the Sounding of Trumpet: Clangor Buccinae

The Sounding of the Trumpet is an extensive alchemical treatise on the Philosophers' Stone, presenting it within a Christian, cosmological, and natural-philosophical framework. It begins by describing God's creation of Prime Matter, from which the four elements-fire, air, water, and earth-were formed. All creatures and substances arise from mixtures of these elements and their qualities: heat, dryness, coldness, and moisture. The text repeatedly insists that natural generation, corruption, death, and transformation depend on the mingling, separation, and purification of these elemental principles.The treatise identifies the Quintessence as the subtle primordial substance underlying nature. This hidden principle animates the elements, mediates their oppositions, and makes generation possible. The Philosophers' Stone is said to arise from this subtle essence within metals, especially through the principles of Mercury and Sulphur. Mercury is not ordinary quicksilver but a philosophical, purified, living substance containing the seed and spirit of metals. Sulphur represents the formative, tincturing, fiery principle. Together they form the root of metallic transmutation.Much of the work explains the symbolic union of Sun and Moon, father and mother, Sol and Luna. The Sun provides the solar seed and red tincture; the Moon mediates, purifies, subtilises, and prepares the matter. Their conjunction is compared to marriage, conception, fermentation, and rebirth. The Stone must pass through dissolution, putrefaction, blackening, washing, whitening, reddening, fermentation, fixation, and multiplication.The practical sections describe four main regimens: calcination, dissolution, distillation or sublimation, and coagulation. The operator must use gentle, measured heat, sealed vessels, repeated imbibitions with mercurial water, and careful purification. Blackness marks putrefaction; whiteness is the foundation of the work and prepares the white elixir; redness completes the solar elixir. Fermentation with prepared Sol or Luna gives the Stone its soul and enables true tincture.The perfected Medicine is said to have four principal powers: healing human diseases, perfecting imperfect metals into silver or gold, transforming stones into gems, and making glass malleable. The text concludes that the Stone's virtue lies in concentrated natural heat and radical moisture, capable of restoring, vivifying, fixing, and perfecting all things according to nature.