s carried it in his belly.
[6.] The earth has nourished it. [7.] It is the father [cause] of all
completion of the whole world. [8.] His power is undiminished, if it has
been turned towards the earth. [9.] You will separate the earth from fire,
the fine from the coarse, gently and with great skill. [10.] It ascends
from the earth to the sky, again descends to the earth, and receives the
powers of what is higher and what is lower. [11.] Thus you will have the
glory of the whole world, and all darkness will depart from you. It is the
strength of all strength, because it will conquer all the fine and
penetrate all the solid. [12.] Thus the world was created. [13.] From this
will be wonderful applications of which it is the pattern. [14.] And so I
have been called Hermes, thrice greatest, possessing three parts of the
knowledge of the whole world. [15.] Finished is what I have said about the
work of the sun.

Sun and gold are identical in the hieroglyphic mode of expression. Whoever
seeks only the chemical must therefore read: The work of gold, the
production of gold; and that is what thousands and millions have read. The
mere word gold was enough to make countless souls blind to everything
besides the gold recipe that might be found in the Smaragdine tablet. But
surely there were alchemistic masters who did not let themselves be
blinded by the word gold and sympathetically carried out still further the
language of the Smaragdine tablet. They were the previously mentioned
lofty-minded men. The covetous crowd of sloppers, however, adhered to the
gold of the Smaragdine tablet and other writings and had no appreciation
of anything else. For a long time alchemy meant no more for modern
historians.

The fact that modern chemical science is sprung from the hermetic
works,--as the only branch at present clearly visible and comprehensible of
this misty tree of knowledge,--has had for result that in looking back we
have received a false impression. Chemical specialists have made
researches in the hermetic art and have been caught just as completely in
the tangle of its hieroglyphics as were the blind seekers of gold before
them. The hermetic art, or alchemy in the wider sense, is not exclusively
limited to gold making or even to primitive chemistry. It should, however,
not be surprising to us who are acquainted with the philosophical
presuppositions of alchemy, that in addition to the chemical and
mechanical side of alchemy a philo