A human being can be generated artificially outside the womb by sealing human sperm in a vessel, putrefying it in horse dung for forty days until it begins to live and move, then feeding it the arcanum of human blood and maintaining womb-like heat for forty weeks. The result is a living miniature human that must be raised and fed with care.
Decay is not an endpoint but the necessary precondition from which new life and transformation arise; nothing is reborn without first rotting. The greatest arcanum lies in putrefaction, which digests and dissolves a thing into a state from which the generative process can begin anew.
Each natural object possesses a visible, corporeal body and a hidden virtue or spirit that carries its true power; the alchemist's task is to separate the pure inner essence from the gross outer shell. Knowing a thing means extracting what is concealed within it, not describing its surface.
Metals and other bodies ripen toward their perfected form along a path nature already follows, and the alchemist does not impose an alien change but hastens and completes what nature intended but left unfinished. Art finishes the maturation that nature begins; the operator is nature's accelerant, not its rival.
Every created thing carries a fixed term, its appointed age or dissolution, set into it at generation like an inner clock that determines when it will corrupt and perish. Corruption is not random accident but the arrival of a time already inscribed in the thing's nature.
The external shape, color, and marking of a thing is a sign stamped by nature that discloses the hidden virtue inside it, so that outward appearance can be read as a legible index of concealed power. To interpret the signature is to know what a substance is good for before testing it.