Please take a look at my work with this process:

1. The Sulphur of Mars via Sublimation w/ Sal Ammoniac - *Must now be purchased! No longer offered for free.*

2. The Sulphur of Saturn via Sublimation w/ Sal Ammoniac - *Must now be purchased! No longer offered for free.*

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From Fulcanelli's Dwellings of the Philosophers:

"The favorite technique to extract the metallic sulphur is the one which uses sublimation. Here are a few procedures given as indications.

Dissolve some pure silver in hot nitric acid according to the manipulation previously described, and then dilute this solution with hot distilled water. Decant the clear liquor so as to separate, if need be, the slight black deposit, mentioned earlier. Let it cool down in a dark laboratory and pour into the liquor little by little either a filtered solution of sodium chloride or pure hydrochloric acid. The silver chloride will precipitate to the bottom of the vessel in the form of a curdled white mass. After letting it sit for 24 hours, decant the acidulated supernatant water, wash it rapidly with cold water, and dry it spontaneously in a room where no light penetrates. Then weigh your silver salt, with which you will intimately mix three times as much of pure ammonium chloride. Put everything into a tall glass retort of such capacity that only the bottom of it is covered by the saline mixture. Give it a gentle heat in a sand bath and increase it by degrees. When the temperature is sufficient, the sal ammoniac will rise up and cover the top and the neck of the apparatus with a firm layer. This snow-white, rarely yellowish sublimate might lead you to believe that it contains nothing special. Skillfully break the retort, carefully detach this white sublimate, dissolve it in distilled water, hot or cold. Once the dissolution has been achieved, you will find at the bottom a very fine, bright red powder; it is a part of the sulphur of silver or lunar sulphur, detached from the metal and volatilized by the sal ammoniac during its sublimation.

However, in spite of its simplicity, this operation does not proceed without some big problems. Although it seems simple, it demands great skill, a lot of prudence in the management of the heat. If you do not want to lose half and more of the metal, you must first and above all avoid the fusion of the salts. Yet, of the temperature does not reach the required degree to cause and maintain the fluidity of the mixture, no sublimation occurs. Furthermore, as soon as the temperature is established, the silver chloride, already very penetrating by itself, acquires such a bite in contact with the sal ammoniac, that it will pass through the glass walls ⁽¹⁰⁾ and escape outside. The artist cannot even resort to using stoneware, earthenware or porcelain retorts, which are even more porous than those of glass, all the more because he must constantly be able to observe the progress of the reactions if he wishes to be in a position to intervene at the right moment. Therefore, there are in this method, as in many others of the same order, certain secrets of practice which the archemists have prudently reserved for themselves. One of the best ones consists in dividing the mixture of chlorides by interposing an inert body capable of impasting the salts and hindering their liquefaction. This matter must possess neither reducing qualities nor catalytic virtues; it is also essential that it can easily be separated from the caput mortuum. Formerly, pulverized brick was used and a variety of absorbents such as putty powder, pumice stone, pulverized flint, etc. Unfortunately, these substances yield a very impure sublimate. We give preference to a certain product which has no affinity for silver or ammonium chloride, which we extract from Judean bitumen. In addition to the purity of the sulphur obtained, the technique becomes very easy. We can easily reduce the residue into a metallic silver and reiterate the sublimations until the complete extraction of the sulphur. The residual mass is then no longer reducible and presents itself in the shape of a gray, soft, very sweet ash, greasy to the touch, which retains fingerprints and loses in a short time half of its weight of specific mercury.

This technique applies equally to lead. Less expensive, it offers the advantage of yielding salts that are insensitive to light, which eliminates the need for the artist to operate in darkness; impastation is then no longer necessary; finally, since lead is less fixed than silver, the yield of red sublimate is better and the duration shortened. The only fortunate aspect of the operation comes from the fact that the sal ammoniac forms with lead sulphur, a saline compact layer which is so tenacious that one could believe that it had melted with the glass. It becomes laborious to detach it without pounding. As for the extract itself, it is a beautiful red, covered by a brightly colored yellow sublimate, but very impure compared to that of silver. It is therefore necessary to purify it before using it. Its maturity too is less perfect, an important consideration if one’s researches are oriented towards the obtaining of particular tinctures.

All metals do not yield to the same chemical agents. The process that is suitable for silver or lead cannot be applied to tin, copper, iron or gold. Further, the spirit capable of detaching and isolating the sulphur of a given metal will exercise its action with another metal on the mercurial principle of the latter. In the first case, the mercury will be strongly held while the sulphur will be sublimated; in the second case, the reverse phenomenon will occur. Hence the diversity of methods and variety of techniques of metallic decomposition. Moreover, it is above all the affinity that bodies manifest for other bodies and the latter for spirits that regulates their application. It is known that silver and lead have a very marked affinity for one another; silvery lead ores prove it well enough. Therefore the affinity establishing the profound chemical identity of these bodies, it is logical to think that the same spirit, used in the same conditions, will bring about the same effects. This is what happens with iron and gold which are bound by a close affinity. When Mexican prospectors come to discover a sandy, very red earth composed mostly of iron oxide, they conclude that gold is not very far away. Consequently they regard this red earth as the matrix and the mother of gold, and the best indication of a nearby gold vein. This fact seems rather unusual, given the physical differences of these metals. In the category of common metallic bodies, gold is the rarest among them; iron, by contrast, is certainly the most common, the one that is found everywhere, not only in mines where it forms enormous and numerous deposits but also disseminated on the very surface of the ground. Clay owes to iron its special coloration, sometimes yellow when iron is found divided as a hydrate, sometimes red when it is in the form of sequioxide, a color which is further intensified by baking (as in bricks, tiles and pottery). Of all the classified ores, iron pyrite is the most common and the best known. The black ferruginous masses in variously sized balls, in shell-like agglomerations, in nodules, are often encountered in fields, on the sides of paths, in chalky terrain. Country children often play with these marcasites which show a fibrous crystalline radiating texture when they are broken. Sometimes they contain small quantities of gold. Meteorites, chiefly composed of molten magnetic iron, prove that the interplanetary masses from which they come primarily owe their structure to iron. Certain vegetables contain assimilable iron (wheat, watercress, lentils, beans, potatoes). Man and vertebrates owe to iron and to gold the red coloration of their blood. Indeed, iron salts constitute the active element of hemoglobin. They are even so necessary to organic vitality that medicine and pharmacopoeia have at all times sought for ways to give impoverished blood the metallic compounds needed for its reconstitution (iron peptonate and carbonate). Common people still use water rendered ferruginous by the immersion of oxidized nails. Finally, iron salts present such a variety of colorations that we can be assured that they would suffice to reproduce all the tonalities of the spectrum, from violet which is the actual color of the our metal, all the way to intense red, the color that it gives to silica in various kinds of rubies and garnets."