Symbols ana a

Seventeen
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One view that is central to the Royal Art is that the hermetist performs certain operations by which he actualizes and brings to perfection a symbolic "Mat' ter,” one that Nature has left imperfect and potential and which, without this assistance of the Art, would never be able to improve itself. This view refers to everything the common man finds here below, but particularly to the importance of that which, "unknown to earlier races,” we have mentioned in connection to the specific spirit of the "heroic cycles,’’
Concerning the first point we can cite, speaking for all sources, the De pharmaco cachob'co: "Nature rests and suspends the work on the Gold [in the sense of vulgar Gold, interpretable as the. state according to which the solar force is found in the common man}. . . . Tin's is the highest goal of all metals [of all the other natures differentiated by the 'matrix’], higher and beyond which, Nature cannot by itself bring any metal.”¹⁶¹ But "men can aid nature and oblige it to undertake something beyond that attainable by its ordinary activity"² to reach chat goal Geber calls "the extreme limit" and "the difficult thing” and "the highest that man can desire."³ The
alchemists thus establish a distinction between that Gold which is a natural production, and the other which is prepared by the help of the Art and receives the mark and sign of "the Masters of Power."¹⁶² Concerning this, Philalethes says allegorically that if Mercury is found among merchants, the Sun or Gold, on the other hand, is "a consequence oi our work and our operation"; and who does not know this ” still does not understand the purpose of our secret work. As we said at the beginning, the purpose of the hermetic Art is not the discovery of Gold, but its fabrication.
Having fixed this general point, we can understand the meaning of such expres­sions as "death and resurrection," "killing the living and reviving the dead," and others that constitute a leitmotiv of hermetism.