This great Master's main Work is described in Le Secret Livre Du Trés Ancien Philosophe Artephius traitant de L'Arte occulte & de la pierre Philosophale, translated into French by Pierre Arnault, Sieur de la Chevalarie, and printed in Trois Traitez de la Philosophie Naturelle: chez Guillaume Marete, 1612.
What are the matters that he uses in his Work? He describes them like this:
«And because our vinegar is a double quicksilver substance, one of antimony and the another of sublimated mercury…»
«…a water saturnine antimonial should be mercurial and white, so that it whitens the gold without burning, but only dissolving it and later coagulating it as white cream...»
And following:
«...when it feels the common fire, it makes to melt the gold and the silver if they put them into...»
«If you place in this water any metal that is, filed or attenuated and if you leave it for some time in sweet and slow heat, it dissolves everything and it will becomes viscous water and in white oil just as it was already said.»
These elements are enough for us to deduce which will be the matters and the result of its chemical reaction in view to obtaining the solvent of the gold and of the silver.
If the water has a double mercury substance, which is one of antimony and another of sublimated mercury, what in spagyrical terms can it mean?
Distil in a good glass Pyrex retort sublimated mercury that can be obtained by the wet way just as already explained to you in our writing of the "Eagles" with an antimony regulus very thinly powdered. What will you obtain? Chemically, it is an antimony dichloride that is to say antimony butter that melts at about 70ºC.
It is not necessary to tell you that you will have to have some knowledge of the antimony dry way so you can prepare its regulus.
This distillation is not easy and it requires a special "hand work" in respects to the heat otherwise its butter coagulates in the retort throat impeding like this the distillation.
If, you prefer to do just as I already I told you in the version of Philalethes wet way, then you place in a vase a regulus amalgam of solar or lunar made with the common quicksilver, together with nitre and ammonium salt, the result will be the same, because in this amalgam is already incorporate the gold or the silver that Artephius joins later into the antimony butter. Of the nitre and ammonium salts chemical reaction, will result royal water that will dissolve the mercury sublimated, which will then? Act on the amalgam of the Solar or Lunar regulus, and will form the composition that, in our opinion is to cook in a closed vase.
Artephius in his treatise explains the whole phase of the cooking until the end. As in almost all the alchemic Works the most difficult is to begin.
This is our opinion concerning the Artéphius wet way described in a treatise that we have in facsimile, Le Secret Livre Du Trés Ancien Philosophe Artéphius, Paris, 1612.
Rubellus Petrinus