seen good to call this body electrum. Its efficacy, power, and operations, moreover, shew themselves to be much greater, even supernaturally so, than exist in a latent form grafted by Nature on metals in their rude condition. In those solid and rude metals are only those powers wherewith God and Nature herself have endowed them. Gold, indeed, is the noblest of all, the most precious and primary metal, if we rightly consider it; and we are not prepared to deny that leprosy, in all its forms, can be thereby removed from the human frame. Nor are we unaware that exterior ulcers and wounds are cured by copper and mercury. The other metals, too, have each their own excellences, and these not by any means to be despised; but we will pass over these for the moment, since you will hear of them when we come to treat concerning the Life of the Metals.[2] But metals cannot be used in medicine without injury, unless they be first comminuted, altered, and, after being deprived of their metallic nature, transmuted into another essence. You can hope for little result from them unless the preparation which Alchemy teaches shall have preceded their administration; that is, if you have not previously reduced them to their arcana, oils, balsams, quintessences, tinctures, calces, salts, crocuses or the like, and then administered them to the patient. Moreover, the supernatural force or effect of the metals, even though it be present in them, will be of no avail unless you first prepare them according to our method in which we will instruct you. But we greatly desire that our electrum should be compounded, since it can afford great and marvellous results in proportion as it is revealed by practice. If we consented to pass
- ↑ A considerable portion of this tract belongs more properly to the section concerned with Hermetic Medicine, but it is inserted at this point for the further illustration of the subject of electrum, which is somewhat shortly discussed in the foregoing treatise. The work De Compositione Metallorum is printed in separate form in the Basle 8vo, but it really constitutes the sixth book of the Archidoxis Magicæ as they are found in the Geneva folio.
- ↑ So far as the Archidoxis Magiciæ are concerned, this promise is not fulfilled. Possibly Paracelsus intended to carry his subject further than the seventh book, which is devoted to the sigils of the planets, and has nothing of a chemical nature. But possibly, also, a reference is intended to the first book Concerning the Nature of Things.
