sperm of the woman.  Of both we get a chaste union and a true generation.’ . . .  Aristotle:  `Take your beloved son, and wed him to his sister, his white sister, in equal marriage, and give them the cup of love, for it is a food which prompts to union.’ “[1a] KELLY, of course, accepts the traditional authorship of the works from which he quotes, though in many cases such authorship is doubtful, to say the least.  The alchemical works ascribed to ARISTOTLE (384-322 B.C.), for instance, are beyond question forgeries.  Indeed, the symbol of a union between brother and sister, here quoted, could hardly be held as acceptable to Greek thought, to which incest was the most abominable and unforgiveable sin.  It seems likelier that it originated with the Egyptians, to whom such unions were tolerable in fact.  The symbol is often met with in Latin alchemy.  MICHAEL MAIER (1568-1622) also says:  “conjunge fratrem cum sorore et propina illis poculum amoris,” the words forming a motto to a picture of a man and woman clasped in each other’s arms, to whom an older man offers a goblet.  This symbolic picture occurs in his Atalanta Fugiens, hoc est, Emblemata nova de Secretis Naturae Chymica, etc. (Oppenheim, 1617).  This work is an exceedingly curious one.  It consists of a number of carefully executed pictures, each accompanied by a motto, a verse of poetry set to music, with a prose text.  Many of the pictures are phallic in conception, and practically all of them are anthropomorphic.  Not only the primary function of sex, but especially its secondary one of lactation, is made use of.  The most curious of these emblematic pictures, perhaps, is one symbolising the conjunction of gold and silver.  It shows on the right a man and woman, representing the sun and moon, in the act of coition, standing up to the thighs in a lake.  On the left, on a hill above the lake, a woman (with the moon as halo) gives birth to a child.  A boy is coming out of the water towards her.  The verse informs us that:  “The bath glows red at the conception of the boy, the air at his birth.”  We learn also that “there is a stone, and yet there is not, which is the noble gift of God.  If God grants it, fortunate will be he who shall receive it."[1]

[1a] EDWARD KELLY:  The Stone of the Philosophers, Op. cit., pp 13, 14, 33, 35, 36, 38-40, and 47.

[1] Op.  Cit., p. 145

Concerning the nature of gold, there is a discussion in The Answer of BERNARDUS TREVISANUS to the Epistle of Thomas of Bononia, with which I shall close my consideration of the present aspect of the subject.  Its interest for us lies in the arguments which are used and held to be valid.  “Besides, you say that Gold, as most think, is nothing else than Quick-silver coagulated naturally by the force of Sulphur; yet so, that nothing of the Sulphur which generated the Gold, doth remain in the substance of the Gold: