Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens: Sources of an Alchemical Book of Emblems

Surely the key to Alchemy has been lost for a very long time-if there ever existed anyone who possessed or was even seriously believed to possess it. What we can do is to survey its literary and ideological sources and thereby demonstrate the ever-recurring 'motives' of a 'secret' and 'sacred' tradition of venerable age. As such it is bound to reveal the treasure of all that human imagination, conscious and unconscious , is capable of conjuring up. It is bound up with work in the chemical laboratory, and the idea of transmutation of base metal into something better or the best goes with it, though not necessarily so. Moreover the alchemists knew more chemistry than any of their contemporaries and at times were the only people who knew anything of the nature of matter and its behaviour in vitro. Some believers in 'transmutation' already and predominantly so displayed the features of the scientific chemist, such as Libavius and Van Helmont. They had significantly dropped alchemical symbolism and were far removed from the type of the followers of the 'threefold-great Hermes'. Indeed the 'laboratory' of the latter is as much an 'oratory'. We see here the adept on his knees in front of an altar with the eternal light above (ne loquaris de Deo absque lumine) and adorned with the magical pentagramme and a representation of the squaring of the circle. There is incense-the smoke-which like his prayer should ascend and be acceptable on High. The centre of the lofty place is occupied by a table on which two lutes, a viol and a harp are prominently displayed-for the secrets of nature speak to us not only in the 'work' that visibly unrols itself or can be captured by the engraver's burin in symbolical emblems, but also in the eternal harmonies and melodies which since ancient days had been believed to make the cosmos 'tick'. The 'chemical' 'work' in search of the Philosopher's Stone or 'accomplished' with it, does not seem to have had anything 'specific' about it: any process starting with something black becoming white and finally red would have done for the purpose. By contrast alchemical symbolism does seem to be 'specific' and attains to a still higher degree of distinctiveness where it is combined with 'musical fugues' and a 'simple melody'. This is significantly achieved in Michael Maier's work of emblems-the subject of the book under notice. Maier …