The Alchemical Fountain

"But he who knows not this our Ocean in which our Water hath its flux and reflux, and our Fountain out of which he may draw this Water for his use, let him forbear this, as a most dangerous Science, for he may only expect loss in it, but no profit." - An exposition upon Sir George Ripley's Epistle to King Edward IV, 1677 by Eirenaeus Philalethes

From Thesaurus Mundi.

“O marvelous efficacy of the fountain, which makes one out of two and creates peace between enemies.”

"Our king—even if he should die—will rise again with life; and we shall be cleansed, we shall be exalted, and we shall become rich."

"Come, O body, to the fountain of the Moon with your mind; drink, and henceforth do not thirst any longer after vanities."

The Fountain of Nature

The macrocosmic and microcosmic fires are constantly circulating in nature, in what is called the Fountain of Nature or the rotation of the elements. When the heavenly fire coagulates or condenses, it forms an invisible and highly subtle moisture – the philosophical element of air. The process continues and the element of air condenses into the element of water, which in turn condenses to the element of earth where it is reinforced and joined to the central fire. The trapped central fire reverses the process, so that the soil is made volatile and becomes a thick water. The water is made volatile and evaporated into air, which is refined into the fire element, which in turn is regenerated by the heavenly fire, after which the cycle begins again. The two fires of the fountain together express the philosophical salt. Thus fire and air come into the waters and impregnate them; the waters get rid of their thickest part and give it to the earth. Thus the earth is heavy or saturated, and its abundance of earth and water is volatised and sublimated again upward by fire as steam, whose ascending and descending God has entrenched in the universal fire as the great and only agent of nature. - Alchemy - The divine work

Aurea Catena Homeri (1781)

“The tincture giving perfection to imperfects is made out of the fountain of gold and silver.”

• The Philosophical Canons of Paracelsus

“And if we are baptized in the fountain of gold and silver, and the spirit of our body ascends into heaven with the father and the son, and descends again, then our souls shall revive and my animal body will remain white, that is, [the body] of the moon.”

• Consilium coniugii (as translated in Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis)

“Our water is serene, crystalline, pure, and beautiful - though it can assume its true form only through the aid of our Art. In that form it is our sea, our hidden fountain, from which gold derives its birth by natural descent”

• Three Treatises (Hermetic Museum, Vol. II)

“For whoever drinks of this golden fountain, experiences a renovation of his whole nature”

• Basil Valentine, The Twelve Keys

“What you would know, my friend, is a fountain very terrible and wonderful in virtue before every other fountain in the world. It belongs to the King alone of this country, whom the fount knows very well, and he himself the fountain.”

• Bernard of Treviso, The Fountain Allegory

“therefore it is the whole Elixir of whiteness and redness, and it is a permanent water, and water of life and death, it is virgin's milk, the herb of washing and the animal fountain, of which whosoever drinks dies not”

• Rosarium Philosophorum

The Fountain of Youth

"For the imperfect body is converted into the first matter, and those waters being conjoined with our water do make one pure and clear water, purifying all things and yet containing in itself all necessary things. And this water of which and with which our magistery is effected, is both dear and cheap, for it dissolveth bodies not with common solution as the ignorant report, which converts the body into cloud water, but by the true philosophical solution, in which the body is changed into its first water of which it hath been from the beginning this self same body."

— Rosarium Philosophorum, c. 1550

"The fountain of wisdom, from where knowledge of nature is being taken."