"I will make this known to thee in all truth [for the love of God], that the root of philosophic sulphur, which is a heavenly spirit, is united in the same material with the root of the spiritual and supernatural mercury, and the principle of spiritual salt—out of which is made the Stone, and not out of several things. That universal thing, the greatest treasure of earthly wisdom, is one thing, and the principles of three things are found in one, which has power to change all metals into one. The three things are the true spirit of mercury, and the soul of sulphur, united to spiritual salt, and dwelling in one body; they are dragon and eagle, king and lion, spirit and body, etc.” - Basilius Valentinus (Lib. Nat. et Supernal., c. 4)
Three primes
- Sulphur - omnipresent spirit of life - (Soul and the Father) 🜍
- Mercury - fluid connection between the high and the low - (Mind and the Son) ☿
- Salt - base matter or body and the Mother 🜔
Magic, it is true, had its origin in the Divine Ternary and arose from the Trinity of God. For God marked all his creatures with this Ternary and engraved his hieroglyph on them with his own finger. Nothing in the nature of things can be assigned or produced that lacks this teaching of the Divine Ternary, or that does not even prove it visually. The creature teaches us to understand and see the Creator himself, as Saint Paul attests to the Romans. This pact of the Divine Ternary, diffused throughout the substance of things, is indissoluble. For this reason, too, we have the secrets of all Nature from the four elements. For the Ternary, with the magical Quaternary, produces a perfect Septenary, endowed with many mysteries and demonstrated by known things. When the Quaternary rests in the Ternary, the Light of the World arises on the horizon of eternity, and with God's help grants us the complete link. — Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Paracelsus
- Divine Trinity → Father, Son, Holy Spirit
- Tria Prima → Sulphur (soul), Mercury (spirit), Salt (body)
- Human Trinity → Spirit, Soul, Body
“Divine Ternary” – The archetypal pattern of three, originating in the Trinity of God, imprinted into all creation. Every being, mineral, plant, animal, or human reflects this threefold structure
When you unite the three spiritual principles with the four elemental qualities, you have the perfect number 7 — a symbol of completion, planetary order, and the full scope of nature.
"AN ENIGMA OF THE SAGES. In which the underlying substance of the Art, called the Phoenix of the Sages, is found to be thrice threefold. If I tell you three parts of a thing you have no cause to complain. Seek one of three, and of the three one will be there: for where there is body and soul, there is also Spirit and there shine salt, sulphur, and mercury. Trust my word, seek the grass that is trefoil. Thou knowest the name, and art wise and cunning if thou findest it."
— The Sophic Hydrolith
Solve
Spiritus (Spirit) – Black triangle
Corpus (Body) – Six-pointed star
Anima (Soul) – Red triangle
Coagula
"United together, they are more beneficial than if they were separate."
"The Philosopher’s Stone is composed of three: the Moon, the Sun, and Mercury.
In the Moon resides the white,
in the Sun the red,
and the Stone of Mercury embraces and transmits them both,
for one tints the other red,
and this is the completion of the Great Work."
"Hermes, the father of philosophers, says that philosophy has three parts:
the Sun, the Moon, and Mercury.
From their union, Father Hermes knew how to compose medicine."
(Reference: The Rosary of the Philosophers, fol. 250.)
"Our Stone is composed of Spirit, Body, and Soul."
“Hermes Trismegistus deserved to be called the Father of Philosophers for having researched the three mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms and the triple subsistence of them in a created essence, in which he recognized all the force and virtue of vegetable nature, animal and mineral. In the nature of mercury flying like snow, white and coagulated, there is a vegetative virtue which is not common: which mercury is a certain Spirit both of the great and of the small world. And it is on this mercury that the movement and flow of human nature depends and originates, according to the reasonable Soul. As for the animating virtue, it is nothing other than a medium between the Spirit and the body, since this virtue, being like the glue of the world, is the bond of these two. Which link consists of sulfur which is like a transparent red oil like the sun to the great world and like the heart of man to the small world. In the end, the minerality is endowed with a body that is similar to salt. This body is of admirable virtue and odor; and when salt is separated from the filth of the earth, it will differ from mercury only in the thickness and consistency of the body. These three substances considered in a created essence, constitute and establish the limb of the great and the little world, from which limb the first man was formed, when he was made of the powder of the earth. To which the immortal microcosmic reasonable Soul arrived, immediately inspired by God. And which, like a Queen, is the driving and directing cause of all the functions that are in man. For the rest, just as the virtue of our body and also our life is whole, by the four elements and by the assembling or coagulation of the dust of the earth, if the mercurial Spirit as radical moist, and the Sulphurous soul as natural heat conspire and come together lovingly into one with the consistency and thickness of salt which is the preserver from all decay, so is it necessary that the immortal soul be separated from the body which was formed from the assembly of the dust of the Earth. That if there be any defect in one or more of the three principles, then the death of all ensues, but if the defect is only found in a part of any principle, the disease will be only caused. This can be seen especially in the Anatomy of Seven Principal Limbs. There is nothing which can better remedy the triple defect of these principles than the mass of this limbo from which man was made, which mass has been assembled by the three principles into a substance, which can increase, preserve and maintain all the forces and virtues of nature, provided it is duly converted and brought into a fixed Astral body.” — Basilian Aphorisms or Hermetic Cannons by Anonymous
"The Sign of the Center of Nature is the Tincture, the Essence and the Oil; Mercury, Sulphur, Salt: the Way to the glory of the age.”
"All things (man included) are composed out of three substances, and all things have their number, their weight, and their measure. Health exists when the three substances constituting a thing preserve their normal proportion of quantity and quality; disease results if this proportion becomes abnormal. These three substances are called Sulphur, Mercury, and Salt."
— "Life of Paracelsus" by Franz Hartmann
Salt
As mercury is the water aspect, sulfur is the fiery aspect, so is salt the form aspect (salt is a crystalline form, or crystallized energy).
The alchemists say that in its lower aspect salt is ‘bitter’. Here salt is symbol for knowledge and wisdom. Self-knowledge is bitter, painful. Sometimes they speak of the bitter ‘sea water’. As water or the sea stands for the soul, it is a reference to the same self-knowledge.
Christ is called ‘Sal sapientiae’, the Salt of Wisdom’.
In the beginning of the Great Work, the salt is called impure. Here it equals the earth, the body, our every day consciousness or being. The impure salt has to be dissolved (‘solutio’) into the divine water (quicksilver, or ‘prima materia’), by which it is purified. In albedo salt arises as a pure form and fixated, that is crystallized into a pure salt.
Mercury
“About Quick-Silver Merucy - Fools who deform its kind from its Metallick disposition or dissolution, and by dissolving its radical moisture, corrupt it, and disproportion Quick-silver from its first Mineral quality, which needs nothing but purity and simple de∣coction. For example, they who defile it with Salts, Vitriols, and aluminous things, destroy it, and change it into some other thing, than is the nature of Quick-silver:” - Bernard Trevisan The Answer of Bernardus Trevisanus, to the Epistle of Thomas of Bononia
"I have pointed out that outwardly Mercurius corresponds to quicksilver but inwardly he is a “deus terrenus” and an Anima Mundi—in other words, that part of God which, when he “imagined” the world, was as it were left behind in his Creation or, like the Sophia of the Gnostics, got lost in Physis. Mercurius has the character which Dorn ascribes to the soul." Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 699
"Mercurius stands at the beginning and end of the work: he is the prima materia, the caput corvi, the nigredo; as dragon he devours himself and as dragon he dies, to rise again as the lapis. He is the play of colours in the cauda pavonis and the division into four elements. He is the hermaphrodite that was in the beginning, that splits into the classical brother-sister duality and is reunited in the coniunctio, to appear once again at the end in the radiant form of the lumen novum, the stone. He is metallic yet liquid, matter yet spirit, cold yet fiery, poison and yet healing draught—a symbol uniting all opposites." — Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Pages 288-295
Sulphur
Inside gold is the alchemical Sun. Inside the Sun is an active substance, sulfur. Sometimes alchemists equal sulfur with the Sun. Sulfur is the spirit of life. Sulfur is of a twofold nature: white and red sulfur. White sulfur is the substance of the Great Work at the phase of Whiteness, and red sulfur at the stage of redness. In general sulfur is the symbol for the active principle in the Great Work.
“And so that you cannot stray from the right path, apply yourself to metals; for the aforementioned sulfur is found in all” - Nicolas Flamel. Testament of Nicolas Flamel
“from these bodies there is extracted an exceedingly white and red sulphur; for in these there is a most pure substance of sulphur, cleansed to the highest degree by Nature's own artifice.” - Arnold de Villa Nova The Golden Tract Concerning The Stone of the Philosophers
“No external thing which is not derived from these two [sulphur and mercury] has power to produce or transmute metals. On this account we must select a metallic substance for the production of the Stone.” - Draco. The Golden Tract Concerning The Stone of the Philosophers
“The Sages have striven to discover how those sulphurs may be extracted from those more perfect bodies, and how their qualities may be so refined by Art, that that which was not manifest before (although it always lay hid in them) may appear by the mediation of the said Art with Nature. - Richard the Englishman, following Avicenna, affirms (cp. xi.). The Golden Tract Concerning The Stone of the Philosophers
"On the Sulphur which is in the Mercury of the Sages.It is a marvellous fact that our Mercury contains active Sulphur, and yet preserves the form and all the properties of Mercury. Hence it is necessary that a form be introduced therein by our preparation, which form is a metallic sulphur.
This Sulphur is the inward fire which causes the putrefaction of the composite Sun This sulphureous fire is the spiritual seed which our Virgin (still remaining immaculate) has conceived. For an uncorrupted virginity admits of a spiritual love, as experience and authority affirm. The two (the passive and the active principle) combined we call our Hermaphrodite. When joined to the Sun, it softens, liquefies, and dissolves it with gentle heat. By means of the same fire it coagulates itself; and by its coagulation produces the Sun." - An Open Entrance To The Closed Palace Of The King. By An Anonymous Sage And Lover Of Truth.
"The Hermetic gold is the flux of the sunbeams or of light suffused invisibly and magically into the body of the world. Light is sublimated gold, rescued magically, by invisible stellar attraction, out of material depths. Gold is thus the deposit of Light, which of itself generates. Light, in the celestial world, is subtle, vaporous, magically exalted gold, or “spirit of flame.” Gold draws inferior natures in the metals, and intensifying and multiplying, converts into itself." - Extract from Robertus de Fluctibus, in: H. Jennings, The Rosicrucians, 1879, pp. 335-36
"There is a stone found in Arcadia, and called asbestos, because once lit it cannot be put out." - Augustine, De civitate Dei (City of God), Book XXI, ch. 5
"On the testimony of Dioscorides, is a stone of Cyprus, not unlike certain species of alum. It is impervious to fire, from which it issues more brilliant. It is fabled by the Germans to be produced from the hairs of a Salamander, which is accounted for by its fireproof nature ... When this stone is set on fire there is scarcely anything that will extinguish it."
- A Lexicon of Alchemy by Martin Rulandus the Elder.
"Basilius Valentinus (Lib. Nat. et Supernal., c. 4) says: "I will make this known to thee in all truth [for the love of God], that the root of philosophic sulphur, which is a heavenly spirit, is united in the same material with the root of the spiritual and supernatural mercury, and the principle of spiritual salt—out of which is made the Stone, and not out of several things. That universal thing, the greatest treasure of earthly wisdom, is one thing, and the principles of three things are found in one, which has power to change all metals into one. The three things are the true spirit of mercury, and the soul of sulphur, united to spiritual salt, and dwelling in one body; they are dragon and eagle, king and lion, spirit and body, etc." — The Golden Tract: Concerning the Stone of the Philosophers. "The Hermetic Museum", Vol. I, by Arthur Edward Waite