(From the Collection of Etchings in the Royal Gallery, Munich.)
Basil Valentine explains the process of fusing iron with this stibium and obtaining thereby “by a particular manipulation a curious star which the wise men before me called the signet star of philosophy.” He commences the treatise already mentioned by explaining that he is a monk of the Order of St. Benedict, which (I quote from an English translation by Theodore Kirkringius, M.D., published at London in 1678) “requires another manner of Spirit of Holiness than the common state of mortals exercised in the profane business of this World.”
After thus introducing himself he proceeds to mingle chemistry, piety, and abuse of the physicians and apothecaries of his day with much repetition though with considerable shrewdness for about fifty pages. At last, after many false starts, he expounds the origin and nature of antimony, thus:—
“Antimony is a mineral made of the vapour of the Earth changed into water, which spiritual syderal Transmutation is the true Astrum of Antimony; which water, by the stars first, afterwards by the Element of Fire which resides in the Element of Air, is extracted from the Elementary Earth, and by coagulation formally changed into a tangible essence, in which tangible essence is found very much of Sulphur predominating, of Mercury not so much, and of Salt the least of the three. Yet it assumes so much Salt as it thence acquires an hard and unmalleable Mass. The principal quality of it is dry and hot, or rather burning; of cold and humidity it hath very little in it, as there is in common Mercury; in corporal Gold also is more heat than cold. These may suffice to be spoken of the matter, and three fundamental principles of Antimony, how by the Archeus in the Element of Earth it is brought to perfection.”
It needs some practice in reading alchemical writings to make out the drift of this rhapsody, and no profit would be gained by a clear interpretation of the mysticism. It may, however, be noted that the Archeus was a sort of friendly demon who worked at the formation of metals in the bowels of the earth; that all metals were supposed to be compounds of sulphur, mercury, and salt in varying proportions, the sulphur and the salt, however, being refined spiritual essences of the substances we know by these names; and that it was a necessary compliment to pay to any product which it was intended to honour to trace its ancestry to the four elements.
As the author goes on to deal with the various compounds or derivatives from antimony, it is abundantly clear that he writes from practical experience. He describes the Regulus of Antimony (the metal), the glass (an oxy-sulphide), a tincture made from the glass, an oil, an elixir, the flowers, the liver, the white calx, a balsam, and others.
Basil Valentine’s scathing contempt for contemporary medical practitioners calls for quotation. “The doctor,” he says, “knows not what medicines he prescribes to the sick; whether the colour of them be white, black, grey, or blew, he cannot tell; nor doth this wretched man know whether the medicament he gives be dry or hot, cold or humid.... Their furnaces stand in the Apothecaries’ shops to which they seldom or never come. A paper scroll in which their usual Recipe is written serves their purpose to the full, which Bill being by some Apothecary’s boy or servant received, he with great noise thumps out of his mortar every medicine, and all the health of the sick.”
Valentine concludes his “Triumphal Chariot” by thus apostrophising contemporary practitioners:—“Ah, you poor miserable people, physicians without experience, pretended teachers who write long prescriptions on large sheets of paper; you apothecaries with your vast marmites, as large as may be seen in the kitchens of great lords where they feed hundreds of people; all you so very blind, rub your eyes and refresh your sight that you may be cured of your blindness.”
In the same treatise Basil Valentine describes spirit of salt which he had obtained by the action of oil of vitriol on marine salt; brandy, distilled from wine; and how to get copper from pyrites by first obtaining a sulphate, then precipitating the metal by plunging into the solution a blade of iron. This operation was a favourite evidence with later alchemists of the transmutation of iron into copper.