Calx of Mercury

Pour in a 500ml graduated glass 250ml of royal water, made with 3 parts of spirit of salt and one of spirit of nitre. Heat it up to 40°C, on a small electric oven in sand bath.

Add to it, little by little, as it dissolves native ore mercury (cinnabar) very thinly powdered or if you don't have it and for experimentation purpose, you can use artificial cinnabar. This operation should be made out doors or in a well-ventilated place, because of the toxic gases that emanates.

When no more cinnabar is dissolved in the royal water, stop. Filter the solution of mercury dichloride by a glass funnel, with a cotton lid, into a Pyrex glass balloon.

If you let the mercury dichloride to crystallise, it is a corrosive sublimate made by the wet way whose toxicity is the same as if prepared by sublimation in the dry way. Therefore, you should take all the precautions when handling the respective solution.

In a large mouth glass vase, pour 500ml of source water and heat it up to 40°C. Pour in canonical tartar salt or sodium carbonate and move with a glass rod until saturation.

Pour little by little in the alkaline solution, the dichloride solution, as it will provoke effervescence by the chemical reaction. When the effervescence ceases, then stop.

It will make a brown reddish precipitate that becomes thicker as the dichloride is added to the carbonate solution.

When you have drained all your dichloride provision, stop. Move well with a glass rod and then, pour the precipitate in a big porcelain or glass porringer, joining it with enough tap water to fill it. Let it rest.

Flow by decantation the exceeding water and repeat the process, until the water has lost its acrimony.

Dry the calx of mercury on an electric oven in sand bath and then, grind it to thin powder in a glass or porcelain mortar. Pass it by 60 lines per centimetre sieve.

This canonical calx of Mercury will serve for the extraction of its tincture by the same process, as the extraction of the Mars tincture, as further on we will see.

In the same way, you can extract the calx of the Sun or of the Moon. The Sun, as you know, will have to be dissolved in royal water and the Moon in spirit of nitre. Of this calx, you can extract the respective tinctures in the same way as when you make the Mars tincture.

Pay attention and be careful! The gold and the silver precipitated of their solutions of gold tri-chloride and of silver nitrate, when poured in a solution of potassium carbonate they become fulminating and will detonate with great violence with the heat or with the pressure. Therefore, it cannot be warm or grinded in a mortar and it has to be handled with extreme care if you don't want to have an accident. The effect is so much more serious the more amount of the product is manipulated.

Basil Valentine, in its book, The Will and Last Testament, advises us charitably of the danger that can happen in the fulminating gold preparation.

Therefore and for your own good, if you don't have the necessary experience, keep away from making these preparations.

Rubellus Petrinus

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