1. The First Key is that which opens the dark prisons in which the Sulphur is shut up: this is it which knows how to extract the seed out of the body, and which forms the Stone of the philosophers by the conjunction of the spirit with the body -- of sulphur with mercury.
About Author:
Mary Anne Atwood (née South), (1817-1910), was an English writer on hermeticism and spiritual alchemy.
Born in Gosport, Hampshire, to Thomas South, a researcher into the history of spirituality, she assisted and collaborated with her father from her youth. Mary Anne's first publication, Early Magnetism in its higher relations to humanity (1846) was issued pseudonymously as the work of Θυος Μαθος (Gk. thuos mathos), an anagram of Thomas South.[1][2] Mary Anne wrote A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery (1850)[3] at her father's request, and in parallel with his own composition of a lengthy poem on the same subject. Thomas South paid for the book to be published anonymously in 1850, but without having read it, trusting his daughter's judgement. Reading it after publication, he believed Mary Anne had revealed many hermetic secrets that were better left unpublished, and therefore bought up the remaining stock and, with his daughter, burnt them, along with the unfinished manuscript of his poem. Only a few copies of the book survived. Mary Anne married the Anglican Reverend Alban Thomas Atwood in 1859, and moved to his parish near Thirsk in North Yorkshire where she spent the rest of her life. She continued private correspondence with several influential Theosophists until her death in 1910.
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