[Illustration:  Here are two birds, great and strong—­the body and
               spirit; one devours the other.

Let the body be placed in horse-dung, or a warm bath, the spirit having been extracted from it.  The body has become white by the process, the spirit red by our art.  All that exists tends towards perfection, and thus is the Philosopher’s Stone prepared.

FIG.  V.]

The author of The Open Entrance speaks of the various stages in the perfecting of the agent as regimens.  The beginning of the heating of gold with mercury is likened to the king stripping off his golden garments and descending into the fountain; this is the regimen of Mercury.  As the heating is continued, all becomes black; this is the regimen of Saturn.  Then is noticed a play of many colours; this is the regimen of Jupiter:  if the heat is not regulated properly, “the young ones of the crow will go back to the nest.”  About the end of the fourth month you will see “the sign of the waxing moon,” and all becomes white; this is the regimen of the Moon.  The white colour gives place to purple and green; you are now in the regimen of Venus.  After that, appear all the colours of the rainbow, or of a peacock’s tail; this is the regimen of Mars.  Finally the colour becomes orange and golden; this is the regimen of the Sun.

The reader may wish to have some description of the Essence.  The alchemists could describe it only in contraries.  It had a bodily form, but its method of working was spiritual.  In The Sodic Hydrolith, or Water Stone of the Wise we are told:—­

“The stone is conceived below the earth, born in the earth, quickened in heaven, dies in time, and obtains eternal glory....  It is bluish-grey and green....  It flows like water, yet it makes no wet; it is of great weight, and is small.”

Philalethes says, in A Brief Guide to the Celestial Ruby:  “The Philosopher’s Stone is a certain heavenly, spiritual, penetrative, and fixed substance, which brings all metals to the perfection of gold or silver (according to the quality of the Medicine), and that by natural methods, which yet in their effects transcend Nature....  Know then that it is called a stone, not because it is like a stone, but only because, by virtue of its fixed nature, it resists the action of fire as successfully as any stone.  In species it is gold, more pure than the purest; it is fixed and incombustible like a stone, but its appearance is that of very fine powder, impalpable to the touch, sweet to the taste, fragrant to the smell, in potency a most penetrative spirit, apparently dry and yet unctuous, and easily capable of tinging a plate of metal....  If we say that its nature is spiritual, it would be no more than the truth; if we described it as corporeal, the expression would be equally correct.”