"This is not for those who do not believe themselves capable of going to the end, nor for those who are content with shadows. Light is in truth, and truth is in Light. Man must enter humbly and with reverence into the sanctuary of nature, and seek there not his own glory, but the knowledge of the Divine. He who seeks anything else will find only illusion. Nature is simple, God is simple, the Work is simple. But man is double, and this is what makes his quest difficult. — The Unity of God — The Unity of Nature — The Unity of Man Everything proceeds from Unity and everything returns to Unity. The world is triple in its operations: Spirit, Soul, Body In man, these three principles are clearly found: — the spirit that conceives — the soul that animates — the body that executes But man’s ignorance and his attachment to the sensible make invisible to him the simple laws of creation. The absolute Unity, The simple Being, The uncreated Light. The union of the soul with God, Obedience to the immutable laws of nature and of the Creator. There is only one God. But man often disturbs divine works with his imagination, with material symbols that he mistakes for realities. The ancient sages saw God in the unchanging order of the laws of nature. They never separated science from piety. The ternary is the key: of God, of Nature, of Man. This is the true temple and the true initiation. The exterior is only a veil. The interior alone reveals the truth."
- FM-ICONOGR-ATLAS, c. 1813, François-Nicolas Noël, BnF, département des Manuscrits
Mercury - Keystone The Tria Prima The 4 Elements Three steps
"Earth, water, air, and fire. Ye have then those four elements without which nothing is ever generated, nor is anything absolved in the Art. Mix, therefore, the dry with the humid, which are earth and water, and cook in the fire and in the air, whence the spirit and the soul are dessicated." -Turba Philosophorum, Fifty-Sixth Dictum