"Calx Vitae"

Does anyone happen to know what Calx Vitae is?
It's a salt of some kind, perhaps a nitre.

I use to know what it meant, but I've forgotten. I see it mentioned several times in one of the Isacc Hollandus books of the RAMSdigital.com collection.

It could refer to a calx made from a living/philosophical source, maybe quicklime?

Admin wrote:

Does anyone happen to know what Calx Vitae is?
It's a salt of some kind, perhaps a nitre.

I use to know what it meant, but I've forgotten. I see it mentioned several times in one of the Isacc Hollandus books of the RAMSdigital.com collection.

I am sure you guys know your latin. Calx is lime, Vitae is life or way of life.
Maybe, lime with the etherial life quickened to it.
Sonof Sol I think your right
Calx Vitae, I would say it is quicklime.

Any other thoughts?

I don't remember having read that in Hollandus, but in Spanish, OCa is called "cal viva" (living quicklime), while OHCa is "cal apagada" (slackened quicklime), which would support your idea.

yes I agree that it's a form of lime.
Aqua Vitae is "Living Water" or "water of life" and is purified alcohol in alchemy.

So maybe Calx Vitae has just been treated with alcohol?

A search of the RAMS material does not show any instances of "calx vitae" or "calx vita" but does find "calx viva."

Basic Windoz search but I also use DTSearch for data-mining.

British Eighteenth-Century Chemical Terms shows calx viva to be quicklime CaO

A search thru 2500+ other files in my alchemy texts folder does not find "calx vitae" either.

Calx Vitae is mentioned throughout the Compiled Works of Isaac Hollandus and other files. It is indeed in there.

OK, I found the same Hollandus document in Potpourri Alchemia in the RAMS collection, and he added quotations after the Calcis Vitae and it says quicklime.

Also the reason you can't search the RAMS manuscripts is because they are not in text format, they are still in picture format. You would have to use the text recognition and conversion feature of the Adobe PDF editor to make the documents searchable.

And that's pretty messed up. There is a lot of information that we could look through if the documents were in pure text format. Who knows what treasures still lay hidden in all those books.a

OCR is part of programs like Adobe Acrobat Pro. There is a graphical file to preserve true appearance, AND a text file. I have no trouble searching the PDF files, so now I wonder if you have something different. But my RAMS was recently purchased. ?!

My RAMS collection has a folder marked POTPOURRI1 and POTPOURRI2.
In POTPOURRI1 I find these three files:

Oil of Antimony as .doc and .pdf
Terrestrial Heaven as .doc and .pdf
and, POTPOURRI1_original.pdf.

In the latter I find two texts: Adrop, and De Urina by Hollandus. 253 pages

On page 30 he says:
When you have brought and reduced the Feces to a white calx
(or: lime), putrefy and change them to a new whiteness and redness
by putrefying them with [mercury], which whiteness and redness
they did not have before.

I do NOT find the term "calcis vitae" but I presume that is a typo. The term "vitae" only appears in the phrase "aqua vitae" or "aquam vitae."

What is the name of the text you are looking at?

___ I found this:
Latin: calx = Lime.
To intensely heat (as with inorganic materials) to a high temperature, but without fusion, in order to drive off volatile matter, or to effect changes (as oxidation or pulverization.) What remains is a fine dry powder.
The heating of limestone Ca CO3, or slaked lime Ca(OH)2 to produce quicklime CaO, calx vita. -- When water is added, quicklime has the property of generating heat.

It wasn't a typo. It's calcis vitae.

OCR text recognition doesn't convert the image very well at all. Every other word will sometimes contain mistakes, which means if you search for "man" you will skip over it because the OCR sometimes sees the letter "m" as rn (r and n)