Rust & verdigris: healing the “metal’s sickness.”
"Imperfect metals are in fact gold and silver, but their sickness and imperfections do hide their properties, which imperfections and sicknesses proceed of these causes."
- A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery
"As the physician purges and cleanses the inward parts of the body, and removes all unhealthy matter by means of his medicines, so our metallic substances must be purified and refined of all foreign matter, in order to ensure the success of our task. Therefore, our Masters require a pure, immaculate body, that is untainted with any foreign admixture, which admixture is the leprosy of our metals."
- Basil Valentine, The Twelve Keys
"Our gold is not the common gold. But thou hast inquired concerning the greenness, deeming the bronze to be a leprous body on account of the greenness it hath upon it. Therefore I say unto thee that whatever is perfect in the bronze is that greenness only, because that greenness is straightway changed by our magistery into our most true gold."
- Rosarium Philosophorum
"When sulphur, black and corrupt, comes into contact with quicksilver, lead is made. Aristotle says of this that lead is leprous gold."
- Albertus Magnus, Libellus de Alchimia
"This impure sulfur makes all the difference from the imperfect metals. The disease of the metals is therefore only accidental; there is therefore a remedy to cure them, and this remedy is the Philosophical powder, or Philosophical stone, called for this reason powder of projection."
- Pernety’s Egyptian and Greek Fables
"It may be necessary, in order to understand this, that we should show, by some examples, how a manifest thing may be rendered occult, and an occult thing rendered materially manifest by means of fire. Whatever is combustible can be naturally transmuted by fire from one form into another, namely, into lime, soot, ashes, glass, colours, stones, and earth. This last can again be reduced to many new metallic bodies. If a metal, too, be burnt, or rendered fragile by old rust, it can again acquire malleability by applications of fire"
- Coelum Philosophorum
"Hence they predicted that, in the last times, there should come a most pure man upon the earth, by whom the redemption of the world should be brought about; and that this man should send forth bloody drops of a red colour, by means of which he should redeem the world from sin. In the same way, after its own kind, the blood of their Stone freed the leprous metals from their infirmities and contagion."
- Paracelsus, The Aurora of the Philosophers
"The arid earth must he irrigated, and its pores softened with water of its own kind; then this thief with all the workers of iniquity will be cast out, the water will be purged of its leprous stain by the addition of true Sulphur, and you will have the Spring whose waters are sacred to the maiden Queen Diana."
- An Open Entrance to the Closed Palace of the King
"Therefore as a sick man taking medicine is made sounde, only by alteracion ... so mettaline bodies, by the true medicine altering them, are made perfect and become pure and good Gold and Silver." - Light in Darkness