"The Golden Carbuncle of the Ancients

Rudolf Glauber describes another way of uniting vegetable
and metallic natures in his work Centuries. He mentions “the
manner of conjoining gold with any burning and volatile
vegetable sulfur” to produce a red extract which is “nearly as
good as potable gold”.

The method is fairly easy and requires only a small amount
of gold, a vegetable charcoal and his “Sal Mirabilis”.
Today, Sal Mirabilis is known as sodium sulfate, though it
still carries the common name of “Glaubers Salt”.
Glauber studied and wrote extensively regarding this salt as a
great arcanum for medicine and alchemical uses. Current
medicine considers it only as a mild laxative, but Glauber
describes it as a key to opening the mineral realm and releasing
great healing potentials.

If you want to prepare Sal Mirabilis in the old way, simply
treat sea salt with concentrated Oil of Vitriol (sulfuric acid)
using a glassware setup as shown below.

The sulfuric acid is slowly dripped onto sea salt and the
reaction produces hydrogen chloride, called “spirit of salt”, as a
gas which is bubbled into water.

Water will dissolve large volumes of hydrogen chloride, and
the resulting solution will be hydrochloric acid, which is useful
in many alchemical works so save it aside tightly sealed.

The sulfuric acid treated salt remaining in the flask has now
been converted into sodium sulfate or Sal Mirabilis. This salt is
now recrystallized from rainwater several times before use. The
salt looks like crushed ice and melts at an incredibly low
temperature of 32 deg C.

The crystals form in the orthorhombic habit and hold a large
amount of water which must be removed for our use here. Dry
the crystals at 100 deg C until they become pure white.
In this form the crystals melt at about 800 deg C. By the
way, the salt is also insoluble in alcohol and is frequently used
to dry alcohol of residual water, similar to the use of salt of
tartar.

Now that we have our starting material, we can proceed to
make what Glauber calls “The Golden Carbuncle of the
Ancients”.

For one part of gold, melt eight to ten parts of the sal
mirabilis in a crucible (parts by volume). Once it is fused,
slowly add the gold as a powder or thin leaves. Slowly add
small pieces of charcoal to the melt.

The best charcoal for this is from grape vines, but you can
use oak, cedar, juniper, beech, or boxwood also. Continue the
fusion for 15 to 30 minutes, then cast the melt out onto a hot
metal dish to cool.

The mass will have a deep red color due to the finely
divided gold. This is the “Golden Carbuncle” that “shines in
the night like a burning coal”.

Powder the mass and extract with good spirit of wine. The
extract will become deep red, with properties similar to good
potable gold. The residue from the extraction can be put
through the process again to create more of the red extract
which is a form of colloidal gold."