Auggie,

I found another hole in your procedure. You said you boiled down your original Water from 1 gallon to 3/4. By doing this you would lose the spirit the you need later. You would need to do the boiling inside a distillation system so you don't lose the spirit, then putrify.

thanks for everyones input .. AB thinks my solution is too weak which i lean towards also and "Blue Floor" thinks I should not have kettle smoked ,or "open boiled" the the water. But instead just boil in Distillation . then continue on with the process via Reusenstein. I han't thought of that , I know in different formulas from different Alchemists the term "Boiling" is used rather loosely sometimes they mean in Distillation and other times it means open air Boiling. Thanks again, everyone and thats a beautiful, haunting logo you picked "Blue floor" Auggie

Auggie ~

I personally think it IS a good idea to reduce the material to a liquorish consistency, but I don't necessarily subscribe to boiling it, but rather evaporate it naturally, so we don't lose the volatile salts which appear to be important ingredients of the Spirit that we distill after the putrefaction.

By evaporating in the heat of a summer's day, we concentrate the solution without losing the volatile components needed for a strong Spirit. And if you insist on boiling - I'd also recommend to do so in distillation.

I am not working on this particular path right now, but I've made it a habit not to throw away anything that hasn't left the building by natural evaporation (-:

Those are just my personal opinions... and I am way too focused on the "Dry Path" to give you more expert advice on the wet one you are currently attempting. If someone has dissolved gold with the "wet" Alkahest - please come forward and share your experience.

(-:

I am just using some logic here. The instructions say to boil, then putrify, then distill off spirit. But if you have already open boiled then "a" spirit escaped. Maybe the spirit we are after is created in putfication. I don't know. Just something that caught my attention.

Hi Auggie and Bluefloor,

I have a copy of the original of Ruesenstein in German. He writes he poured it into a kettle and left it to "verrauchen" till it became a liquour which looked like a puddle of manure. The German "verrauchen" comes from "Rauch" which means smoke. But the English smoking in that sense means "räuchern" in German. So under no circumstance Ruesenstein meant to smoke it but he clearly meant to evaporate it.

So we have that clear once and for all.

Secondly neither Ruesenstein says to destil it but to evaporate it in an open kettle as well as the Master Gualdo in the following:

>>>>>Gualdus said: I will tell you why this happens, but first I will tell you how to prepare May dew. Take as much May dew as you can get and pour it into a kettle. Boil it for a good while and pour it into a little barrel and cover it with little planks of wood. Leave it to stand under the roof (where the Suns rays never touch it) until it begins to stink and decay. Then proceed as I told you, but take care that the Water from which you wish to extract the Salt or Menstruum has been boiled or simmered before it is left to putrefy. Without boiling it you will get a Spiritum, and it will also putrefy without boiling, but it will be weak and bad. However, if it has been boiled first, it decays more easily and gives a greater volume of Spiritum.<<<<<

Gualdo and others in the Ruesenstein repeatedly state the it is not the spirit or liquid that does the trick but the salts that are dissolved in it.
My logic is that they evaporate it down to concentrate the salts in the "spirit".

Auggie I will study your comments in detail and will give you my opinion to what happened.

Frank

Auggie,

I see now that the point I was making does not matter because he was ONLY working with the "puddle of manure", so he must not have minded losing whatever escaped.

Hi Auggie and Bluefloor,

The obvious is that the solution is too weak. But why? It could be that one is supposed to boil the dew down to ½ (several time mentioned in the Ruesenstein paper)or even to a puddle of manure. To be on the safe side one should probably evaporate it in a distillation system. Because the steam keeps rising but also falls down again like in circulation so you probably loose less volatile salt. A kettle normally has a small opening but it has also a roof from where the condensed water can drip down.

Don’t give up Auggie, we’ll get there in the end.

Frank

Hello again gang.. Thanks for being so supportive.. AB thinks "Natural evaporation" is the ticket. but a little time consumeing..Frank suggests " ,Evaporate by distillation" and Bluefloor suggests that the actual Spirit is created during the More importaint "Putrification process"..All very good observations. Thank you I will think about all of them.. Heres an un-related observation I have made.. Oak seems to play an importaint part in the dew method. It also is used present day, in mushroom growing, As the oils in oak prevent un-wanted molds from growing after sterilization.. Yikes!! Sound familiar ? Hum? ...... Also Rusenstein mentioned in one of his processes on Pg. 74.... "Put 3 measures of water in a large sugar glass.. "Put pieces of Wood in it " ? .....and place in the cellar.. So The water in a glass container wasn't enough to start the proper putrification ( Wood needed to be added..) Interesting dont you think . Something to seriously consider.. Auggie

∴N.D.C∴ said:
It seems to me that some supernatural force is preventing everyone on this forum from succeeding in making the stone.

I know what you mean.

Thank you again for stalking us.
"Accidit in puncto quod non speratur in anno".
Translation: in a while it happens what you work and strife for all the year long.
Working hard, of course.

Zosimo

Hi all,
I would like to hunt with you the water stone in my saturnine-fashioned way.
But at the same time I don’t want to appear assertive.
I’m not qualified, I’m myself looking for my solution of the question.
My way is to create rules that can be starting points.
Sometimes it works. So, well, I think that the best thing is
1) to have a lot of rain water or dew
2) then to start experiments in the different directions possible (for this reason I’m inventing the cheapest distillation apparels that can distil at the lower temp.)
3) at the end I WANT to dissolve those gold leaves.
4) This means that I’ve a lot of smoking or distilling apparels on a big pan full of sand (that’s on the heating plate reactor) smoking or distilling in different ways the different kinds of waters
5) and, in the meanwhile, I’m putrefying in big glass containers with or without oak wood slices and,
6) with very little flasks (10-20 ml), I’m testing the solving power of the waters in the different moments of the different distillations.
I start one week ago this way to Operate: any insight, I think, will come from doing it.
Because we did a lot of things in different ways collecting dew or rain, leaving it somewhere etc… And, as Frank said, it's like baking a cake.

I’m and I will always very grateful to Nick, that gave me the keys of the Work in a way no one did before, and all of you for your hints: I’m not joking, in my renaissance mind you are Kings and Queens and I hail you with reverences, trying to understand at my best what you are saying.
But starting to Operate, for what I know, I don’t know nothing until I do it.
Insight will come, doing the right thing.

Zosimo

On the question of boiling, distilling or naturally evaporating the fresh Morning Dew, my final experience-based answer is to boil/simmer down to a liquor-like consistency. The volatile salts we are after will not form until the matter is putrefied and decomposed, so nothing of real importance will be lost during the initial boiling.

If anything, the boiling will accelerate the decomposing process and will result in a stronger Alkahest. Before putrefaction, the immature Spirit of Dew (which becomes the Alkahest when united with the salts after putrefaction) has a higher boiling point than the superfluous water and will not boil away before the water.

Also, if the fresh dew is more on the clear/odorless side and if boiling it down doesn't result in a liquor-like consistency, then it's most likely not fit for the process.

This is my personal experience with this path. Others may discover different things...

top of pg 109 ruesenstein path, after the 24 hours in BM when you filter the first time before adding gold to it, this is the elixir right?, and the filter paper, it doesn't state to use wine spirit this time on this water, right? this afternoon i have about 200mls of "water" at this stage in the path, ready! i can ingest this alkehest at this stage, correct? it was made by 20 liters of collected dew water and now it is concentrated 200mls of dew alkahest, i'm about to filter the water solution now and have a taste. i only have silver in the form of a silver coin, i'll file a few shavings off and place it into bm again for another day to see where i'm at in this path tomorrow. i will start collecting dew again near the start of Dec coming up to the full moon, and see how much i can collect in that week and concentrate that as well.

Philipp,

I'd only take 6 times the weight of the silver of your dew filtrate. Don't waste all your dew on it. If it dissolves, get gold for the rest.

Just a suggestion.

Good luck!

Frank