The Manly Hall Manuscript Collection, Volume I

Introduction

The book and its witness

The Book of Hieroglyphic Figures joins the interpretation of images to an account of the transformations of matter. Its title promises explanations of the poets' fables, the mysteries of Christianity, chemistry, and pharmacy according to numbers. The promise is expansive, but it also describes a method: the reader is asked to recognize the same order in a myth, a scriptural scene, an alchemical operation, and a sequence of figures. Each can become a way of reading the others.

The present witness belongs to the Manly Palmer Hall collection at the Getty Research Institute. Getty catalogues it under Abraham Juif, dates it to approximately 1800, and describes 139 leaves with ink illustrations, some partly colored. It is the first item in Getty's collection inventory, housed in Box 1 and identified by the number 3 in Ron Charles Hogart's bibliography. The collection contains 243 manuscript texts bound in 68 physical volumes. Those identifiers describe this witness’s position in that modern collection. They do not give it an authorial volume number or make it the first installment of a single continuous treatise.

The title's Abraham is best approached initially as the authority named by this manuscript. The page addresses the Jewish nation and ends its greeting in the name of Jesus Christ. That conjunction is part of the text's self-presentation, and the translation retains it. Neither the personal name nor the greeting establishes who composed this witness or when the underlying account originated. Comparable manuscripts with this extended title survive elsewhere, including the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica witness PH400 described by the University of Amsterdam and the manuscript Français 14765 displayed by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. They provide a context for the title; they have not been substituted for this witness's wording.

Secrecy and the conditions of reading

The opening is unusually forceful. Before explaining the figures, the narrator describes the curses said to surround their disclosure. Biblical language is transferred to the custody of the art: city and country, crops and households, bodily health and communal survival become the terrain on which secrecy is enforced. The threatened penalties are followed by instructions about the disposition of the reader. The art demands reverence, restraint, and a form of withdrawal from ordinary company.

This beginning shapes the reading that follows. Knowledge is represented as a gift whose possession changes the obligations of its recipient. At the same time, an explanatory book must reveal something of what it orders the reader to conceal. The tension between disclosure and reserve is therefore present in the act of writing itself. The translation preserves the repeated warnings and the changes of person through which they are delivered. Their repetitions are part of their pressure, not surplus wording to be condensed.

Figures and operations

The manuscript proceeds through descriptions and explanations of emblematic figures. Its drawings include a caduceus, a serpent attached to a cross, a garden, a violent scene associated with Herod, and serpents in a landscape crossed by rivers. The explanations name processes such as corruption, reduction of the elements, and fixation. A picture can consequently carry an action as well as a thing: a wound, a death, a flowing stream, or a return to life may be read as a stage in the work.

The garden makes this method especially clear. Its metallic tree has fixed roots or matrices, a mercurial principle of growth, minerals for bark and leaves, and precious metals for fruit. The explanation then assigns sulfur the office of fixity, quicksilver that of nourishment and increase, and salt that of bringing the concealed tincture to light. The picture gathers several kinds of activity within one growing thing. Reading its parts in sequence is more informative than treating each object as an isolated token in a cipher.

A useful first discipline is to keep three levels distinct while observing their connections. There is what the picture visibly represents; there is the interpretation the manuscript gives it; and there is any further inference made by a modern reader. The notes identify these levels where they might otherwise merge. An apparent parallel is not automatically a statement by the source, and the presence of a familiar symbol does not guarantee that it bears the same meaning in every passage.

Fables and Christian mysteries

The work's later divisions extend beyond the first emblem sequence. Classical fable and the labors of Hercules supply further occasions for hermetic interpretation. Discussions of good and bad angels and of spirits follow. The closing movement brings alchemical operations into relation with the Incarnation, the death of Christ, the Resurrection, and the Eucharist. These are substantial parts of the book's architecture. An account of the manuscript confined to metallic transmutation would leave much of its subject unexplained.