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.
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