Heinrich Khunrath’s Magnesia Catholica Philosophorum

Introduction

i. The book

The Magnesia Catholica Philosophorum was printed at Magdeburg by Johann Bötcher in 1599, and was to be had, the colophon adds, from Johann Francke. The treatise proper runs from page 5 to page 187 — 183 pages — and it is about one thing.

That one thing is a substance the book never names. Khunrath argues for 183 pages about a matter he refuses to identify, and the refusal is a doctrine, not an omission. The matter has an ordinary name, in common use, which everybody knows: obs schon die gantze Welt vor jhren Augen hat / auch kennet / vnd darzu mit seinem eigenen Nahmen … weis zu nennen (p. 44). Knowing that name is worth nothing. In the eyes of the undiscerning it is ein schlecht verächtlich ding / jederman bekand / von sehr wenigen aber erkand — a mean, contemptible thing, known to everyone and recognized by very few (p. 45). The Process-books scarcely ever set it down mit jhrem Eigenen Nahmen, quod habet apud vulgus (p. 107), and among the Philosophers its name is simply OMNIA, all things, because all things can be predicated of it (p. 111). A reader who opens this book to find out what Magnesia is will close it not knowing. He is meant not to.

Neither is it a recipe, though the older claim that there is no process in it will not stand. Khunrath gives the operations twice in sequence and once as a list: a vorarbeit of dissolving, cleansing and separating and a nacharbeit of composing, reuniting, coagulating, fixing and incerating (p. 46); putrefaction, coagulation, fixation and inceration (p. 98); and the full ten at p. 160, where the margin stops to define one of them — Inceriren ist wachs flüssig machen. He names a vessel, and it is his own: mein ATHANOR mit dem vnuorbrenlichen Tocht, my Athanor with the unburnable wick, with a whole tract of his promised on it in the margin of p. 98. He speaks of weight, and insists on the right one (p. 46). What he never gives is a quantity, a duration, or a description of any of it — and p. 48 says why in one clause: the mixture is made in determinirten der Natur alleine wolbekandten Gewichten vnnd Massen, in determinate weights and measures known to Nature alone. The numbers are not withheld from the reader; they are not the Artist’s to have. Where Khunrath does withhold something deliberately, it is not process but further identifying marks of the subject, and he says so in a parenthesis at p. 55: he has of set purpose forborne to set down other Requisita, Conditiones, Qualitates and Proprietates of it, sonderlich auch mit / das sich nicht alle Bawre darein finden sollen — so that not all peasants should find their way in.

The book stands among at least five others of his, four of them named in it. It sends the reader to the third and fourth Figures of the Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae (pp. 6, 89); to chapters 1, 2, 6 and 8 of his Confessio on the hylealic Chaos, twice with the page numbers (pp. 77, 88, 145, 161); to a tract of his own on the Philosophical Athanor (p. 98); and it promises a book de Veritate, Antiquitate & Præstantia LAPIDIS Philosophorum, ac ALCHYMIAE (p. 31). Two more he says he has in hand and asks God to let him finish: an Apocalypsis of the hidden Magnesia, and a Harmonia analogica MAGNESIAE … cum IHSVH CHRISTO, & contra (pp. 57–58). Neither appeared.

The author. Nothing in pages 5–187 establishes anything of Khunrath’s life except that he was a physician: the subscription at p. 187 styles him HENRICVS KHVNRATH, LIPS., Theosophiæ amator & utriusque Medicinæ Doctor, and at p. 7 he addresses himself to allen Medicis. The rest of what follows comes from outside the book and is given with its sources. He was born about 1560; the older reference literature (Dictionary of Scientific Biography) gives Leipzig, recent scholarship gives Dresden, and the disagreement is unresolved — the book’s own LIPS., Lipsiensis, is how he chose to style himself and is not independent evidence of birth. He matriculated at Basel in May 1588 and took the M.D. there on 3 September 1588, defending the theses printed as De signatura rerum naturalium (Basel, 1588). He met John Dee at Bremen in 1589 and was for a time physician to Vilém of Rožmberk at Třeboň. He practised at Hamburg and at Dresden. The Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae appeared at Hamburg in 1595 and, much enlarged and posthumously, at Hanau in 1609; the Confessio this treatise keeps citing was printed at Magdeburg in 1597, two years before the Magnesia and by way of the same city. He died on 9 September 1605, at Dresden or at Leipzig. The standard modern authority is Peter J. Forshaw; see also Urszula Szulakowska, The Alchemy of Light (Brill, 2000). Six years, then, between this book and his death: the projected Apocalypsis and Harmonia analogica were never written, and the promise at pp. 57–58 is the nearest thing the treatise has to a plan that failed.