"THE FIRST MATTER is often called Magnesia, and is so described in the glossary to Mr. Waite's translation of the Hermetic writings of Paracelsus. This description is taken, almost verbatim, from the writings of Thomas Vaughan.
"Magnesia. This term, which is occasionally used by Paracelsus in its alchemical, as distinct from its chemical sense, has received many explanations from the adepts. It is the matter of the Stone, which the philosophers sometimes call their red, and sometimes their white magnesia. In the first preparation the chaos is blood-red, because the central sulphur is stirred up and discovered by the philosophical fire.
In the second it is exceedingly white and transparent like the heavens It is something like common quicksilver, but of such a celestial and transcendent brightness, that nothing on earth “ban be compared to it. It is a child of the elements, a pure virgin, from whom nothing has been generated as yet. When she breeds, it is by the fire of Nature, which is her husband.
She is neither animal, vegetable, nor mineral, nor is she an extraction from these; she is pre-existent to them all, and is their mother. She is a pure, simple substance, yielding to nothing but love, because generation is her aim, and that is never accomplished by violence. She produces from her heart a thick, heavy, snowwhite water, which is the Lac Firginis (Virgin's Milk), and afterwards blood from her heart.
Lastly she presents a secret crystal. She is one and three, but at the same time she is four and five. She is the Catholic Magnesia, the Sperm of the World, out of which all natural things are generated. Her body is in a sense incorruptible; the common elements will not destroy it, nor does she mix with them essentially. Outwardly she resembles a stone, and yet she is no stone.
The philosophers call her their white gum, water of their sea, water of life, most pure and blessed water; she is a thick, permanent, saltish water, which does not wet the hand, a dry water, viscous and slimy, and generated from the saline fatness of the earth of Nature, and a secret, celestial spirit, animated and quickened by God. She is a middle nature, between thick and thin, not altogether earthly, not wholly igneous, but a mean aerial substance, to be found everywhere and at all seasons."
In the statement: "She is one and three, but at the same time she is four and five," find several clues to the arcana of Hermetic Science.
The First Matter is in itself a perfect unity. Hence The Emerald Tablet says: ‘‘All things dre from one, by the mediation of one.. and all things have their birth from this one thing by adaptation. Another says of the First Matter, ‘‘It is a commonly diffused subject. Similarly, Anastratus says the matter is one, and contains within itself all that is needed. The same declaration, with variations of wording, is made by all sages.
The First Matter is also three, because it contains within itself the three principles: Sulphur, Mercury and Salt These are not three things of which the First Matter is composed. The First Matter is not a composition. It is a perfectly homogeneous unity."
"The First Matter is said to be five, because it includes another principle besides the four whose activities produce in us our ordinary experience of the physical world. In alchemical writings this principle is called the Quintessence, and is usually said to be 'extracted' from the four elements in the course of the Great Work. This is said because we derive our awareness of the Quintessence from our experience of the operation of the other four. The Quintessence, however, is not in itself an extraction from the four other principles. It is not derived from them. They are derived from it.
The Sanskrit name for the Quintessence is Akasha. Akasha is said to have neither touch, taste, color nor odor. Its fundamental quality is that of space Here we encounter a difficulty. There is a difference between absolute space, or Akasha, and relative space, such as we ordinarily conceive. Relative space, as Einstein has indicated, is curved and finite. It may not be very exact to say that Akasha , or absolute space, contains relative space; but this is as near as we can come to the truth of the matter, considering the limitations of human speech.
Akasha , moreover, is the subtle principle of sound . This is not ordinary sound, the atmospheric vibration which we hear. It is the original power of vibration. It is the undifferentiated Life-power, the source of all other manifestations. For this unmanifest reality we can frame no adequate definition. To us it seems to be Nothing, or we find ourselves thinking of it as being perfectly empty space. This is why the sages of India say the fundamental quality of Akasha is pure space. Because space is omnipresent, they teach also that Akasha is allpervading.
Rama Prasad says: "The Akasha is the most important of all the Tattvas. It must; as a matter of course precede and follow every change of state on every plane of life. Without this, there can be no manifestation or cessation of forms. It is out of Akasha that every form comes, and it is m Akasha that every form lives. The Akasha is full of forms in their potential state. It intervenes between every two of the five Tattvas." [Paul Foster Case - The Great Work Lessons, c. 1930]