Hi, I don't want to diminish what you have said now, but please let me correct one or two things that are of more general interest.
Black, it seems you‘ve got something mixed up. To get the philosophical Mercury, first you need the black, putrefied earth (the decomposed body of the dead dragon). The philosophical gold is the red stone, it is also called the seed of gold.
The alchemical putrefaction requires the fire of the Green Lion, which stirs the (secret) inner fire of matter. This inner fire is the same cold fire that ignites its known effect in the dead bodies and puts the corpses into all the creepy states that can be observed.
Look at this lion, he sits on the earth and loops his tail up past the anus through the hind legs. This shows he gathers the astral spirit or spiritual fire from on high and leads it down or into the earth, mixing it with the exhalations from the buttocks. The earth is thus led into a stinking rottenness and putrefaction. (That he bites into the rays of the sun at the same time has not much to do with this, the one is the putrefaction, the other rather a philosophical calcination).
What do the alchemists actually mean by the adjective "philosophical"? Something is philosophical if it has come into being through alchemical transformation or serves alchemical transformation and is not an ordinary substance.
Thus, the dew that forms in the morning and can be collected in an ordinary way is not a philosophical substance, but an common substance. The philosophical dew or May Dew of the philosophers is precisely not dew, but small beads of water that form on our matter. These are formed by the concentrated astral spirit collected by our magnet. They can also take on an orange-golden colour and are then sometimes called honey pearls.
I can only advise not to jump to conclusions, but always to weigh very carefully the whole context in relation to alchemy. Mud, for example, has no hermaphroditic nature. Mud is earth and water, and earth is feminine, as is water (in any form). Mud is compared to primordial chaos and, especially when black, represents an image of the Materia Prima. This (the Materia Prima and not the mud) is the fundamental feminine principle of creation, it is the matrix into which the spirit inscribes the forms. But in exactly the same way, the mud is also thoroughly feminine.
Moreover, we only acquire a hermaphroditic nature when we combine the masculine and the feminine in such a way that they can no longer be separated and can only be described as one. However, both properties would in principle still have to be recognizable, which cannot be observed in a nuclear fusion (which shows that this fusion is not a perfect union); moreover, it could be disintegrated again by a nuclear fission.
The reason for this is that perfect union can only take place when the two (complementary) opposites of a thing are united (man and woman, sun and moon, day and night, etc.), or precisely the inner with the outer.
Thus water (if one wants to achieve a hermaphroditic nature with it) can only be united with its opposite - and that is fire. This, of course, would be a transformation and is indeed one of the greatest secrets of alchemy.
We can unite a man with a woman, but not a man with a leopardess, the result would be monstrous and unnatural. Nor could a man be united with a man or a woman with a woman, that would merely be a multiplication.
