Page:Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Paracelsus Vol I (IA cu31924092287121).djvu/170

 And as with Sol, so also in the case of other metals, you should take no metallic arcanum or medicament into the body unless it shall have first been rendered volatile, so that it cannot be brought back to its metallic condition. Wherefore the first step and beginning of preparing Aurum Potabile is this; afterwards such a volatile substance can be dissolved by spirit of wine, so that both ascend together, becoming volatile and inseparable. Just as you prepare gold, in the same way you prepare potable Luna, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mercury.

But to return to our proposition, and to prove by illustrations and by adequate reasons that mortified things are not dead and compelled to continue in death, but can be brought back and resuscitated and vitalised by man, according to natural guidance and rule. You see this in the case of lions, who are all born dead, and are first vitalised by the horrible noise of their parents, just as a sleeping person is awakened by a shout. So the lions are stirred up; not that they are sleeping in the same way—for one who sleeps a natural sleep would necessarily wake—but this is not the case with lions. Unless they were stirred up with this noise they would remain dead, and life would never be found in them. Hence it is understood that they acquire their life and are vitalised by that noise. You see the same thing in all animals, except those which are produced from putrefaction, like flies, which, if they are drowned in water so that no life could be discerned in them, and were so left, would continue dead, and never would revive of themselves. But if they are sprinkled with salt and placed in the warm sun, or behind a heated furnace, they recover their former life, and this is their resuscitation. If this were not done they would remain dead. So you see in the case of the serpent. If it be cut in pieces, and these pieces be put in a cucurbite, and putrefied in a venter equinus, the whole serpent will revive in the glass in the form of small worms or the spawn of fishes. Now, if these little worms are—as they ought to be—brought out by putrefaction and nourished, more than a hundred serpents will be produced from the one, any single serpent being as big as the original one. This can be accomplished by putrefaction alone. And just as with the serpent, so many animals can be resuscitated, recalled, and restored. By this process, with the aid of nigromancy, Hermes and Virgil endeavoured to renovate and resuscitate themselves after death, and to be born again as infants, but the experiment did not turn out according to their intention and it was unsuccessful.

Let us, however, pass by these examples, and come to the practical method of resuscitation and restoration. It is advisable to begin with metals because metallic bodies more frequently resemble human bodies. Know, then, that the resuscitation and renovation of metals are twofold: one brings back calcined metals by a process of reduction to their original metallic body; the other reduces metals to their first matter. The former is a reduction to argentum vivum, and such, too, is the latter process. Calcine a metal by means