Heinrich Khunrath

Heinrich Khunrath (1560–1605) was a Leipzig-born physician, laboratory alchemist and Lutheran lay theologian who called himself, on every title page he printed, “Theosophiae amator fidelis et Medicinae utriusque Doctor” — a faithful lover of divine wisdom and doctor of both medicines — and who gave the word “theosophy” the sense it carried for the next century: the knowledge of God sought at once in Scripture, in the great world of nature and in the conscience of the regenerate man. His fame rests on one book, the Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae (“Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom”), privately printed at Hamburg in 1595 with four circular engravings and reissued after his death at Hanau in 1609 with five rectangular ones, a portrait, an engraved title and a small plate of a bespectacled owl — twelve engravings in all — in which a commentary on 365 verses of Solomon’s wisdom books is made to yield a programme that its title names in three coinages — “Christiano-Kabalisticum, Divino-Magicum, nec non Physico-Chymicum”: Christian Kabbalah, divine magic and physico-chemistry, “which triune study is true catholic Theosophy”. Around it stand the German and Latin treatises of 1596–1608 on the “hyleal Chaos” and its “Magnesia”, the one universal matter of the Philosophers’ Stone, on the alchemist’s furnace, on the fire of the magi and on the salts of the physician’s art. Khunrath’s doctrine can be stated briefly. The Stone is the Son of the great world as Christ is the Son of God and of man, and the two stand in an “analogical harmony” that runs in both directions; the matter of the Stone is a chaos that God animated at the creation with a spark of the world-soul and left unspecified; the work that draws the Stone from it must be done, in the phrase the fourth engraving made proverbial, in an oratory and a laboratory at once, “orando et laborando”; and the man who does it is regenerated by the same light that regenerates the matter. He found the materials in Paracelsus and the Paracelsians, in Reuchlin’s, Pico’s and Agrippa’s Christian Kabbalah, in the Corpus Hermeticum and the Emerald Tablet, in John Dee’s Monas hieroglyphica, in the medieval alchemists and in Valentin Weigel and the mystics of the Rhine, and he fused them under a single name, “Theosophia”, which he defended as “God-wise” against the “world-wise” learning of the schools. Johann Arndt learned from him; the Sorbonne condemned him; the Rosicrucian manifestos mocked him while borrowing his vocabulary; Éliphas Lévi made him a sovereign of the Rose-Cross and Jung a witness to the projection of the psyche into matter; and the engraving of the kneeling theosopher between his tabernacle and his furnace became the best-known picture ever made of an alchemist at prayer and at work.¹

Life#

Leipzig (1560–1588)#

Khunrath was born in 1560, almost certainly at Leipzig, the son of Sebastian Khunrath (Kunrat), a merchant of the city who traded in cloth and vitriol, and his wife Anna, born Meier; he was the fourth of eleven children, and his elder brother Conrad (c. 1555–1613), who took over the family trade, became a Paracelsian distiller and mint-assayer at Schleswig and Hamburg and the author of the Medulla destillatoria et medica (1594), so that the two are sometimes confused in the older literature. The year is fixed by Khunrath’s own portrait, engraved at Magdeburg in 1602 “aetatis suae XLII”, and by the earliest notice of his death, which gives his age as forty-five in September 1605; the place, by the “Lipsensis” or “Lips.” that follows his name on every title page and by the archival study of the family. On every title page too stands the double doctorate “Medicinae utriusque”, of both medicines — the Galenic and the chymical, or the internal and the surgical — which he used from 1595 to the end.²

Of his youth he tells us what he chose. A “Henricus Conrad Lips” — so the register is reported — matriculated at the University of Leipzig in the winter of 1570, paying the fee but exempted from the oath as too young; the identification with the ten-year-old Khunrath, once doubted, is now generally accepted. In the Amphitheatrum he says that he had laboured “in officina Vulcani”, in Vulcan’s workshop, indefatigably since his fifteenth year — that is, since 1575 — and in the preface to Vom hylealischen Chaos (1597) he counts that year the twenty-third of his alchemy. He worked, he says, alone and with companions, now with the right hand and now with the left, noting his successes and failures; he read the theosophical, kabbalistic, magical and physico-alchemical writers; he travelled, and visited libraries, collections and laboratories; and he did it, he insists, at his own expense, “sumptibus certe non exiguis, tamen gratia Deo propriis” — at a cost by no means small, but, thank God, his own. In the Magnesia catholica of 1599 he adds that he had been faithfully instructed “by GOD, by NATURE, and by a well-knowing Master, to whom may it be well in Eternity”; the master is never named. Where he lived between 1570 and 1588 is otherwise undocumented.³

Basel (1588)#

In May 1588 Khunrath matriculated at Basel, the university at which the Paracelsian physicians of the Empire preferred to take their degrees, and on 24 August he defended before the medical faculty twenty-eight theses De signatura rerum naturalium — on the signatures of natural things, the doctrine that God has marked every creature with the visible sign of its hidden virtue. They were printed by the Oporinus press, and on 3 September he was created doctor of medicine. Seven weeks earlier, on 5 July, the same faculty had heard the disputation of Andreas Libavius, the future author of the Alchymia (1597) and the most determined enemy of the Paracelsian school; the two men never met in print on equal terms, but Libavius’s later attacks on the “Amphitheatrum Trasybuli” — Thrasybulus being Khunrath’s pseudonym — and on the Paracelsians who “corrupt the name of Jesus by cabalistically writing IHSVH in the character of a cross” were written by a man who had taken the same degree in the same faculty in the same summer as the theosopher he was attacking. Khunrath later boasted that he had been “the first of all since Paracelsus” to defend the doctrine of signatures in public, “Della Porta’s Phytognomonica being not yet extant nor seen in Germany”; and the theses already end with Reuchlin’s five-lettered name of Christ, “IHSVH veritas aeterna ostende veritatem”.⁴

Bremen, Prague and Hamburg (1589–1597)#

By the following summer Khunrath was practising at Hamburg, for on 6 June 1589 John Dee, then living in his hired house at Bremen on the way home from Bohemia, wrote in his diary: “Dr. Kenrich Khanradt of Hamburgh visitted me.” Nothing is recorded of what passed between them; the evidence of what Khunrath took from the visit is in his work. Dee’s Monas hieroglyphica appears in the third circular engraving of the Amphitheatrum of 1595 as the letter O of the word AZOTH on the breast of the Hermetic bird, the Amphitheatrum cites Dee’s distinction between the “Cabala of the real” and the “Cabala of the word”, and the medical Quaestiones tres that appeared after Khunrath’s death are dedicated to “Angliae Hermetem”, the Hermes of England, John Dee. Frances Yates built on this meeting her account of Khunrath as the link between Dee and the Rosicrucian manifestos, and the meeting, in Ashmole’s later telling, entered the occultist canon; but its documentary content is seven words of a diary.⁵

On 15 December 1591 Khunrath entered the service of Vilém (Wilhelm) of Rožmberk, the greatest magnate of Bohemia and Dee’s former host at Třeboň, as personal physician, with a salary of two hundred thalers, three horses and four servants. He was with Rožmberk at Třeboň and at Prague, where on 23 August 1592, eight days before his patron’s death, he signed the dedication to the Emperor Rudolf II of an edition of the Observationes of “Zebel, the most ancient king and sage of the Arabs”, an astrological manual on the effects of the moon’s course through the twelve signs, printed by Michael Peterle; the title page styles him “Medicus ordinarius” to Rožmberk. This is the whole of his documented connection with the court of Rudolf II. He held no office there, and the story that he did rests on the imperial privilege for his works that Rudolf granted at Prague on 1 June 1598, six years later; his own remark that he had known many at princely courts who sought a perpetual motion of wood or steel “mechanically (ah, in vain)” is the nearest he comes to an account of the place. After a period at Prague he returned to Hamburg, where he was living when he signed the Confessio de chao (1596) “Hamburgi degens”, and where the first Amphitheatrum was made.⁶

That book was a private printing. Between April and September 1595 the Antwerp engraver Paullus van der Doort, then superintendent of the Dutch poor in Hamburg, cut the four large circular plates, signing each “Paullus von der Doort Antverp. sculpsit Hamburgi anno a Christo nato 1595”; for the fourth, the oratory and laboratory in perspective, the Dutch architectural painter Hans Vredeman de Vries supplied the design, and signed it “HF Vriese pinxit”. The twenty-four pages of Latin text that accompany them, printed on paper from Niklaus Heusler’s mill at Basel, probably by Jakob Lucius the Younger with the exotic types that Elias Hutter was then using for his polyglot Bible, name no printer and carry the reservation “in publicum vix mittendum” — scarcely to be sent into the public. The few copies went, as a later editor complained, almost only to persons of rank; six are recorded today, and the edition remained unknown until a bookseller’s catalogue of 1932. In the same months Khunrath published at Magdeburg his Latin Confessio de chao physico-chemicorum catholico (1596), and on 13 June 1597, passing through Magdeburg, he dated the preface of its German enlargement, Vom hylealischen, das ist, pri-materialischen catholischen oder algemeinem natürlichen Chaos (1597).⁷

Magdeburg (1597–1603)#

Magdeburg, whose printers Andreas Gene’s heirs and Johann Bötcher and whose bookseller Johann Francke issued most of his German books, was Khunrath’s base for the next six years, though he described his residence there as “pro tempore”, provisional. Here the imperial privilege of 1 June 1598, “ad decennium” — protecting for ten years all his works “tam scripta quam picta”, written and pictured, medical, chymical, kabbalistic “and several others more secret” — was first printed, in the Latin and German Symbolum physico-chymicum of 1598, a creed of the physico-chemists on the model of the Quicunque vult; here in 1599 appeared the Magnesia catholica philosophorum, his fullest statement of the doctrine of the one matter, and the Warhafftiger Bericht vom philosophischen Athanor, the description of a lamp-heated furnace of his own invention. Here too he found the readers who mattered most to him. Johann Arndt, then pastor at Quedlinburg, had praised him in the Ikonographia of 1596 as an “excellent philosopher and knower of nature”, and on Christmas Day 1599 wrote to their common friend Erasmus Wolfart, an imperial notary and prefect of Ilsenburg in the Harz county of the Stolbergs, that from “Dr Khunrath’s book called the Theatre of Eternal Wisdom” he had learned “to know God and true wisdom out of the scripture of the great and the little world”; Wolfart, “amico ac fratri suo percharo” in the dedication of a presentation copy of the Chaos, would see the second Amphitheatrum through the press. In 1602 Johann Diricks van Campen engraved at Magdeburg the portrait of the author at forty-two and, almost certainly, the five rectangular “hieroglyphic figures” and the architectural title-page that were to enlarge the book; the Frankfurt fair catalogue of 1602 announced the new edition as printed “Magdeburgi in fol.”, and the enlarged Athanor of 1603 announced it again, but it did not appear in Khunrath’s lifetime — possibly, as Carlos Gilly suggests, because the oblong circles of 1595 and the upright rectangles of 1602 could not be made to lie in one book.⁸

Berlin, Gera and Dresden (1601–1605)#

The last years are known from a few letters and imprints. Khunrath wrote to Count Albrecht VII of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, a prince who kept his own laboratory, from Berlin in 1601, from Magdeburg in 1603 and from Gera in 1604, where the engraved title of the Amphitheatrum was redated “MDCIV” and where, according to Gilly’s chronology, he wrote De igne magorum; the treatise on the tartaric diseases printed after his death as the Tractatus physico-medicus is subscribed from the Harz, “before the Brocksberg”, but the year of its composition is not established; and on 23 March 1605 he signed, with four other physicians — Zacharias Brendel of Jena, Simon Berger, Friedrich Müller of Gotha and Thomas Brömel — a joint consilium for the dying count. He died at Dresden on 9 September 1605, aged forty-five, “immatura morte praeventus”, forestalled by an untimely death, as Wolfart wrote; the earliest printed record, Henning Witte’s Diarium biographicum of 1688, gives the day and the place. The alternative “Leipzig”, which John Ferguson gave in 1906 while noting that Moller had “Dresden”, and which was repeated even by Gilly in 2002, rests on no earlier record; in Witte’s entry “Lipsiensis” is Khunrath’s origin and “Dresdae” the place of death. Nothing is known of the cause, of the burial or of any epitaph; and the statement that he died “in obscurity and poverty”, which has passed from A. E. Waite’s Lives of Alchemystical Philosophers (1888) into every occult reference book, has no source earlier than Waite and sits ill with a wealthy merchant’s son who had paid for his own copperplates.⁹

The posthumous book and the censure (1607–1625)#

What Khunrath left, Wolfart and the Strasbourg publisher Lazarus Zetzner’s editor Benedictus Figulus put into print. The Quaestiones tres per-utiles on gout and the stone, with their dedication to Dee, Joseph Du Chesne and Peter Holland of Hamburg, appeared at Leipzig in 1607; De igne magorum philosophorumque secreto externo et visibili, on the outer and visible fire of the magi, at Strasbourg in 1608, with an anonymous “Judgement on the four figures of the great Amphitheatre” that has been attributed since the eighteenth century to Arndt, and with Figulus’s announcement that a new Amphitheatrum, “adorned with more figures, yet cheaper and a better bargain than before”, was in the press. It came out at Hanau from the press of Wilhelm Antonius in 1609 — some copies with a cancel title naming Levin Brauns of Magdeburg and dated 1608, and unsold sheets reissued with a Frankfurt title in 1653 — with Wolfart’s preface dated at Wernigerode on the Ides of March 1609, the text enlarged from 306 to 365 verses and rearranged in seven “grades”, the four circular plates re-engraved without their commentaries and the five rectangular plates, the portrait, the title and a small plate of the bespectacled owl added. It is by this edition that Khunrath has been known. Sixteen years later, on 1 February 1625, the Faculty of Theology of Paris censured it as “blasphemous, impious and dangerous to the faith”, “a most pernicious book”, “swarming with impieties, errors and heresies, and woven together out of a continual sacrilegious profanation of passages of Holy Scripture, abusing even the more venerable mysteries of the Catholic religion, and finally soliciting its readers to secret and wicked arts”; the censure names the “explications” and “corollaries” as well as the book, so that the faculty had the 1609 edition with its figure-commentaries before it. The Rosicrucian Confessio Fraternitatis of 1615 had already sneered, in a passage that Gilly reads as aimed at the Amphitheatrum, at the “Amphitheatrical actor, a man ingenious enough for imposture”. Thereafter the book’s fortunes belong to its reception.¹⁰

Thought#

The system in outline#

Khunrath’s system is easiest to hold if it is taken as three books, three studies and one work, and it helps to know first what the reader will meet on the way. There is one big book, the Latin Amphitheatrum (“Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom”, 1595 and 1609), which carries twelve engravings: four circular “figures”, numbered one to four, five large rectangular plates known by short names — the Gymnasium, the Porta or gate, the Pyramides, the Citadel and the Calumniators — and a title-page, a portrait and an owl. Around it stand the German treatises on the matter of the work (the Chaos of 1597 and the Magnesia of 1599), on the furnace (the Athanor, 1599) and on the fire (De igne magorum, “On the fire of the magi”, 1608), and the vocabulary of two older traditions that Khunrath assumes, the alchemists’ and the Kabbalists’. Kabbalah is the Jewish tradition of reading Scripture through the letters, numbers and names of its Hebrew, and “Christian Kabbalah” is that tradition as Pico della Mirandola and Johann Reuchlin had turned it, a century earlier, to prove the Trinity and the Incarnation; the Tetragrammaton is the four-letter Hebrew name of God, YHVH, which Jews did not pronounce; and the Philosophers’ Stone is the substance that the alchemists claimed could turn base metals into gold, cure every disease and prolong life — a universal medicine of metals and of men.

The three books are Holy Scripture, the “great world-book of Nature” and the conscience of the man who reads them; the same God wrote all three, so that “one book interprets and explains the other”, and the truth about God, about the world and about oneself is one truth caught in three mirrors. The three studies are the three that the title of the Amphitheatrum names — “Christian-Kabbalistic, divine-magical and physico-chemical” — and it is a convenience of this exposition, not Khunrath’s own statement, to assign one to each book. Christian Kabbalah reads Scripture: it finds in the Hebrew of Genesis and in the divine Names (the Hebrew names of God, held to carry power) the structure of creation, and it finds the name of Jesus, which Khunrath writes IHSVH, as the Tetragrammaton made pronounceable by one added letter — the “wonder-working Word” by which Christ, God’s Word made flesh, works wonders. Physico-chemistry, that is, laboratory alchemy, reads Nature: it seeks in the great world the one thing out of which God made all things, the “Chaos” or first matter, which Khunrath holds still exists — lying in the open rather than in mines, not yet particularised into any plant, beast, mineral or metal, and animated by a spark of the world-soul, the life that the Platonists supposed to run through the whole cosmos. It is a thing that everyone sees and names and almost no one recognises, and he calls it Magnesia, “a philosophical name” that has nothing to do with the mineral or the medicine. Divine magic reads conscience: it is the “hyperphysical” practice — above nature — by which the purified soul, praying “in spirit and in truth”, receives light, dreams and angelic instruction from above. Khunrath’s magic also has a lower, natural kind, the talismans and planetary alloys of Renaissance magic, which he practised and defended; but it is the higher kind that he sets among the three studies. Together the three make what he calls “Theosophia”, God-wisdom, which he opposes to the “world-wisdom” of the universities; and the one work in which they are exercised is the making of the Stone, in an oratory (a prayer-closet) and a laboratory that stand in the same room.

The levels of reality are those of the Christian Neoplatonism he inherited, with an alchemical middle term. Above is Jehovah-Elohim, triune, whose “Archetype” the second figure shows as the Tetragrammaton in fire. Below him are the angelic orders and the ten Sefirot, the emanations through which, in the Kabbalah, God acts on the world. Then comes the great world (the macrocosm), which God created out of nothing as a “pri-material Chaos” — Khunrath’s coinage for the matter that was before any particular matter — and formed by his Spirit, the Ruach Elohim that hovered on the waters, working through the heavens; Khunrath reads the Hebrew for heavens, Schamaim, as esch and maim, fire and water, because for him the heavens are the two agents, hot and moist, by which the Spirit works on the Chaos. Then comes the little world (the microcosm), man, made of body, spirit and soul, in whom two lights can shine: the light of nature, the knowledge available through created things, and the light of grace, the knowledge God gives directly. And between the two worlds stands a third thing, the Stone. Khunrath gives its matter and the Stone made from it the same titles — a “macrocosmic microcosm, not a human one”, the “Son of the great world”, born of the world’s own seed and “consubstantial” with it — because the Stone is that matter perfected; and he means the titles exactly: the Stone is to the great world what Christ is to mankind, born of it and of one substance with it. Every level is joined to the next by light. The divine Wisdom radiates as light; the world-soul is dispersed through creatures as fiery “sparks” (scintillae); and the man who is regenerated — reborn by grace — receives the “spark” of divine wisdom that lets him see the sparks in things.

The self is likewise layered, and its layers are the rungs of an ascent. On the second figure Khunrath engraves two lists of ten. One is the “grades of cognition”, the faculties by which knowledge rises from the sensed thing to the mind — from “object” and “medium” through the senses, imagination, judgement and reason to intellect and “mind”; the other, on a chain of cross-shaped links, is the “ladder of conjunction and union”, the stages of the soul’s approach to God, from faith, meditation and love through prayer and “conjunction” to “familiarity” and “likeness”. The end of the ladder is stated on the same plate: “the end of man, the true and highest good, is to enjoy Jehovah as father, brother and friend: the eternal jubilee, the great Sabbath”. The practice that climbs it is prayer and work, “orando et laborando”; and its rule is written round the plate’s edge in the number-language of the Renaissance magi: “let the binary be rejected, and the ternary be reduced through the quaternary to the simplicity of the monad” — let division (two: the self-willed condition of fallen Adam) be renounced, and let the threefold man (body, spirit and soul) be brought back, through the four elements of which his body is made, to unity (one), which is God’s. The one work is the Stone; the end the work serves is double: the Stone itself, a universal medicine of the “three kingdoms” (plant, animal and mineral, metals counted with minerals) and a “tincture” — a preparation that transmutes base metals into gold — and the regenerated man, whom Khunrath does not scruple to call “divine”. Both are produced by one light, and the theosopher who has made the one and become the other says, with the aged Simeon of Luke’s Gospel, that he may depart in peace, because his eyes have seen in the book of nature “a true symbolic likeness and natural counterfeit” — counterfeit in its old sense, a portrait — “of the Saviour of the human race”. The ethical rule, finally, is written on the walls of the laboratory pictured in the fourth figure: “do not speak of God without light”; “neither rashly nor timidly”; “sleeping, keep watch”. What is learned there is to be used, in a phrase that recurs in his prefaces and captions, “for the honour of God and the profit of one’s neighbour”, and kept from “sophists” — his word for the false philosophers of the schools and the fraudulent alchemists — and “peasants”, to whom the gate of the fortress on his Citadel plate says “not for all”.¹¹

“Theosophia”: the word and the programme#

The word had a history before Khunrath — the fifth-century mystical theologian who wrote as Dionysius the Areopagite, the medieval schools and the followers of the Swiss physician Paracelsus (1493–1541) had all used it — but it was his books that made it a banner. Carlos Gilly has shown that “Theosophie” and “Theosophen” spread rapidly after 1595 among both admirers and opponents until, within a generation, they had become “the epitome and common denominator of the various religious and natural-philosophical currents” of dissent; the sneer of Johann Valentin Andreae, the Lutheran pastor who wrote the Rosicrucian Chymical Wedding, that “demonomania, after it changed its name, is heard of as theosophy” (1620), shows how far the word had travelled. Khunrath knew it was provocative. In the preface of the Chaos he defends his German equivalent: “You sophist and calumniator, leave me this little word ‘God-wise’ (Theosophicè) unreproved: I set it against the word ‘world-wise’, and by it understood the philosophy that proceeds from wisdom lent by God, not that I esteemed myself wise like God, as you will wickedly think.” The definition in the Amphitheatrum is given as a gloss on Proverbs 1:23, “I will pour out my spirit unto you”: Wisdom will make her disciples know her mind “biblically, macro- and microcosmically … through Christian Kabbalah, divine magic and physico-chemistry: which triune study is true catholic Theosophy” — Kabbalah, magic and alchemy, in that order, which is the order of his title and of the first three figures. “Catholic” in Khunrath’s usage never means Roman; it means universal, and it is applied indifferently to God, the Church, the first matter, the Stone and the reader. The three studies are not alternatives but a single obligation, as the posthumous De igne magorum puts it in a sentence that Peter Forshaw takes for the motto of the whole work: “Kabala, Magia, Alchymia conjugendae — shall and must be used together and beside one another.” Gilly reads out of the Amphitheatrum a finer hierarchy of five sciences within the three: physics, physico-medicine and physico-chemistry belong to the study of nature; magic in its physical and “hyperphysical” forms, the latter being communion with good angels, stands above them; and Kabbalah, the “theosophical reception of divine revelation”, stands highest. The Magnesia, for its part, compresses the method into three adverbs: the seeker must search out the matter of the Stone “at once historicè, physicè and Theosophicè” — by the record of the wise, by the study of nature and by the light God gives — “so long until, besides the being able, you also learn to recognize it”, that is, until he can not only make it but knows what he has made.¹²

The three books, the seven grades and the two kinds of knowing#

The doctrine of the three books is stated in the printed introduction (the “Isagoge”) to the fourth figure. The theosopher “hears, sees, observes” the voice of Wisdom in Holy Scripture, read “literally, morally, tropologically, anagogically” — the four senses of medieval exegesis — and, Khunrath adds, “physically, typically, cabalistically, theosophically”; in Nature, read in an equally long string of ways that runs from “physically” and “physico-medically” to “hyperphysico-magically” and “cabalistically”; and in “ourselves, according to the soul in the mirror of the mind joined to God and illuminated by the divine light, and this as much in sleeping as in waking, according also to the thousand witnesses of one’s own conscience, attesting the truth according to the law divinely written in our hearts”. The third book is therefore not “the self” in general but conscience, the mind mirrored in God, and it explicitly admits dreams. In the German works the scheme is put more plainly: “book explains book … the book of biblical Scripture the book of nature, and the book of nature in return the book of biblical Scripture”; “the great world is a divine wonder-book of Nature, which can be studied out to the end by no man”. Against this stands the learning of the universities. Their professors, Khunrath says, stuff their pupils’ heads with syllogisms, disputations and sophisms and block the way to the three true books; in the first of the seven divisions of the Amphitheatrum (described next) the “pseudo-physicians and academics” are told that their “blind and lame masters” have taught them to make less of the books of Scripture and Nature, of God himself, “in not hearing the Spirit of his Wisdom”, and of experience, and that woe awaits them on the day of judgement.¹³

The Amphitheatrum is at bottom a commentary on 365 verses of the wisdom books of Solomon, one for each day of the year, and the edition of 1609 arranges them in seven “prologetic grades” (his coinage: grades of the prologue), “a mystical ladder of seven orthodox grades”, which Gilly believes to be modelled on the seven steps of the Clavis totius philosophiae chymisticae (1567) of Gerhard Dorn, the Paracelsian physician who made alchemy a discipline of the soul. Their arguments, read in sequence, are a course of formation: the universal call to hear eternal Wisdom (I); perseverance after the divine seed has been received, and the rejection of sophistry (II); the beauty of Wisdom as the root of sound philosophy (III); what Wisdom gives, from which Master it is to be sought and in which books it is transmitted (IV); who receives it and who does not, the “theo-philosopher” against the sophist, and the rules of what may be revealed (V); its goods, its exercises and its fruits (VI); and the contempt of the sophists “as dust”, with the steadfast confession of the truth by “the small number of the theosophically learned” (VII). The seven grades of the text, the ten grades and ten steps of the second figure, and the staircase of the Porta plate of 1602 — seven steps cut into a mountain under a natural arch lettered “Procul hinc abeste profani”, “Far from here be gone, ye profane” (Virgil’s warning at the mouth of the underworld), with seven “oracular laws” written on rays of light, the first “Be washed, be clean” and the last that the sacred things whose mysteries the visitor comes to handle are to be “open to the worthy, hidden from the profane” — are three pictures of one ascent.¹⁴

The epistemology that governs all of this is a distinction between knowing and recognising, kennen and erkennen, that the Magnesia makes its refrain. The matter of the Stone is a thing which, “although the whole World has it before its Eyes, and knows it, and moreover can call it by its own proper Name, which it publicly and commonly has — yet nevertheless, because their Eyes, Senses and Understanding are so held and governed by GOD, just as were those of the Disciples who went with Christ toward Emmaus, so that they did not know JESUS, they do not recognize It; only those few recognize it whom GOD, out of his especial GOODNESS and MERCY, will let recognize it … In the eyes of the undiscerning it is a mean, contemptible thing, known to everyone, but recognized by very few. It is only a matter of the knowing!” The concealment, that is, is God’s, not the philosophers’; a note in the printed margin adds that it is not given to all “because the better things suit the fewer”, and lest the unworthy harm themselves or others, and ends “pray God that you too may be one of those few”. Khunrath is at the same time an empiricist in the Paracelsian manner: “every craftsman is to be believed in his own art, nor is experience to be rashly contradicted”; “more credit is to be given to the truthful crowd of those who rightly philosophise and labour physico-chemically than to a handful who speak wrongly or to the fallacious multitude of the ignorant”; the sceptic is not to believe “either for or against” until sufficient causes are given, “since to know is to know a thing through its causes”. Reading, laboratory experience and divine gift are three conditions of one knowledge — the historicè, physicè and Theosophicè of the last section — and the order of study is a ladder of its own: “to question closely, to contemplate, to learn and to recognise”.¹⁵

Christian Kabbalah: the wonder-working Word, the Names and the reading of Genesis#

Khunrath’s Kabbalah is the Christian Kabbalah of Johann Reuchlin, the German humanist and Hebraist, whom the Amphitheatrum names as the teacher of its central device. Throughout his books, Latin and German, Christ’s name is written IHSVH: the four unpronounceable letters of the Tetragrammaton, YHVH, with the Hebrew letter shin (S) set in their midst, so that the Name becomes speakable and spells Jesus — the “wonder-working word” of Reuchlin’s De verbo mirifico (1494), made pronounceable, on this reading, by the Incarnation. The portrait dates itself “in the year from the birth of Ihsuh Christ our Saviour 1602”; the theses of 1588 close on the name; and the first figure sets the shin over the head of the crucified Christ at the centre of concentric rings of the Sefirot, the divine Names, the Hebrew alphabet, the Decalogue and the angelic orders. Above them stands the Tetragrammaton written as the Pythagorean tetraktys — the triangle of ten points that the Pythagoreans revered — with one letter in the first row, two in the second, three in the third and four in the fourth, and the word OMNIA, “all things”, beneath. This combination of Name and number recurs on the title-page of 1609 and in the argument of the Magnesia, where the operations of the Stone run “one, two, three, four” and issue in the “Denarius”, the ten taken as a unity, which the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria calls “the most familiar of numbers to God”. The Hebrew is worked the same way. Aben, “stone”, is read as Ab and Ben, “Father and Son in the Stone”; the name of the first matter is divided as “MAGNES-IAH”, the magnet of Jah (God), or “magnum AES-IAH”, the great ore of Jah; and Elixir is derived from El, the Mighty, with I and X, one and ten, and the Greek eir, so that the word is made to mean “a bright shine, flash and spark of the uniquely Mighty and Strong”. Khunrath knew the Conclusiones of Pico della Mirandola, the De occulta philosophia of Cornelius Agrippa (which he cites four times) and the Monas hieroglyphica of John Dee, whose distinction between a “Cabala of the real” — reading the signs written in things — and a “Cabala of the word” — reading the letters of Scripture — he adopted; but the Jewish Kabbalah he knew was the Christianised digest of these authors, and his Hebrew, as the plates show, is that of a Lutheran physician who had learned the sacred tongue for the Names.¹⁶

The heart of the Kabbalah, for Khunrath, is the cabalistic and chymical reading of Genesis 1, which he shares with the Paracelsian tradition and which drew the fire of the chemist Andreas Libavius, the friar Marin Mersenne and the theologians of Paris. “Moses, truest historian of all Nature,” he writes, “says in Genesis 1:1, In the beginning ELOHIM created HEAVEN. This, from its nature and substance, has properly in Hebrew the name SCHAMAIM,” that is, “ESCH VA MAIM, fire and water”; God created “from nothing a pri-material Chaos, from which he afterwards built the whole macrocosm”; the Ruach Elohim is “a certain vivifying and powerful emanation” of the divine Ideas, “the primordial and radical seminal reasons” (the seed-principles of things); and the firmament is “God’s wonderful, perpetual, universal macrocosmic laboratory, where Nature presides and works”. In the Chaos the Spirit that moved on the face of the waters is identified with the “essential form” of things, with the soul of the world and with the light of nature, and in the Symbolum of 1598 the Spirit becomes embodied “mediantibus Schamaim”, by the mediation of the heavens — a phrase Libavius singled out for attack. The engraved title of 1609 puts the whole cosmogony in six words at the foot of the page, in a burst of light over land and sea: Ruach Elohim mediantibus Schamaim. Genesis, in other words, is a recipe: the Chaos is the first matter, the Spirit is its animating agent, the heavens are the vehicle, and the alchemist who understands the first two chapters of Moses knows what the Stone is made of — which is why the Magnesia opens its demonstration by proposing to show “out of the First two chapters of the First book of MOSES, what the MATERIA PRIMA of the whole great edifice of the material WORLD may be”.¹⁷

The alchemy: Chaos, Magnesia, Azoth and the Son of the great world#

The alchemical doctrine turns on one thing, and Khunrath’s most original pages are those in which he argues that there can be only one. The Stone is universal, “catholic”; a universal can be made only from a universal (“Vniuersale enim non nisi ex vniuersali”; “as the seed, so the fruit”); every specified thing yields only a specified stone — “Gold gives, in a Nature-conforming and artful way, a Gold-Stone; Silver, a Silver-Stone; Vitriol, a Vitriolic Stone; Antimony, an Antimonial one” — and though the “SPIRIT” of the Lord is in all things, “IN EACH ONE … IS NOT CATHOLIC”, because in each particular thing it has already been particularised. Hence the creed of unities that closes the argument: “there is ONE UNIVERSAL God; ONE UNIVERSAL great Material WORLD made by GOD; ONE UNIVERSAL MATERIA PRIMA, first-created of that same World; ONE UNIVERSAL SAVIOUR of the human race; ONE UNIVERSAL CHRISTIAN FAITH; ONE UNIVERSAL CHRISTIAN CHURCH; ONE UNIVERSAL HEAD of that same CHURCH, IHSVH CHRISTVS; ONE UNIVERSAL Nature-conforming and artful STONE of the wise”, and “in ALCHYMIA there is no more than only ONE VNIVERSALE or universal thing”. That one thing is the “hyleal” (from the Greek hyle, matter), “pri-material”, “catholic” Chaos of the physico-chemists, which “NATVRE has left CATHOLIC, since she has not specified it upon a Vegetable, Animal or Mineral, but has ensouled and given nature to it Catholicly, or universally, with one Synopticè-Catholica scintillula of hers — that is, a comprehended-in-brief, universal little spark”. It is “of just such MATERIA as that from which GOD built the great edifice of the material World”, but still “in the state of the Catholic First Matter”. It lies “above the Earth”, and is the same matter out of which Nature “in the belly of the Earth” still begets all metals. It is “the Mine of the Art”, which Nature, “GOD’S Deputy in Natural things”, has already prepared “in the VNIVERSAL LABORATORY OF GOD”, the whole world, so that the artist need do nothing but recognise and receive it. And the philosophers — Khunrath here takes the other side of the question of concealment — have called it, “the better to hide it from the unworthy”, by the traditional cover-names of the first matter: “MAGNESIA, or MAGNES-IAH, and the SATVRN of the wise” (not common lead, the margin warns, but “their Saturn’s viscous Mercury”), “the Catholic and Crude Mercury of the Philosophers”, the “Green Lion of Nature”, and Azoth, the alchemists’ name for the living universal mercury, which Khunrath’s third figure spells with Dee’s Monas sign for its O. Khunrath’s own name for it, Magnesia, is “a philosophical name” and not the mineral; when the curious guess bismuth, chimney-soot, pebbles, saltpetre, bolus, ruddle, quicklime, brick, vitriol, arsenic, “star-shot”, firestone, antimony ore, gold-quartz or bloodstone, he answers only that “ONE alone it is Among All, and no other whatever besides”, that “this one Nature chose and set before me; this one, both mediately and immediately, the Spirit of the Wisdom of God showed to me”, and that the touchstone of any candidate is whether it shows “ALL (ALL, I say) those Properties, Qualities and Conditions” his treatise teaches. What Magnesia was in his crucibles he never says in print; the “yet other Requisites, Conditions, Qualities and Properties” he withholds “for certain sufficient reasons, however (and especially with this, that not all Peasants should find their way into it)”. Forshaw’s study of the alchemy argues, under the headings “Neither Mercury, nor Antimony, but Salt” and “There Is Nothing More Useful in the World Than Sun and Salt”, that the matter was a salt; the Magnesia itself says that “in salt are the labours” and that the salt of the philosophers is found “in that catholic ocean or sea of the philosophers, which is Magnesia”, and Jung had already noticed that for Khunrath the salt “is not only the physical centre of the earth but the sal sapientiae”, the salt of wisdom. The identification is left here where Forshaw puts it, as an argument.¹⁸

The work is closed — nothing is added from outside — and it has two halves. The one thing is that “into which constitutively nothing goes or comes that has not previously also gone out of it or come forth from it; save only that the Craftsman, in the First or FORE-WORK … should in a Nature-conforming and artful manner DISSOLVE that same, duly CLEANSE it, and Separate the superfluities from it; and afterwards, in the SECOND or AFTER-WORK, should again rightly Compose, REUNITE, COAGULATE, FIX and INCERATE the Pure parts in their right Weight” — to fix is to make a substance stable in the fire, to incerate to bring it to the consistency of wax. The margin reduces it to the classical formula, “Solve; coagula; fige”, dissolve, coagulate, fix, and adds “this belongs to the Art” — and “this rests with GOD, who knows well whether, and to whom”. Within the one subject, Khunrath goes on, lie hidden the alchemists’ traditional pairs, triads and tetrads, and they are the one-two-three-four of the second figure’s formula. The one is “MERCVRIVS Philosophorum CATHOLICVS & Crudus, the Catholic and Crude Mercury of the Philosophers”. The two is “its Man and Wife, the working and the suffering; REBIS” — the “two-thing”, the hermaphrodite of the third figure — “twofold Mercury, that is, Mercury with the Sulphur of the Philosophers”. The three is “Body; SPIRIT (which is the proper vehicle and nearest dwelling of the SOUL, and the Bond joining Soul with Body) and SOUL; SALT, MERCURY and SULPHUR OF NATURE, OF WISDOM and OF THE WISE”, the three principles of Paracelsian chemistry. The four is “Earth, Water, Air and Fire, animated … with the FIFTH ESSENCE; ALL in ONE Natural SVBIECTO”. Out of these, by dissolution and, after purification, by lawful recomposition, “with the help of Vulcan” — the fire — the artist brings forth “their real Physical Denarius: more-than-perfected, and the HIGHEST GOOD of Nature through ART — that is, the WONDER-WORKING CATHOLIC STONE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS, adorned with a most ruddy diadem (the SIGNATURE of highest perfection)”, the red of the finished Stone being the visible sign of its perfection. Dissolved into “pri-material water” the matter is “Azothically watery”; coagulated and fixed it is “Azothically” solid; regenerated in the athanor — the slow digesting furnace of the alchemists — “through putrefaction, coagulation, fixation and inceration” it becomes “the Universal Stone of the philosophers”, the “REGENERATION FIELD of Silver and Gold”: the field, in Khunrath’s farming image, in which the noble metals are sown and grow again “more-than-perfected”, yielding the tinctures that transmute the base. “Plusquamperfectio”, more-than-perfection, is Khunrath’s word for what the Stone does to metals and what grace does to men. The Athanor treatise adds the practical creed: “one furnace, one vessel, one fire”, and the fire a lamp-fire, constant and even, of his own invention; De igne magorum adds that the outer visible fire is the principal agent of the work and that it should be solar fire, kindled from the sun’s rays and kept perpetually burning — the two books agree, so far as they are reconciled, in the later one’s rule that the lamp itself be lit from fire caught from the sun.¹⁹

The Harmonia analogica: the Stone and Christ#

The doctrine for which Khunrath was condemned by the Paris theologians in 1625, and which the Magnesia presents as the third and strongest of its three “trumpets of truth” — the three arguments that the Stone exists, after the experience of witnessed transmutations and the unanimous testimony of the philosophers — is the “analogical harmony” between the Stone and Christ. He states it with theological exactness. The matter, Magnesia, is “the SON of the great World, and the only true subiectum” — subject, the stuff worked upon — “of the LAPIS Philosophorum CATHOLICVS, the Natural and Nature-conforming, artful SERVATOR of the great World”; the Chaos is “The Chymical Philosophers’ MICROCOSMVS macrocosmicus, non humanus — a great-Worldly, not a Human, little World”, and hence “ex spermate MVNDI maioris, MACROCOSMI FILIVS, ὁμοούσιος, coessentialis atque consubstantialis parenti — out of the Seed of the great World, a SON of the great World, like unto its Begetter in First-World-beginning Essence or Being, and in Matter”, the margin adding that “Certainly and properly that is called a son which is begotten of the Father’s seed and substance”. The Greek word, homoousios, “of one substance”, is the Nicene creed’s word for the Son’s oneness of being with the Father, set here in Greek type and left unglossed. The harmony itself — “or Natural, likeness-wise comparison”, as he glosses it — is “of MAGNESIA and of the CATHOLIC STONE of the philosophers, the Preserver and (in its own manner) the Natural, and moreover physico-artificial, Catholic Saviour of the greater WORLD and of its fruits, namely of Vegetables, Animals, Minerals and Metals, with IHSVH CHRISTO, the Catholic Preserver and Saviour of the lesser WORLD, that is, of the human race; likewise with His Doctrine, Life and Miracles; and conversely”. Three things in the wording show that Khunrath knew what he was doing. He distinguishes Servator, preserver, from Salvator, saviour, and hedges the second, for the Stone, with “suo modo”, in its own manner, a qualification he never gives to Christ; he adds in the margin “medicinal, I say”; and he writes “and conversely” — the analogy runs both ways, so that the Stone reveals Christ as Christ reveals the Stone. The same doctrine fills the eighth chapter of the Chaos; it is confessed article by article in the Symbolum of 1598, a creed of the Stone written on the pattern of the Church’s creeds, where the Stone, “the Son of the macrocosm”, descends into its sepulchre, dies, rises, ascends and will at the consummation judge “all the fruits of the elements”; and it is proclaimed in the Amphitheatrum with the caveat, in Forshaw’s rendering, “I speak without blasphemy: The PHILOSOPHERS’ STONE, Servant of the Greater World is the type of IHSVH CHRIST crucified”, and the summons to the Stone, “our KING, and LORD of Lords”, to “come forth from the inner-chamber and throne of his glassy sepulchre” — the glass vessel in which the Stone is made. Magnesia is Christ’s “true Counterfeit out of the Divine great World-book of Nature”, which Herod’s kind seek “not to the same End as the Wise”; the Magnesia that testifies of Christ “naturally and universally” does so, he says, “in a symbolic understanding”, in symbolico intellectu; and he offered to defend the analogy before the theologians with “very many similar examples, for Papists, Lutherans, Calvinists and the rest, each from their own theological writings”. Two books were to complete it, an “Apocalypsis, that is, the Revelation of the Catholic hidden MAGNESIA” and a “Harmonia analogica MAGNESIAE Philosophorum Catholicae cum IHSVH CHRISTO, & contra”: “which I have in hand; God let Me finish them, Amen”. Neither appeared. Jung’s summary is exact as far as it goes: Khunrath “formulated for the first time the ‘theological’ position of the lapis: it was the filius macrocosmi as opposed to the ‘son of man’, who was the filius microcosmi” — though, as Jung also noted against the occultist A. E. Waite, the identification of the Stone with Christ is much older; what is Khunrath’s is its systematic and reciprocal form.²⁰

Divine magic, the fire and the reformation of magic#

“Divino-magicum” is the second of the three studies in Khunrath’s own order, and his magic, as the outline warned, is of two kinds. The first is the “physical” and “mathematical” magic of the Renaissance tradition, Agrippa’s, which he practised. In 1597 he wrote a “counsel” on the magical forging of the armour of Achilles — the armour that Vulcan forges for the hero in the Iliad, taken as a real recipe — which prescribes an “electrum magicum”, an alloy of the seven metals compounded at the hours ruled by their planets, stamped with the characters of Mars and of the planet’s ruling spirits, its “intelligence” and its “demon”, and breathed upon “with an angry, cruel, warlike voice”, so that the armour transmits fear as the basilisk’s gaze does; the same text prescribes engraved talismans, which it calls gamahaea. De igne magorum defends the weapon-salve — an ointment applied not to the wound but to the weapon that made it, and said to heal at a distance — ridiculing those “unable to conceive natural contact other than corporeal”, and boasts of “physical and hyperphysical MAGIA, in natural and supernatural wisdom”; and the caption of the Gymnasium plate speaks of the “hieroglyphic characters” of nature “by which things themselves converse with men cabalistically”. The second kind is the “hyperphysical” or “divine” magic, the highest of the three studies and the means of the regeneration described below: communion with the good angels and with God, obtained by prayer alone. The fourth of the seven grades of the Amphitheatrum announces its programme as “the restoring and renewing reformation of magic; and, conversely, the eradicating extirpation of necromancy”, and the fifth declares that the Creator is to be approached “by praying; not necromantically, that is, diabolically and superstitiously consecrating, exorcising, adjuring or conjuring, as the pseudo-cabalists do. Prayer in spirit and truth alone sufficed.” The “oracular laws” on the Porta plate are the constitution of this reformed magic: Jehovah is to be held “the one maker of all things, the other powers his ministers”; “to the first, vows and prayers; to the lower, hymns”; petitions to the lower powers are valid only “under the form of an administration delegated by the first”; the angels “flying from us to Jehovah and from him to us” are to be met with “reverence and trembling”. The knowledge so received includes dreams and visions. The third book of truth is read “as much in sleeping as in waking”; the portico at the back of the pictured laboratory says “Dormiens vigila”, sleeping, keep watch; Khunrath claims that the matter was shown him “both mediately and immediately” — through means, such as books and nature, and directly, by vision — by “Ruach Hhochmah-El”, the Spirit of the Wisdom of God; the Chaos contains a rhapsodic first-person vision, “I saw the GREEN catholic LION of Nature”, and promises the Christian Kabbalist and divine mage “a true and heavenly APOCALYPSIS of things past, present and to come, in the Stone of the wise”; and the introduction to the third figure speaks of an “inner movement” that the adept feels in himself at the moment when Azoth is perfectly prepared. There is no séance in Khunrath, no scrying-glass and no angelic conversation of the kind John Dee held through a crystal-gazer; his magic is illumination, and its instrument is the oratory, the curtained tabernacle in the corner of his pictured laboratory.²¹

Oratory and laboratory: prayer, music and the Lab-Oratorium#

The formula for which Khunrath is remembered is not, in his Latin, “ora et labora” — the motto of the Benedictines — but the gerunds “orando et laborando”, by praying and by working, which recur through the Amphitheatrum and stand on the medallions of the two obelisks of its title-page: “what you ask of Jehovah, orando & laborando you will happily obtain”; “theosophically pray and work, that you may be in the love of God”. His own summary of the doctrine, in an annotation of the Amphitheatrum that Gilly singles out, is that wisdom “is acquired only by theosophical mental practice from divine inspiration in the double oratory” — the church and the closet — while the fruits of wisdom “are won by the wise man’s manual labour in the laboratory”. In the Chaos Khunrath attacks those who “utterly unphilosophically separate oratory and laboratory from each other”, and the fourth figure of 1595 is the doctrine drawn. On the left, under a domed canopy inscribed ORATORIVM and “happy he whose counsellor is Jehovah”, the theosopher kneels with open arms before a desk on which lie two open books, one showing the diagrams of the first two figures, the other a psalter open at Psalm 145, “Jehovah does the will of them that fear him”, under a lamp and the tablet “Ne loquaris de Deo absque lumine”, do not speak of God without light. On the right, under a chimney-hood lettered LABORATORIVM and “what is wisely attempted will one day succeed”, stand the furnaces, the bellows, the shelves of bottles, a column whose base is marked EXPERIENTIA and a furnace-block marked RATIO. Between them a table bears a harp, a lute, a viol and a cittern on a cloth that reads “holy music, the flight of sadness and of evil spirits, because the Spirit of Jehovah gladly sings in a heart suffused with pious joy”. The beam above says that “no one was ever a great man without divine inspiration”; the doorway at the back says “sleeping, keep watch”; and in the 1609 version of the plate the smoke of the censer carries “let prayer ascend like smoke, a sacrifice acceptable to God”. Forshaw has traced the musical doctrine to the Neoplatonist Iamblichus and to Boethius’s De musica: the instruments symbolise “the harmonies vibrating between heaven and earth”, and the table on which they lie, standing between God’s realm on the left and Nature’s on the right, is in his reading man himself, who relates to both realms “via magic”. Abraham von Franckenberg, the Silesian nobleman who edited the mystic Jacob Boehme, would add an “Auditorium” to Khunrath’s pair in 1676; the judgement on the plate printed in 1608 and attributed to Johann Arndt, the Lutheran devotional writer, is the simplest: “in the fourth figure the Amphitheatrum teaches theology in the oratory, and theology is nothing other than alloquium divinum, a conversation with God through prayer and through the Holy Spirit”.²²

Regeneration, the enemies of truth and the discipline of secrecy#

The end that the system serves is the regeneration of man, and Martin Žemla has shown how far Khunrath was prepared to take it. He does not accept that the sinfulness of fallen man is irremovable: original sin “can be erased and removed, not through human works, but through the divine love, in the regeneration of body, soul and spirit”, and the regenerate theosopher is “a human God” or “a divine man”, restored to the state before the Fall. The second figure is the map of this process. Over the square of the four elements the line reads “evil abandoned, thrice-reunited, let the fiery-minded, catholic Adam be sublimed by regeneration” — sublimed as a substance is sublimed, raised as a vapour and recondensed pure; the Adam is an androgyne, male and female in one body, because Khunrath takes the “male and female” of Genesis 1:27 as the whole man before the division of the sexes. Below the square a command is cut on the rock: “Adam the microcosm, androgyne, catholic by formation and nature, earthly in person, vile and unclean because of sins — beat him down with the fiery pestle of the Decalogue of contrition into a dusty clod, greening with the fertile salt of conversion”. The inner band describes the new birth “out of the new water of obedience, in the Holy Spirit … out of the dust of penitence, in sackcloth and ashes”; and the outer ring gives the rule, already quoted, in the language that Forshaw traces to the abbot Trithemius, to Paracelsus and to Dorn: “let the binary be rejected, and the ternary be reduced through the quaternary to the simplicity of the monad”. The alchemical and the human regeneration are one process under one light: “O wonderful regenerative harmony of the macrocosm and the microcosm”, the Amphitheatrum exclaims; the Stone that “more-than-perfects” the metals is the “medicinal saviour” of the great world, and the man who makes it is made by it. The eschatology is that of the plate’s motto — “the eternal jubilee, the great Sabbath” — and of the Pyramides plate, whose legend reads the whole work as a rehearsal of the end: the “seeds of the new earth” that will survive “the burning of the heavens and the melting of the boiling elements” are the “radical humour” of the world — in the physicians’ idiom, the innate moisture on which life depends — that is, Magnesia, from which the world will be “renewed by fire”.²³

The other face of this doctrine — since the regenerate are few — is polemic. Khunrath’s books are full of enemies — “arrant chymists”, “sophists”, “Ardeliones” (busybodies), “school-foxes”, “buffalo-heads”, “Beelzebubian slander-hornets”, “calumniators and slanderous devil’s-hounds” — and the Calumniators plate of 1602 gives most of them animal heads and sets Beelzebub, “prince of the flies”, over them with the instruction “calumniate boldly, something always sticks”. The polemic has a doctrinal function. Fraudulent alchemy is the counterfeit of the true; the “Warnungs-Vermahnung”, the “warning and admonition” that closes the Chaos, describes forty-six fraudulent procedures; the Citadel plate, a bird’s-eye view of a star-shaped fortress with the Stone in its court, surrounds the one true gate with twenty false ones each labelled with a malpractice and a verdict (“deception”, “sophistication”, “vain hope”, “sterile confidence”, “confusion”, “ignominy”); and the owl with spectacles, torches and candles that closes the Magnesia and the Athanor asks, in the German rhyme that became Khunrath’s device, “what use are torches, light or spectacles, if people will not see?” The discipline of secrecy follows from the same conviction. Wisdom “is not given to all”; the properties of Magnesia are withheld so that “not all peasants should find their way into it”; the gate of the citadel says “non omnibus”; the seventh law of the Porta orders that sacred things be “open to the worthy, hidden from the profane”; and the title-page of 1609 addresses the book “e millibus vix uni”, to scarcely one in a thousand. Yet Khunrath also insists, against the guild secrecy of the alchemists, that the thing is hidden by God, not by the philosophers, that it “is known to everyone”, and that in his own writing “partly a Philosophically sound account is given, partly instruction is shown in the Work and to the eye” — enough that the wisdom-loving reader, “convinced by his own Truth-loving Conscience — must and can be content with it”. The two positions stand side by side, and he does not reconcile them.²⁴

Sources and synthesis#

The synthesis is Paracelsian in its frame, Reuchlinian in its Kabbalah, Hermetic in its cosmology and medieval in its alchemy. Paracelsus is “Philippus Theophrastus Paracelsus” among “the most learned men of past times and of our own” in the first grade, and from him come the doctrine of signatures that Khunrath defended at Basel — that every natural thing bears an outward mark of its inward virtue — the “light of nature”, the theory that the diseases of stone and gout are deposits of “tartar” in the body, and the “Archeus”, the inner craftsman that governs digestion and growth; the Paracelsians supply the seven grades (Dorn’s Clavis), the vocabulary of “spagyric” separation — the chemical taking-apart and recombining of substances — and the reading of Genesis as chemistry; Forshaw calls him simply “the Paracelsian Heinrich Khunrath”. Reuchlin’s De verbo mirifico and De arte cabalistica, Pico’s Conclusiones and Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia supply the Kabbalah, with Dee’s Monas hieroglyphica for the Kabbalah of signs; the medieval corpus — Lull and pseudo-Lull, the Turba philosophorum, Bernard of Trier, the Rosarium philosophorum, Senior, Morienus, Dionysius Zacharias — supplies the alchemical authorities that the Magnesia cites by name. The Hermetica — the Greek writings ascribed to the legendary Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus — are present as Ficino’s Latin Pimander, whose opening is engraved on the Pyramides plate beneath the Emerald Tablet (the Tabula smaragdina, the short Hermetic text on the unity of the cosmos that the alchemists treated as their charter) in Latin and German, and as the Tablet’s own “that which is below is as that which is above”, which holds up the obelisks of the 1609 title; Žemla has shown that Khunrath took from Ficino also the metaphysics of light in which divine Wisdom radiates as light and the world-soul as sparks, and that the “light of nature” is for him no metaphor for reason. Philo is cited on the Denarius, Cicero on divine inspiration, Virgil on the profane. The Lutheran background is real but heterodox: the Amphitheatrum is the first printed book to name Valentin Weigel — the dissident Saxon pastor whose mystical writings were then circulating in manuscript and would soon be condemned — outside his own circle, and it names him with Reuchlin, Erasmus, Agrippa and Paracelsus among the learned; the fourteenth-century Dominican Johannes Tauler and the Rhineland mystics supply the contempt for the schoolmen; and Arndt, who praised its author in 1596 and the book in 1599, and whose verses and, probably, whose judgement on the figures stand in the edition of 1609, stands at the book’s cradle. What Khunrath added was the name and the picture: the word “Theosophia” as the common roof of these currents, and the twelve engravings in which their union could be seen.²⁵

Khunrath and the history of esotericism#

The question whether Khunrath was a Gnostic arises only because a nineteenth-century occultist said so. He is not a Gnostic in any historical sense, and no scholar of the last century calls him one: his God creates a good and legible world; his cosmology has nothing of the Gnostic myth’s evil creator or of its imprisonment of spirit in matter; his theology is Trinitarian, scriptural and, in its own understanding, Lutheran; and his “Theosophia” is a knowledge sought in three books that God wrote. The one writer who called him a Gnostic was Éliphas Lévi, for whom Khunrath “represents and sums up the most learned Gnostic schools”, “affects Christianity in his expressions and his signs”, but whose Christ “is that of the Abraxas, the luminous pentagram radiating on the astronomical cross” — a construction of Lévi’s own. What Khunrath does share with the broad sense of “gnosis” that historians of Western esotericism use to define their field is an epistemology: knowledge as a divine gift “not given to all”, recognition beyond knowledge, illumination “mediately and immediately”, an ascent through grades of cognition to union and “likeness”, and a regeneration that he does not hesitate to call deification. In the history of Western esotericism his place is exact. He stands between the Christian Kabbalah of Reuchlin and Agrippa and the theosophy of Boehme, who did not read him but whose editor Franckenberg did; between Paracelsus and the Rosicrucian manifestos — the anonymous tracts of 1614–16 announcing a secret brotherhood of reformers — whose “Magia, Cabala and Alchymia” are his three studies under other names, and whose authors both borrowed from him and repudiated him; and at the head of the line of “theosophers” — Weigel and Arndt beside him, Boehme after, and after Boehme the Boehmists Johann Georg Gichtel and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger — whose common name his books made current. Jung, who quoted him repeatedly from Psychology and Alchemy onwards, read the Amphitheatrum as the clearest case of the projection of psychic contents into matter; Frances Yates read it as the pictorial introduction to the Rosicrucian mind; the historians of alchemy since Forshaw read it as the most elaborate attempt of the Renaissance to make laboratory practice, Christian Kabbalah and prayer one discipline, and to say so in pictures.²⁶

Works#

Khunrath’s writings fall into three groups: the Latin Amphitheatrum, which he called the “Amphitheatre” proper and treated the rest of his life as the trunk from which everything else branched; the German and Latin treatises of 1596–1603 on the matter, the furnace and the fire of the work, which explain one another and refer the reader to the Amphitheatrum; and the medical and occasional pieces, most of them printed after his death. They are taken here in order of composition, the posthumous prints at the dates of their appearance; the engravings, which are as much his work as the words, have a section of their own below.

De signatura rerum naturalium theses (1588) [Theses on the Signatures of Natural Things]#

At a glance. De signatura rerum naturalium theses, Basel, “Typis Oporinianis”, 1588: a quarto of six leaves containing the twenty-eight theses that Khunrath defended before the Basel medical faculty on 24 August 1588 for the doctorate conferred on 3 September. One copy is known, in the University Library at Basel. Argument. The theses set out the Paracelsian doctrine of signatures — that God and Nature “do nothing in vain” and have marked every natural thing with an outward sign of its inward virtue — and extend it, beyond the qualities of things, to their quantities, their sympathies and antipathies and their “hieroglyphic figures”; from it they derive physiognomy, chiromancy and metoposcopy, the reading of the face, the hand and the forehead, and they cite among their authorities Aristotle, Galen, Pliny, Joseph Du Chesne, Tadeáš Hájek and Giambattista della Porta. Paracelsus is not named, but Khunrath later claimed to have been “the first of all since Paracelsus” to defend the doctrine in public, “Della Porta’s Phytognomonica being not yet extant nor seen in Germany”, and the print closes on Reuchlin’s pentagrammaton, “IHSVH veritas aeterna ostende veritatem” — IHSVH, eternal truth, show the truth. Major themes and takeaway. The signature is the first form of the idea that governs all Khunrath’s later work: that the visible world is a text in which God has written, “in hieroglyphic characters”, what things are, and that the physician, the alchemist and the theosopher are readers of one script. The red “diadem” of the finished Stone in the Magnesia of 1599 is still “the signature of highest perfection”, and the “divine characterism of nature, called the signature of natural things”, stands among the fifteen “foundations of my dogmas” on the Calumniators plate of 1602.²⁷

Zebelis Regis … observationes (1592) [Observations of King Zebel]#

Khunrath’s second print was an edition, not a work of his own: Zebelis Regis et Sapientis Arabum vetustissimi, de interpraetatione quorundam accidentium … secundum Lunae motum, per duodecim Zodiaci celestis signa, observationes accuratissimae, Prague, Michael Peterle, 1592, a quarto of ninety leaves in Latin and German, dedicated to the Emperor Rudolf II, with a preface signed at Prague on 23 August 1592 in which Khunrath styles himself physician in ordinary to Vilém of Rožmberk and says the text comes “ex bibliotheca Henrici Khunrath”. “Zebel”, the Arab king and sage, is the pseudonymous author of a medieval astrological manual on the meaning of accidents — sudden, rare and unlooked-for events — according to the moon’s place in the signs; Forshaw calls it “a fairly standard astrological work”. Its interest is biographical: it is the only book Khunrath published in Bohemia, the only one dedicated to the emperor, and the evidence that the theosopher of the Amphitheatrum also practised, and thought worth printing, the ordinary lunar astrology of the courts.²⁸

Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae (1595; 1609) [Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom]#

At a glance. Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae solius verae, christiano-kabalisticum, divino-magicum, nec non physico-chymicum, tertriunum, catholicon — “Amphitheatre of eternal wisdom, alone true, Christian-Kabbalistic, divine-magical and also physico-chymical, thrice-triune, universal” — exists in two editions that are almost two books. The first, made at Hamburg in 1595, is an oblong folio without printer’s name, “in publicum vix mittendum”, scarcely for publication: a prologue of 306 numbered verses from the Proverbs and the Wisdom of Solomon, printed in two parallel Latin versions, the Vulgate and a “new translation” from the Hebrew and Greek, with annotations; an epilogue under a Greek heading; and four large circular engravings by Paullus van der Doort, each surrounded by a wide border of engraved commentary in Latin, Hebrew and Greek. Six copies are recorded; Khunrath himself described the work in 1597 as a “wholly circular and perfect universal or general theatre of the eternal, alone true wisdom”, and it is the four circles, not the letterpress, that he meant by the title. The second edition, “Hanoviae, excudebat Guilielmus Antonius, MDCIX”, is an upright quarto of some 300 pages in two paginations, with an engraved architectural title dated 1602 whose motto has changed to “E millibus vix uni”, to scarcely one in a thousand; a portrait of the author at forty-two; the imperial privilege of 1598; seven dedicatory addresses — to God, to Christ, to the angels, to Scripture, to Nature and to the sciences among them; a preface to the reader by Erasmus Wolfart dated at Wernigerode on 15 March 1609; five commendatory poems, one of them the “theosophical oration to the fountain of wisdom” of “Christianus Cordatus”, who is Johann Arndt; an introduction describing the seven grades; the prologue, now of 365 verses, one for each day of the year, rearranged in the seven grades (first pagination, pp. 23–60); the “interpretations and annotations” on the 365 verses, grade by grade (second pagination, pp. 1–184); the four “Isagogai” or introductions to the circular figures, which are the engraved borders of 1595 set in type (pp. 185–214); an epilogue (pp. 215–222); two folding letterpress tables; and twelve engravings — the title, the portrait, the four circles re-engraved without their borders, the five rectangular “hieroglyphic figures” of 1602 and the small plate of the owl — which every copy binds in a different order. Some copies carry a cancel title of Magdeburg, “apud Levinum Braunss”, dated 1608, the subject of Umberto Eco’s bibliographical essay Lo strano caso della Hanau 1609; unsold sheets were reissued with a Frankfurt title in 1653.²⁹

Argument. The book is formally a commentary and materially a manifesto. Its text is the wisdom literature of Solomon — Proverbs above all, with Wisdom and Sirach — read as the charter of a “Theosophia” that its author presents as at once orthodox and hidden: the “small number of the theosophically learned” perceive the “catholic truth” that the schools have lost. The seven grades of the prologue form a curriculum. The first summons all men to hear eternal Wisdom and her “divine apologist”, and to render the obedience of disciples; here the “pseudo-physicians and academics” are told that their masters have taught them to despise the books of Scripture and Nature, God himself and experience. The second treats perseverance after the divine seed has been received, the ardent love of Wisdom as the sole source of truth and virtue, and the rejection of the “false wisdom” of sophistry and rhetoric. The third praises the beauty and incomparability of Wisdom as the root and foundation of sound philosophy and of the theosophical method. The fourth asks what Wisdom gives, from which Master she must be sought, in which sacred books she is transmitted and how she manifests herself in creation, in Scripture and in inspiration; it is here that the reading of Genesis 1 as the record of the first matter, the Spirit and the “heavens” of fire and water is set out, and the firmament called “God’s wonderful, perpetual, universal macrocosmic laboratory”. The fifth distinguishes who receives Wisdom and who does not — the “theo-philosopher” from the sophist — and lays down the conditions of study and the rules of what may be revealed; here stands the “reformation of magic” and the insistence that God is approached “by praying, not necromantically … as the pseudo-cabalists do”. The sixth describes the goods and gifts of Wisdom, the exercises of her study, use against abuse, fruit and end; and the seventh the contempt of the sophists “as dust”, the steadfast defence of the truth and the readiness to confess it. Through all seven, in the commentary, runs the doctrine of the three books and of “orando et laborando”, the divine origin of the light of nature, the “Cabala of the real” and the “Cabala of the word”, the Stone as “type of IHSVH Christ crucified” and “Servator of the greater world”, and the expectation of the regenerated man. The four Isagogai then read the figures: the first sets the seven “oracular laws” over the Christ-seal and expounds the Names; the second, on the androgyne, is a “know thyself” — “know Jehovah from Holy Scripture, the creature … know thyself” — carried through the theosophical, physical, medical, chymical, magical, “hyperphysico-magical” and cabalistic ways of knowing; the third and longest, on the Rebis, is a treatise on nature “universally and particularly”, on the one world-soul whose “innumerable sparks” dwell in the parts of the world, on the “heaven” that is “the corporeal ethereal spirit or the spiritual ethereal body” firm above and incorporated below, on Azoth, and on the “womb or uterus of the greater world in which the Spirit of God is conceived and made a body”; the fourth, on the oratory-laboratory, is a short “aenigma” ending with the book’s war-cry, “Hallelu-Iah … Phy diabolo”.³⁰

Major themes. The one wisdom in three books. Scripture, Nature and conscience are one revelation; the exegete who reads Proverbs “physically” and “cabalistically” and the alchemist who reads the world “theosophically” are doing the same thing. The reform of the sciences. Theosophy is not a private mysticism but a programme for medicine, physics, magic and Kabbalah, against the “syllogisms” of the schools and the “necromancy” of the magicians; Light. Divine Wisdom is light; the world-soul is fire dispersed as sparks; the theosopher is illuminated; “do not speak of God without light”. Number and Name. The Tetragrammaton as tetraktys, the Names as powers, the ten Sefirot and the “Denarius” bind the Kabbalah to the arithmetic of the Stone. The Stone and Christ. The Son of the great world and the Son of God are types of one another. Regeneration. The end is the “human God”, restored through contrition, obedience and the rejection of the binary to the “simplicity of the monad”.

Esoteric symbolism. The symbolism of the text is that of the figures, treated below: the seal of God with Christ crucified at its centre; the androgynous Adam in the triangle of body, spirit and soul, bounded by the square of the elements; the hermaphroditic Rebis holding the sphere of the first matter, with the Hermetic bird above and the terrestrial globe of Chaos below; and the room in which prayer and work are one. To these the letterpress adds the “Summa” of the folding table, in which the reader is told “learn, O man, to acknowledge God, to know thyself, to know the greater world — Christian-Kabbalistically, divine-magically, physico-chymically — praying in the oratory and working in the laboratory”, and the “Tria sunt” table that aligns the three principles of the world in Moses (earth and water, heaven, Ruach Elohim), in Hermes and the ancient sages (body, spirit, soul), in the philosophers (matter and form) and in the physico-chemists (sulphur and salt, mercury, the fifth essence). The number seven governs the book’s architecture — seven grades, seven dedications, seven laws, seven steps of the Porta — and the number 365 its calendar; the “amphitheatre” itself, a word Yates wrongly thought absent from the text, is the circular “schauplatz” in which the wisdom of God is displayed to the few and hidden from the many.

Relation to other works. The Amphitheatrum is the mother of the rest. The Confessio and Chaos of 1596–97 are, in Khunrath’s own words, confessions of the doctrine of the third figure; the Magnesia of 1599 refers the reader to “the circumference of the third Figure … of my AMPHITHEATRVM SAPIENTIAE AETERNAE” for the definition of the Stone, and the Athanor of 1603 announced the enlarged edition; the Iudicium of 1608 reads the four figures as the pictorial sequel of the prologue. Its models are Dorn’s Clavis for the seven steps, Reuchlin for the Word, the Paracelsian Genesis-alchemy and Dorn for the cosmogony, and Dee’s Monas for the alchemical Kabbalah of signs; its heirs are Arndt’s Liber naturae (the fourth book of Wahres Christentum), the vocabulary of the Rosicrucian manifestos, and, through Jung and Yates, the modern picture of the “religious alchemist”.

Takeaway. The Amphitheatrum is the fullest early-modern attempt to make one discipline of Bible, laboratory and prayer, and to say so in pictures. Its text is repetitive, its Latin crabbed and coined, its Hebrew a physician’s; but its idea — that God is to be known through three books that interpret one another, by a man who prays and works in one room — is stated with a completeness no Paracelsian had reached, and its images made the idea visible to readers who never construed a line of the commentary. The Sorbonne condemned exactly what it had understood: a book in which the mysteries of the Christian religion are read out of the Stone, and the Stone out of Scripture.³¹

Confessio de chao physico-chemicorum catholico (1596) and Vom hylealischen Chaos (1597) [Confession on the Universal Physico-Chemical Chaos and On the Hyleal Chaos]#

At a glance. The doctrine of the third figure was first confessed in Latin: Confessio Henrici Khunrath de chao physico-chemicorum catholico: in quo catholice habitat Azoth sive materia prima mundi, h.e. Mercurius sapientium; ubi Magnesiae (subjecti videlicet lapidis philosophorum catholici) conditiones fideliter recensentur — “Confession of Heinrich Khunrath concerning the catholic Chaos of the physico-chemists, in which Azoth, or the first matter of the world, that is, the Mercury of the wise, catholically dwells; where the conditions of Magnesia (namely the subject of the catholic Philosophers’ Stone) are faithfully recounted” — Magdeburg, 1596, a duodecimo of fifty-six pages, its preface signed “Hamburgi degens”. No copy of 1596 has been located online; the text is known from the reprint of Strasbourg, 1699. Within a year Khunrath turned it into a German book eight times as long: Von hylealischen, das ist, pri-materialischen catholischen oder algemeinem natürlichen Chaos der naturgemessen Alchymiae und Alchymisten, wiederholete, vernewerte und wolvermehrte naturgemeß-alchymisch und rechtlehrende philosophische Confessio oder Bekentnus Henrici Khunrath Lips., Magdeburg, the heirs of Andreas Gene, 1597, a duodecimo of twelve preliminary leaves and 469 pages, the author styled “lover of divine wisdom and doctor of both medicines”; the preface, a “short defensive and justificatory preface to the well-meaning reader”, is dated at Magdeburg, 13 June 1597. It has ten numbered chapters without descriptive titles and, at pages 440–69, a “Trewhertzige Warnungs-Vermahnung eines getrewen Liebhabers der Warheit … an alle wahre Alchymisten” — a “faithful warning and admonition of a true lover of truth to all true alchemists” — signed with the pseudonym “Ricenus Thrasibulus”. A second edition appeared at Magdeburg in 1616, the Warnung separately in 1678, a modernised reprint at Frankfurt in 1708 with the first biography of Khunrath, by an editor signing “G. C. J.”, a further modernisation at Leipzig in 1786 as Alchymisch philosophisches Bekenntnis vom universellen Chaos der naturgemässen Alchymie, and a facsimile of the 1708 text at Graz in 1990. It is, after the Amphitheatrum, the work by which Khunrath was read.³²

Argument. The ten chapters, as Forshaw summarises them from the copy Khunrath gave to Wolfart, treat in turn the creation of the first matter, the Chaos; the usefulness of Kabbalah to alchemy; the light of nature; the Green Lion and the Philosophers’ Stone; the true subject of the Stone; the Stone’s nature from the monad to the quintessence; the Mercury of the wise and the properties of salt; the harmony of Christ and the Stone; the tests by which what has been made can be known; and theosophical living, in which prayer and work are joined. Its governing image is the “hyleal” Chaos — from the Greek hyle, matter — the “pri-material”, first-material, “catholic or general natural Chaos” of nature-conforming alchemy: the universal first matter of the world, which the Ruach Elohim animated at the creation and which still exists, and in which “Azoth”, the living Mercury of the philosophers, “catholically dwells”. The Spirit of the Lord that moved on the waters is identified with “the essential form” of things, with the soul of the world and with the light of nature; the Chaos is “hyle catholica”; the fiery “little sparks” of the world-spirit (“Füncklein”, “Feuer-Funcklein”) are dispersed through all things and gathered in the one. The book supplies the etymologies that the plates and the Magnesia presuppose: “Magnesia” is “Magnes-Jah”, the magnet of God, or “magnum AES-JAH”, the great ore of God; “Elixir” is “El”, the Mighty, with I and X, one and ten, and Greek eir, “a bright shine, flash and spark of the uniquely Mighty and Strong”. It states the two-book hermeneutic — “book explains book, one book interprets and explains the other: the book of biblical Scripture the book of nature, and the book of nature in return the book of biblical Scripture” — and the doctrine of the eighth chapter, the harmony of Christ and the Stone. It is the most personal of Khunrath’s books. Here he defends the word “Gottweislich” against the calumniator; here he dates his alchemy to its twenty-third year; here, in the fourth chapter, he breaks into a rhapsody of vision — “I saw the GREEN catholic LION of Nature and of the nature-conforming alchemists: the green DUENECH …” — on the colour that is the “blessed greenness” of the Rebis plate; and here he promises the Christian Kabbalist and divine mage “a true and heavenly APOCALYPSIS of things past, present and to come, in the Stone of the wise”. The Warnung that closes it is the practical counterpart: a catalogue of forty-six fraudulent procedures of the “Arg-Chymisten”, the wicked chymists, that shows, as Žemla observes, a “skilled laboratory practitioner” who knew every trick of the trade, and that Michael Maier plundered for his Examen fucorum pseudo-chymicorum of 1617.³³

Major themes. The one matter. The Chaos is not a hypothesis but a thing, created, animated and still present, in which the whole of the work lies hidden. Kabbalah in the service of alchemy. The Hebrew Names and the letters of Genesis are the key to the matter’s identity. The light of nature as a real light, dispersed as sparks, not a metaphor. Vision. Khunrath writes as one who has seen. Fraud and truth. The true art is defined against its counterfeits. Esoteric symbolism. The Chaos of Genesis 1:2 becomes the alchemical prima materia; the Spirit on the waters becomes the Mercury of the philosophers and the world-soul; the Green Lion and the “blessed greenness” (benedicta viriditas) are the living, vegetating power of the matter; Azoth, the word built from the first and last letters of Latin, Greek and Hebrew, names the whole from beginning to end. Relation to other works. The Chaos is the Confessio enlarged, the Symbolum of 1598 is the same creed compressed, and the Magnesia of 1599 refers the reader back to “the first chapter of my Confessio” and to its eighth. Takeaway. The Chaos is the fullest and most practical of Khunrath’s German books, and the one in which the laboratory alchemist, the visionary and the polemicist are all audible; its warning against fraud is the most reprinted thing he wrote.

Symbolum physico-chymicum and Naturgemes-alchymisch Symbolum (1598) [Physico-Chemical Creed and Nature-Conforming Alchemical Creed]#

At a glance. Two small pamphlets from the Hamburg press of Philipp von Ohr for the heirs of Hans Binder, in identical types and borders: the Latin Symbolum physico-chymicum Henrici Khunrath Lips. … de chao physico-chymicorum catholico, naturali, triuno, mirabili atque mirifico, secretissimo: lapidis philosophorum universalis et magni subiecto genuino ac proprio, materiave debita et unica (twenty-two pages) and the German Naturgemes-alchymisch Symbolum, oder gahr kurtze Bekentnus Henrici Khunrath Lips., beyder Artzney Doct., von allgemeinem, natürlichen, dreyeinigen, wunderbaren und wunderthätigen, allergeheimbsten Chao der naturgemessen Alchymisten (twenty-three pages), both dated 1598 on the imprint and both subscribed “12 December, about eight in the evening, 1597”, the German with the attestation “GOTTweißlich hats Doct. KHVNRATH gesagt” and a hymn dated 23 December. They are dedicated “in honour of Jehovah, eternal, most wise, best, almighty, infinite, merciful, the only God”, and “for the common God-wise profit of his neighbour and himself”, and they are the earliest of his books to carry the ten-year imperial privilege of 1 June 1598. The German title bears the mottoes “Auß Vnuerstandt vnnd Neyd geschicht Verleumbdung. Pfuy dem Lesterer!” — from ignorance and envy comes slander; fie on the blasphemer — and the Latin closes “Ars non habet osorem, nisi ignorantem”, art has no hater but the ignorant.³⁴

Argument. The Symbolum is a creed — a “symbolum” in the theological sense — and Žemla has shown that it is a rewriting of the Athanasian Creed in which the theological terms are replaced by alchemical ones, “the body of salt” for “man”, “the womb of Chaos” for “the womb of Mary”. Whoever would be a “nature-conforming chymical philosopher” must hold that there is one natural universal Chaos “in a triune being, namely of body, spirit and soul”, not three but one subject; that “the body is Mercury, the spirit is Mercury, the soul is Mercury”, yet not three Mercuries but one catholic Mercury, the Azoth of the wise; that the Ruach Elohim, “the Spirit of the Lord which in Genesis 1 hovered upon the water”, became embodied “mediantibus Schamaim”, by the mediation of the heavens; that Magnesia is “the preserver and saviour of the great world”; that the Stone, the “Filius Macrocosmi”, like Christ descended into its sepulchre, died, rose and ascended, and will at the consummation judge “all the fruits of the elements”, vegetable, animal and mineral, in body, spirit and soul; and, finally, that no chymist will ever attain the Stone who does not believe this catholic doctrine. Major themes, symbolism and takeaway. The pamphlet is the harmony of Christ and the Stone in its most audacious form, the Quicunque vult of the laboratory, and it was this compressed statement — the Stone’s “birth, passion, death, resurrection” — that Libavius denounced in 1615 as an application to the Stone of “the highest benefits of the Son of God”. A reprint of the Latin Symbolum was planned for the fifth volume of Zetzner’s Theatrum chemicum (1622), seventeen years after Khunrath’s death, but its editor Isaac Habrecht dropped it. Its interest for the historian is that it shows the analogy not as a decoration but as an article of faith, to be confessed in the form of the Church’s own creeds.³⁵

Magnesia catholica philosophorum (1599) [Universal Magnesia of the Philosophers]#

At a glance. Magnesia catholica philosophorum; Das ist, Höheste Nothwendigkeit in Alchymia, auch mügliche Uberkommung, augenscheinliche Weisung und gnugsame Erweisung catholischer verborgener Magnesiae, des geheimen wunderthetigen Universal Steins naturgemeß-chymischer Philosophorum rechten und allein wahren pri-materialischen Subiecti — “Magnesia catholica of the philosophers; that is, the highest necessity in alchemy, and also the possible obtaining, ocular showing and sufficient demonstration of the catholic hidden Magnesia, the right and alone true first-material subject of the secret wonder-working Universal Stone of the nature-conforming chymical philosophers” — “von Henrico Khunrath Lips., Theosophiae amatore & Medicinae utriusque Doctore, wolgegründet gestellet und herfür gegeben, Anno 1599”, with the counsel “Ließ; Verstehes; Als dann vrtheile” — read, understand it, then judge — and Seneca’s “Nunquam melius torquebis invidos, quam virtuti & gloriae inserviendo” on the title; colophon “Gedruckt zu Magdeburg bey Johann Bötcher, im Jahr M.D.XCIX. Bey Johann Francken zu bekommen”. An octavo of 187 pages within rules, German in Fraktur and Latin in roman, with marginal glosses throughout, followed by a leaf of nineteen errata keyed to page and line, the woodcut of the owl with the rhyme “Was helffn Fackeln, Liecht oder Brilln, wann die Leute nicht sehen wölln” and the acclamation “Floreat, floreat, floreat MAGNESIA Philosophorum CATHOLICA, de qua in hoc Tractatu meo!” There is no patron; the book is addressed to the “son of doctrine” and against the sophists. It was modernised, condensed to 112 pages and shorn of its marginalia by Johann Christoph Lenz for Adam Friedrich Böhme of Leipzig in 1784 — a recension whose editor confesses to having brought Khunrath’s “confused Latin-German writing style” into “better order and connection”, and which cannot stand for the original.³⁶

Argument. The treatise has no chapters; it is a single continuous demonstration, articulated by marginal glosses, by three “trumpets of truth” and by a series of objections and answers, and ending in a “Beschluß” (pp. 164–66) and an appended defence. It opens (pp. 5–9) on the Name: “A IOVE, that is, IEHOVAH, Principium Musae; from GOD the LORD comes the beginning of the investigation of all things”; “every good gift and every perfect gift comes down from above, from the Father of Lights”. The Stone is “NATVRAE BONVM, per artem, SVMMVM — the highest GOOD of Nature, which must be brought about and can be attained through the help of Art”, and “DONVM DEI triunius Catholici triunum Catholicon” — “a singular and great, triune VNIVERSAL GIFT of the triune universal GOD, which He bestows upon the triune catholic Man; out of the triune Hermaphroditic universal SON of the greater World; under a Triune Regimen; unto a universally profitable, triune USE and END”, “as has also been reported in the circumference of the third Figure … of my AMPHITHEATRVM SAPIENTIAE AETERNAE”; it is “a mirror of the knowledge of GOD, of Nature, and of Our own selves”. The philosophers say “that there are two secrets of this art: the first, the recognition of its true MATERIA; the other, the right preparation” — and this book is about the first, “the Catholic SON of the greater World … (whose Philosophical Name is MAGNESIA)”.

The necessity of knowing the one matter follows (pp. 10–15). “Frustra quaeritur in eo, in quo quod quaesitum est, non continetur — In vain does one seek in a thing that in which the thing sought for is not,” as Bernard of Trier cites from the Turba; “whoever fails in the debita materia is like a wayfarer who does not travel the right road. If he is minded to journey from Nuremberg out to Venice, and were to draw off over the Brocksberg toward the promontorium Tabin — how should he arrive where he ought?” The seeker must “search that same out most diligently (by IEHOVAH’s leading), at once historicè, physicè and Theosophicè, so long until, besides the being able, you also learn to recognize it”; then he has “the ONE hidden thing and the true BEGINNING of this high Art: namely, the secret First-Material Universal Magnesia of the Wise … the Natural and proper FIELD of the Nature-conforming and artful making-to-grow, Regeneration, and More-than-perfecting of Silver and Gold”; “in this right beginning he already has … half the Art”, and the rest “must be begged of the merciful GOD, diligently sought after, and awaited with patience until His time”.

Against the “laborants” who hold that there are several universals in alchemy, because all things came from the first matter and the “most secret SPIRIT of the WORLD, NATVRE, the SOUL of the World” is in all things (pp. 16–24), Khunrath argues that the Stone is universal only because it is prepared from a universal subject and works universally upon all natural things; “as many things, so many Philosophical STONES can be made by Art out of them”, but every specified thing yields only a specified stone; the Spirit of the Lord is in all, “but IN EACH ONE HE IS NOT CATHOLIC. In no other whatever, but in MAGNESIA Philosophorum CATHOLICA alone, does He dwell Synopticè-Catholicè”; and the argument ends in the creed of unities — one God, one world, one first matter, one Saviour, one faith, one Church, one Head, IHSVH CHRISTVS, one Stone — and the thesis “that in ALCHYMIA there is no more than only ONE VNIVERSALE”.

The three trumpets (pp. 24–32) are blown against those, “at Court, in the high Schools, and elsewhere, among Clergy and Laity”, who deny that the Stone ever existed: first, “the frequent EXPERIENTIA”, the transmutations “many times demonstrated at various places and by various People” in Germany in Khunrath’s own time, whose names he withholds; second, the “manifold wonderful Monuments and Nature-conforming Writings” of the philosophers, ancient and modern, unanimous on the subject, the preparation and the use of the Stone, so that “more credit is to be given to the truthful crowd of those who rightly philosophise and labour physico-chemically than to a handful who speak wrongly or to the fallacious multitude of the ignorant”, and “every craftsman is to be believed in his own art”; third, “the wonderful Harmonia analogica of the wonder-working Lapis Philosophorum with IHSVH CHRISTVS, THE WORD OF GOD THE FATHER INCARNATE, THE WONDER-WORKER — and conversely”, to be proved at length in a book “de Veritate, Antiquitate & Praestantia LAPIDIS Philosophorum, ac ALCHYMIAE” that never appeared. God, he concludes, still has “His own — though very, very few, yet some of them, among whom I, without idle boasting, am the least … to whom He lets the CHAOS PRI-MATERIALE of the Wise, that is, the MAGNESIA Philosophorum Catholica, the VNIVERSAL Subiectum of the VNIVERSAL STONE of the Wise, be not only known but also wonderfully and well recognized”.

The pseudo-Magnesias (pp. 33–43) come next: the curious, some of them Herods “who also searched diligently indeed for the little Child IHSuh, whose true Counterfeit out of the Divine great World-book of Nature is MAGNEsia — yet not to the same End as the Wise”, guess bismuth, chimney-soot, pebbles, saltpetre, bolus, ruddle, quicklime, brick, vitriol, arsenic, “star-shot”, firestone, antimony ore, gold-quartz, bloodstone; asked why, “they say: We have heard it so”; but “to know is to know a thing through its causes”, and “ONE alone it is Among All, and no other whatever besides. Hanc mihi elegit proposuitque Natura! hanc (& mediatè & immediatè) mihi ostendit RVACH HHOCHMAH-EL! … Tu mihi sola places!” The touchstone is whether a candidate matter shows “ALL (ALL, I say) those Properties, Qualities and Conditions” the treatise teaches; the reader who finds it will be converted like Saul on the road, “the scales of blindness” falling from his eyes, and will “recognize and confess that MAGNESIA CATHOLICA … is the SON of the great World, and the only true subiectum of the LAPIS Philosophorum CATHOLICVS, the Natural and Nature-conforming, artful SERVATOR of the great World”.

Then the demonstration proper (pp. 43–52), under the heading “MERCKET AVFF”, mark this well, in three steps that the margin numbers: first, to show “out of the First two chapters of the First book of MOSES, what the MATERIA PRIMA of the whole great edifice of the material WORLD may be”; second, to show “ONE NATURAL THING — also according to the teaching of the Philosophical saying, ubi Natura desinit, ibi Ars incipit, where NATURE leaves off, there Art begins — to which Man’s Hand or the help of Art has never yet come”, which “the whole World has it before its Eyes, and knows it, and moreover can call it by its own proper Name”, yet, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, does not recognise; “In the eyes of the undiscerning it is a mean, contemptible thing, known to everyone, but recognized by very few. It is only a matter of the knowing!” This thing “has in Itself ALL that it needs for the VNIVERSAL constitution of the LAPIS Philosophorum”, so that the craftsman need only, in the fore-work, dissolve, cleanse and separate, and in the after-work “rightly Compose, REUNITE, COAGULATE, FIX and INCERATE the Pure parts in their right Weight” — “Solve; Coagula; Fige” — nothing entering “that has not previously also gone out of it”. It is “of just such MATERIA as that from which GOD built the great edifice of the material World”, but “not in such wise as those Vegetables, Animals, Minerals and Metals severally came to be from it … specified or fixed in kind”; rather, “in the state of the Catholic First Matter … as the MATERIA PRIMA CATHOLICA was at that time — created at the beginning of the World by GOD out of NOTHING, and CATHOLICLY animated … with the UNIVERSAL NATURE (that most secret and most hidden Spirit or Soul of the World)”, ensouled “with a Synoptically-Catholic fiery little Spark of the FIERY CATHOLIC NATURE”, “truly a peculiarly secret and Masterly art-piece of NATURE, of subtle Catholic Separation and Composition of BODY, SPIRIT and SOUL out of the great World’s BODY, SPIRIT and SOUL, into ONE first-material CHAOS of its own. The Chymical Philosophers’ MICROCOSMVS macrocosmicus, non humanus — a great-Worldly, not a Human, little World. And thence: ex spermate MVNDI maioris, MACROCOSMI FILIVS, ὁμοούσιος, coessentialis atque consubstantialis parenti — out of the Seed of the great World, a SON of the great World, like unto its Begetter”; and third, that it is “above the Earth, of just that same UNIVERSAL MATTER out of which NATURE … has at every time begotten, and universally still begets, all the Metals in the Earth”.

The conclusion names it (pp. 52–55): “the first-material and universal CHAOS of the Physico-Chymists … MAGNESIA, or MAGNES-IAH, and the SATVRN of the wise; the MINE OF THE ART; the true and single VNIVERSAL SVBIECTVM of the Philosophical VNIVERSAL STONE”, which, dissolved into first-material water, “either still Azothically watery, or else Azothically coagulated and fixed”, is “the REGENERATION FIELD of Silver and Gold”; and within it lie the philosophers’ numbers — one, the crude catholic Mercury; two, “its Man and Wife, the working and the suffering; REBIS”; three, body, spirit and soul, salt, mercury and sulphur; four, the elements “animated … with the FIFTH ESSENCE; ALL in ONE Natural SVBIECTO” — out of which, “by the help of Vulcan”, the artist brings forth “their real Physical Denarius: more-than-perfected, and the HIGHEST GOOD of Nature through ART — that is, the WONDER-WORKING CATHOLIC STONE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS, adorned with a most ruddy diadem (the SIGNATURE of highest perfection)”. Other properties Khunrath withholds “that not all Peasants should find their way into it”; the “exceedingly wonderful analogical HARMONY” of Magnesia and the Stone with Christ, “and conversely” (pp. 56–59), is set out in full, with the promise of the two unwritten books; and to the question “can one then really have such a thing? … Is it also to be obtained?” the answer is “Yes — GOD be praised — one can have it, and, as opportunity serves, obtain it richly, as much as is needful to every son of the Doctrine”.

The second half of the treatise (pp. 59–164) is refutation and instruction. The artist is not to try to make the first matter of metals out of the metals with “foreign Waters, corrosive harmful Spirits, and the like sophistries”: “It is wasted Labour: For there always remains something of metal, though not a metal”; the “SPECIFICATION” cannot be stripped off; metals “will, shall and must be reduced into THE FIRST MATTER in no other way than only, again, through THE FIRST MATTER”; and the artist should be content with what “NATURE (GOD’S Deputy in Natural things, and the shrewd Woman-Labourer appointed to this end)” has prepared for him “in the VNIVERSAL LABORATORY OF GOD — understand, in the whole great wide World”. The Chaos “and no other” is “THE FIRST VNIVERSAL MATTER OF METALS … the Mine of the Art”; Bernard of Trier’s polemic against the bare elements does not touch it, and the Rosarium, with Dionysius Zacharias, teaches that “the Crude MERCVRIVS of the Philosophers (namely, MAGNESIA) is such as NATVRE has worked upon a very little … and has formed into a … metallic form (not into a Metal …) yet left it imperfect”. The later pages return to the sophistical preparations of silver and gold with tartar, urine-salts and spirit of wine; describe the regeneration of the depurated matter, “AZOTH sive Mercurius Philosophorum Animatus, Catholicus, Vivus”, in the philosophical athanor “through putrefaction, coagulation, fixation and inceration” into “the Universal Stone of the philosophers”; locate the salt of the philosophers — “in salt are the labours … it is found in that catholic ocean or sea of the philosophers, which is Magnesia”; answer the sceptic who asks “has Doctor Khunrath then nothing certain in the Art — how dare he speak so certainly of MAGNESIA?” with the reply that the first philosopher too had to know the matter before he made the Stone, as Bernard knew the art two years before he achieved it; and defend the Christological analogy before “the theologians”, offering “very many similar examples, for Papists, Lutherans, Calvinists and the rest, each from their own theological writings”, since “in the whole of nature there is no matter in which the Harmonia analogica with IHSVH Christ so exactly holds as in this”. The “Beschluß” ends with the Nunc dimittis rewritten for the laboratory — the chymist who receives Magnesia from the Holy Spirit may say “LORD, now lettest thou thy servant laborate in peace upon the chymical philosophers’ STONE, as thou wilt; for mine eyes have seen thy medicinal SAVIOUR of the great world, a true symbolic likeness and natural counterfeit of the SAVIOUR of the human race, IHSVH Christ, in the divine great world-book of Nature” — and a “Prognosticon” that the theology of the world-book will vindicate the doctrine of “the SON of the great World, in this last quarrelsome century”; “whoever does not enter this Art by the right door is a sophist and a wanderer. MAGNESIA Catholica is the first-material door of Nature.”³⁷

Major themes. Recognition. The whole book turns on erkennen, the recognition of a thing “known to everyone”; the alchemist’s first virtue is to see what is before his eyes. Unity. One God, one world, one matter, one Saviour, one Stone: the universal can come only from the universal. Nature as God’s deputy. The matter is prepared “in the universal laboratory of God”, and the artist’s part is to receive, dissolve, cleanse and recompose, never to make. Specification. Everything that has taken a species — gold, silver, antimony — is disqualified; only the unspecified can be universal. Experience against sophistry. The trumpets of truth are experience, testimony and analogy, and the sceptic is answered with the rule of causes. The Stone and Christ. The matter is Christ’s “counterfeit” in the book of nature, and the book’s last word is Simeon’s. Esoteric symbolism. Magnesia is the magnet of God, the hidden Name in the visible thing; the Emmaus road and Herod’s search are figures of recognition and of its abuse; the Nicene homoousios is transferred to the relation of the world to its Son; the numbers one to four and the Denarius of Philo are the inner structure of the matter; the red diadem is the signature of perfection; the owl at the end is the reader who will not see. Relation to other works. The Magnesia is the systematic statement of the third figure of the Amphitheatrum, to which it refers; it cites “the first chapter of my Confessio” and its eighth, “my treatise on the philosophical Athanor”, and promises three books that were never printed — on the truth, antiquity and excellence of the Stone, the “Apocalypsis” of Magnesia and the “Harmonia analogica”. Takeaway. Of all Khunrath’s books this is the clearest, because it has one thesis and argues it; a reader who wants to know what he meant by the one matter, why he thought there could be only one, and how far he was prepared to press the analogy of the Stone with Christ, will find it here, in his own German and Latin, with the laboratory practice of the fore-work and after-work stated as plainly as he ever stated it — and the identity of the matter withheld, in the end, “that not all peasants should find their way into it”.³⁸

Warhafftiger Bericht vom philosophischen Athanor (1599; 1603; 1615) [True Account of the Philosophical Athanor]#

At a glance. Warhafftiger Bericht vom philosophischen Athanor, auch Brauch und Nutz desselbigen — “True report of the philosophical Athanor, and its use and profit” — Magdeburg, Johann Bötcher, 1599, an octavo of thirty-three pages printed with the imperial privilege; enlarged as a second edition in 1603, sixty pages, published by the author without place or printer’s name — presumably at Magdeburg, for Johann Francke — with the author “Magdeburgi pro tempore habitans”; and as a third, “Editio tertia, & auctior”, 1615, “in Verlegung des Autoris”, again without place, sixty pages within a woodcut border and with woodcuts of the furnace, closing “Hallelu-JAH! Hallelu-JAH! Hallelu-JAH! Henricus Khunrath Lips., Theosophiae amator fidelis, & Medicinae utriusque Doctor” and, on its last leaf, the owl. The “1597” sometimes given for the first edition is an error; the Magnesia of 1599 already cites “my treatise on the philosophical Athanor” in its margin, and no copy of 1597 exists. A modernised reprint, Wahrhafter Bericht vom philosophischen Athanor, was issued by Adam Friedrich Böhme at Leipzig in 1783 “on account of its exceedingly great rarity”, “cleansed of its German faults of language without injury to the sense”, with the first bibliography of Khunrath’s writings, a “historical preliminary report on all his works”, and an engraved folding plate of the furnace by Heinrich Müller, “Ecce! Siehe!”, redrawn from the woodcut of the early editions.³⁹

Argument. The treatise opens on “the highest necessity of a right governance of the fire”, the point on which, in the alchemists’ own confession, most operations failed, and describes “my own invention”: an athanor — the “immortal” furnace of the medieval books — heated not by charcoal but by a lamp, so as to give “a constant, ever-lasting, even fire”, with a lamp whose two, three or four tubes can heat as many furnaces at once. Khunrath says he had tried the lamp-fire “already eighteen years before”, “with as many as nine wicks and in two kinds of lamp, in two ways”; he cites the Liber Saturni that no fitting fire can be given save in its own fitting furnace, and Lull on the property of the athanor; he lays down the philosophers’ rule of “one furnace, one vessel, one fire”; and he concedes that “the furnace and the vessel are better learned from the sight of the work itself than from description alone”. The enlarged editions of 1603 and 1615 added the announcement of the new Amphitheatrum, “Christiano-Kabalistico, Divino-Magico … Physico-Chymico”. Major themes and takeaway. The Athanor is the laboratory book, the counterpart of the Magnesia: as that treats the first secret of the art, the matter, this treats the instrument of the second, its preparation, and it is the plainest evidence that the theosopher of the Amphitheatrum was, in Žemla’s phrase, “a skilled laboratory practitioner”. Its doctrine of the fire is completed by the posthumous De igne magorum.⁴⁰

The Consilium on the armour of Achilles (1597; printed 1615)#

At a glance. A manuscript of 1597, “Consilium de Vulcani magica fabrefactione armorum Achillis Graecorum omnium fortissimi et cedere nescii” — “Counsel on Vulcan’s magical forging of the armour of Achilles, strongest of all the Greeks and one who knew not how to yield” — now in the Royal Library at Stockholm (MS Rål. 4), with a dedication by Conrad Khunrath, who hawked his brother’s text to Duke Charles of Södermanland, regent and later king of Sweden, and to the Landgrave Maurice of Hesse; printed, without Khunrath’s consent and long after his death, as the first eighty-six pages of Johannes Staricius’s HeldenSchatz — “Heroes’ Treasure, that is, natural-scientific consideration upon and concerning the Vulcanic and also natural magical fabrication and preparation of the weapons of the hero Achilles in Greece” — Frankfurt, Nicolaus Stein, 1615, and pirated at Erfurt in 1616; the rest of the HeldenSchatz is not his. Johannes Burggrav’s Achilles Panoplos redivivus (1613) had already plagiarised it. Argument. Taking Homer’s shield and Vulcan’s forge as a real recipe, Khunrath prescribes an “electrum magicum” of the seven metals — ten parts gold, ten silver, five mercury, five copper, two tin, two lead and one iron — purified and alloyed under the planetary hours and aspects, stamped with a steel die bearing the characters of Mars, of its intelligence Graphiel and of its demon Barzabel, and breathed upon with incantations “with an angry, cruel, warlike voice”, so that the armour made of it should strike fear into the enemy as the basilisk’s gaze kills; the talismans (gamahaea) and characters are engraved on iron under favourable constellations. Hereward Tilton, who has studied the manuscript, traces its sources to Agrippa, the pseudo-Paracelsian Archidoxis magica, Ficino’s De amore and Della Porta. Takeaway. The Consilium is the “physical and hyperphysical magic” of the Amphitheatrum in practice, and the plainest evidence that Khunrath’s “divine magic” stood on the ordinary astral and talismanic magic of the Renaissance; he cited it himself in De igne magorum.⁴¹

The medical works: Quaestiones tres per-utiles (1607) and Tractatus physico-medicus (1611)#

At a glance. Quaestiones tres per-utiles, haud-quaquam praetermittendae, nec non summè necessariae, cum curationem, tum praecautionem absolutam, perfectam & veram arenae, sabuli, calculi, podagrae, gonagrae, chiragrae, aliorumque morborum tartareorum microcosmi seu mundi minoris, hominis puta, concernentes; Das ist, Hochnützliche, unumbgängliche und gar nothwendige drei Fragen … — three most useful questions concerning the cure and prevention of sand, gravel, the stone, gout of the feet, knees and hands “and other tartaric diseases of the microcosm or lesser world, that is, of man” — Leipzig, “bey Thomas Schürer Buchführer”, 1607, printed at Eisleben by Bartholomaeus Hörnig, an octavo of fifty-six unnumbered pages in Latin and German with the motto “Praestent meliora periti”, dedicated to “the great treasurer of sincerer wisdom, the Hermes of England, John Dee”, to Joseph Du Chesne, physician to Henri IV and “most religious Druid of the sacred Vulcanic-spagyric rites”, and to Peter Holland of Hamburg, “the Hippocrates of Germany”, with a commendatory poem by Zacharias Brendel of Jena; reissued at Frankfurt and Leipzig in 1788. Tractatus physico-medicus von recht gründlicher … Curation Tartari, Grieses, Sandes, Steins …, Hof, Matthäus Pfeilschmidt, 1611, a quarto of fifty-five pages, edited by Johannes Thurnmüntzer from a text Khunrath had subscribed “at the root of the Hercynian forest, at the Harz, before the Brocksberg”, in a year the subscription as reported does not settle. Argument. Both are Paracelsian tartar-pathology. The diseases of the stone and of gout are coagulations of “tartar”, the earthy salt that the body fails to separate from its nourishment; the three questions ask whether the “philosophically dissolved salts of gems and stones”, spagyrically prepared, are not far superior to stones merely ground to powder, whether such dissolved salts are not therefore the true “conclusive remedy” for the tartaric diseases — like curing like — and whether a “lover of natural secrets” is not bound to prepare and supply them. The vocabulary is that of the alchemical books — mercury, sulphur and salt, the Stone as the highest arcanum — and the dedication to Dee is the last word Khunrath addressed to him. Takeaway. The medical works show the “doctor of both medicines” of the title pages at his trade, and place him, with Du Chesne and Croll, in the iatrochemical school for whom the salts of the physician and the salt of the philosophers were one study.⁴²

De igne magorum philosophorumque secreto externo et visibili (1608) [On the Secret External and Visible Fire of the Magi and Philosophers]#

At a glance. De igne magorum philosophorumque secreto externo et visibili: Das ist, Philosophische Erklährung von und über dem geheymen, eusserlichen, sichtbaren Gludt- und Flammenfewer der uhralten Magorum oder Weysen und andern wahren Philosophen — “On the secret outer and visible fire of the magi and philosophers: that is, a philosophical explanation of and concerning the secret, outward, visible glow- and flame-fire of the ancient magi or sages and other true philosophers” — “durch H. Heinricum Khunrath … Göttlicher Weißheit getrewen Liebhabers und beyder Artzney Doctoris”, Strasbourg, “in Verlegung Lazari Zetzners”, 1608, an octavo of eight preliminary and 157 pages, edited by Benedictus Figulus (Töpfer), “beneben andern zweyen Tractätlein”: an anonymous “Judgement of an experienced Kabbalist and philosopher on the four figures of the great Amphitheatre of Dr Heinrich Khunrath” (pp. 107–23), and a pseudo-Paracelsian tract on the tincture and oil of antimony, “hitherto falsely spread under the name of Roger Bacon”, from the library of Georg Schwalenberg, canon of Fritzlar. It opens with an anonymous “Paraenesis” to the reader: “since for the working of all wonders two things suffice, namely fire and earth, as Hermes, wisest of philosophers, says”, and since few except this author have explained the fire the spagyric work requires, the reader is exhorted to the treatise. Reprinted at Strasbourg in 1700 and, “with Johann Arndt’s philosophical-kabbalistic judgement on the first four figures of the great Khunrathian Amphitheatre”, at Leipzig in 1783; a Czech volume of four of Khunrath’s treatises, Oheň mágů (“The Fire of the Magi”), took its title from it in 2019.⁴³

Argument. The outer, visible fire is “the principal agent” of the work, and Khunrath distinguishes its kinds: the fire of the sun, the “heavenly and solar fire”; the fire kindled “through and from the sun’s hot rays”, caught “pure and clean in tinder” and kept perpetually burning; the candle or lamp lit from the sun; the fires of Vulcan at Lemnos kindled by lightning; the fires of altars and of the vestals. The Stone, he insists, requires solar fire. The book contains his most programmatic sentence on the three arts — “Kabala, Magia, Alchymia conjugendae: they shall and must be used together and beside one another” — his boast of “physical and hyperphysical MAGIA, in natural and supernatural wisdom”, and his defence of the weapon-salve, “in Latin called unguentum armarium”, against those who cannot conceive “natural contact other than corporeal”, with a cross-reference to his own counsel “on the forging of the arms of Achilles”. The appended Iudicium is a letter of private counsel to a nobleman who had asked for a judgement on the Amphitheatrum: “The whole work is divided into two principal parts: the first, which the author (Doctor Khunrath of blessed memory) called the Prologue, consists of the sayings of Solomon, not indeed in the order in which they stand in the Bible, but drawn together in a special order that suits the author’s intent”; Solomon laid in these books “the ground and foundation of natural Magic, supernatural Kabbalah and divine Theology”; “the whole ground is: Initium Sapientiae Timor Domini”; and “what the author of the Amphitheatrum taught in words in the Prologue, that he now wishes further to show to the eye in the four figures”. Its reading of the figures is by the doctrine of the three lights: “Magic is a light, and the knowledge of all natural things”; “Kabbalah is a supernatural light and spirit, an angelic light”, and “where Magic leaves off, there Kabbalah begins, and where Kabbalah leaves off, Theology begins”; “the first figure teaches principally the Kabbalah, though Magic is mixed in; the second teaches Magic; the third Chymia — for Chymia is a species and part of Magic, and no one will ever understand true Chymia who does not first learn and grasp Magic”; the fourth “teaches theology in the oratory, and theology is nothing other than alloquium divinum, a conversation with God through prayer and through the Holy Spirit”. Alchemy, it adds, “has three operations: in the first the Mercury of the philosophers is made; out of that, in the second, the Luna of the philosophers; out of that, in the third, the Sol of the philosophers”, and the fire of the work “is no natural fire … it is an astral fire, an ethereal fire, and comes through Magic; therefore all who have had the Stone have been magi” — a reading that goes beyond Khunrath’s own text on the fire. The attribution to Johann Arndt was asserted by the Leipzig editor of 1783 “as can be proved from his writings, especially the epistle on the incarnation of Christ”, and is accepted, with a residual question mark, by Gilly and Forshaw; the text’s reference to “Doctor Khunrath seliger”, the late Doctor Khunrath, and “Khunradus P. M.” shows that it was at least revised for the press after 1605, whereas Arndt’s letter of 1599 already speaks of his “explanations” of the figures. Major themes and takeaway. The fire that comes from the sun is the physical form of the light that comes from God; the two are, for Khunrath as for the Iudicium, one agent under two names, and De igne magorum is the last statement of the sympathy of the heavens with the work. Its historical importance is double: it preserves the “conjugendae” sentence, and it preserves the earliest reading of the Amphitheatrum’s figures by a contemporary who was, if the attribution holds, the author of the most read Lutheran devotional book of the century.⁴⁴

Doubtful, lost and promised works#

The bibliography has edges. A Vrim et Thummim christiano-cabalistica, ex macrocosmo et SS. Scriptura biblica desumpta is known only from the Frankfurt fair catalogue of 1607, which gives the bookseller as Johann Francke of Magdeburg (the Leipzig bibliography of 1783, following Draudius, has Levin Brauns), and Gilly doubts that it was ever printed; a quarto Lux in tenebris of 1614 (thirty-one pages; a copy at Yale) circulates under his name, and an incomplete “Lux in tenebris” stands beside the Iudicium in a Copenhagen manuscript of 1602–16, but the Leipzig editor of 1783 already warned that a Lux lucens in tenebris by another hand “is by no means to be confused with the Khunrathian”, and the authorship is open. Wolfart’s preface of 1609 speaks of other, “more secret” writings left behind; the 1708 editor lists a “Manuale”; Forshaw’s bibliography adds a “Water of Health” of 1603, a “Practical Philosophical Counsel”, a “Practical Confession”, “cabbalistic theosophical tables”, a patent application to the emperor of 1591 and the magical manuscripts of 1588–89 — the copies of Trithemius’s Liber Albedachi, Libellus Almachbalae, Astrophili Megalopij and Antipalus maleficiorum that Gilly’s chronology records Khunrath making between December 1588 and October 1589, “probably at Berlin” — items known, until Forshaw’s volumes are consulted, only as chapter titles. Three books are promised in the Magnesia and never appeared: “de Veritate, Antiquitate & Praestantia Lapidis Philosophorum, ac Alchymiae”, the “Apocalypsis” of Magnesia and the “Harmonia analogica”, together with a “Signatura Magnesiae” that Forshaw dates to 1603. Khunrath is not the author of the rest of the HeldenSchatz, of the antimony tract in De igne magorum, or of the sixteen “chimerical editions” of the Amphitheatrum — a “Prague 1598”, a “Hanau 1599”, a “Strasbourg 1599”, a “Magdeburg 1599” — that Johann Moller (twelve) and Umberto Eco (four more) have collected from bibliographers who never saw a copy; the “Magdeburg 1608” that the Dictionary of Scientific Biography reported as an edition “not mentioned in the literature” is, by contrast, real, but it is the cancel-title issue of the Hanau printing and not a separate edition. Nor did he write, as Éliphas Lévi believed, an Amphithéâtre “published in 1598” — the Khunrath of Lévi’s Histoire de la magie was “born in 1502” and “reached the high theosophical initiation” at forty-two. Of his letters, the one document of the friendship with Arndt is Arndt’s; the Rudolstadt letters await publication. Manuscript copies of the Amphitheatrum — Johann Friedrich Jung’s oblong transcript with the four coloured circles (Copenhagen, 1602–16), a page-for-page copy of 1609 made “in the holy cave” by a “religious anchorite F. B.” in 1702 (Amsterdam), Gustav Bonde’s Swedish excerpts and the German translation commissioned by Ochs in 1756 (The Hague) — are the evidence of how it was read when it could not be bought.⁴⁵

The engravings#

Khunrath thought in pictures, and it is by his pictures that he has been remembered. He signed the four circular plates of 1595 “Henricus Khunrath Lips., Theosophiae amator et Medicinae utriusque Doctor, DEI gratia inventor” — inventor by the grace of God — leaving to Paullus van der Doort the “scalpsit” and to Vredeman de Vries, on the fourth, the “pinxit”; the five rectangular plates of 1602 name him “inventore”, “extructore”, “effigiante”, their inventor, builder and portrayer, and the portrait alone bears the engraver’s name, Johann Diricks van Campen, at Magdeburg. Arndt’s Iudicium explains their purpose: “what the author of the Amphitheatrum taught in words in the Prologue, that he now wishes further to show to the eye in the four figures.” In 1595 each circle stood inside a broad border of engraved commentary — the “Isagogai”, introductions — in Latin, Hebrew and Greek; in 1609 the circles were re-engraved bare and the commentaries set in type, so that the reader of the second edition must turn from the plate to the page. The circles measure roughly twenty-three centimetres across the lettered rim, the rectangles roughly twenty-eight by thirty-three, and the rectangles are folded into the quarto; no two copies bind them in the same order, and the small owl plate is often missing. What follows describes the twelve engravings of 1609 from the impressions in the Science History Institute, the Wellcome Collection and the Getty Research Institute, transcribes the inscriptions as they are cut (expanding only the engraver’s abbreviations of -que and et), and reports the modern readings — Ralf Töllner’s, Urszula Szulakowska’s and above all Peter Forshaw’s, whose four volumes of 2024–25 are the first study of every image.⁴⁶

The title-page and the portrait (1602)#

The engraved title is an architectural frontispiece of the kind Antwerp had made fashionable, but every element of it is lettered. Two obelisks stand on pedestals inscribed “MEMORIAE HONESTAE” and “IMMORTALITATI LAVDANDAE”; the left bears a tablet “ADSIT”, a medallion “ORANDO” and, at its summit, a flame lettered with the Hebrew for fire over a disc “ΧΑΟΣ MAGNESIAE”; the right bears a tablet with three Hebrew lines, ruach hokmah El, the Spirit of the Wisdom of God, a medallion “LABORANDO” and, at its summit, a triangle enclosing a small pyramid ringed with a few pointed Hebrew letters, over the cut word “SA LEI”. Two cornucopias tied at the base curve up to frame the oval of the title, with the medallions “NEC TVMIDE” and “NEC TIMIDE”, neither puffed up nor timid, on either side; above the oval a small portrait medallion of the author is ringed “SINE NVMINE ELOHIM NON CERTE HAEC”, not without the godhead of Elohim were these things done, and above it, in clouds, a hand holds out a laurel wreath under the word “PERSEVERANDO” and a triangle in the sky repeats the tetraktys of the Name, with the sun lettered shemesh at the left and the moon at the right. The title itself reads “AMPHITHEATRVM SAPIENTIAE AETERNAE, SOLIVS VERAE, CHRISTIANO-KABALISTICVM, DIVINO-MAGICVM, nec non PHYSICO-CHYMICVM, TERTRIVNVM, CATHOLICON: instructore HENRICO KHVNRATH LIPS: THEOSOPHIAE amatore fideli, et MEDICINAE utriusque DOCT: Hallelu-IAH! Hallelu-IAH! Hallelu-IAH! Phy diabolo! E MILLIBVS VIX VNI”; the ribbon beneath it, “Rumpantur et ilia MOMO”, let the guts of Momus burst, adapts Virgil’s seventh eclogue, and the shield under the ribbon is ringed “INVIDIA VIRTVTIS COMES”, envy is the companion of virtue. At the foot, in a burst of light over a landscape, stands the Hebrew and Latin of the cosmogony, Ruach Elohim mediantibus Schamaim; the land to the left is lettered “ID QVOD INFERIVS” and “SOL”, the sea to the right “SICVT QVOD SVPERIVS” and “LVNA”, and between them rises a rock “MERCVRIVS” with the sign of the planet — the Emerald Tablet’s “that which is below is as that which is above” laid out as a map, with, in Forshaw’s words, “the Pythagorean Tetraktys containing the divine Hebrew name IHVH at the top of the image … echoed by the triangular mound at the base, with the signs for Khunrath’s three main protagonists”. The privilege line closes the plate. The portrait, on the facing leaf, shows Khunrath at forty-two in three-quarter view, bearded, in a fur-lined gown over an embroidered doublet, with a narrow lace-edged collar and a chain, his right hand resting by a pair of dividers on a table with an open book and a sheet lettered “DEO DVCE”, his left tucked into the gown at his breast, a small dog laying its head over his right forearm, a shelf of books behind him lettered MAGIA, KABALA, ALCHYMIA, MEDICINA, with BIBLIA lying flat before them and HISTORIA and an hour-glass on the shelf above, and instruments — a sphere, a balance, glass vessels — at the right; the oval reads “EFFIGIES HENRICI KHVNRATH LIPSENSIS, THEOSOPHIAE AMATORIS FIDELIS, ET MEDICINAE VTRIVSQ. DOCTORIS: ANNO à IHSVH CHRISTO, SERVATORE NOSTRO, NATO, M.DC.II. AETATIS SVAE, XLII”, a wreath above it “DOCTRINAE filio fideli”, to the faithful son of doctrine, and rays from the upper corner “Sufficiat tibi GRATIA mea”, my grace is sufficient for thee; below, between Minerva and Mercury, twelve lines by Andreas Riccius spell in their initials CONSILIVM DEI and pun on the name — “Khunrath”, bold in counsel, “MAGNVS CONSILIO”. Howard Hotson reads the books to the left as “the Bible, medicine, natural history, magic, and the Kabbalah as well as alchemy itself” and the sword, musket and powder-horn among the objects to the right as attributes of nobility.⁴⁷

The first circular figure: Christ in the Seal of God#

Forshaw calls the plate “Christ-Cruciform or Seal of God” and “the Sigillum Emet, Seal of Truth”; the Res Obscura nickname “Cosmic Rose” is modern. At the centre, in a small circle ringed “IN HOC SIGNO VINCES”, a naked, bearded Christ stands upright with both arms stretched out in the attitude of the crucifixion but without a cross, the words “verè filius DEI ERAT IPSE” — the centurion’s confession — around him, a dove seen from above radiating light beneath his feet and the Hebrew letter shin above his head: the letter which, inserted into the Tetragrammaton, makes the pentagrammaton IHSVH. Around this burns a ring of flames bearing pointed Hebrew divine names — El, Shaddai, YHVH, YHVH Tsevaot, Elohim Tsevaot — with the four large letters of the Tetragrammaton distributed round it; then a ring of ten cloud-framed compartments carrying the names of the ten Sefirot — Keter, Chokmah, Binah, Chesed, Gevurah, Tif’eret, Netsach, Hod, Yesod and Malkut — with a dark sphere in clouds lettered Ein Sof, the Infinite, at the top and, opposite it at the bottom, a small radiant circle with Emet, Truth; then a broad ring with the double commandment of love in capitals, “DILIGES DOMINVM DEVM TVVM, EX TOTO CORDE TVO, ET EX TOTA ANIMA TVA, ET EX OMNIBVS VIRIBVS TVIS, ET EX OMNI MENTE TVA: ET PROXIMVM TVVM SICVT TEIPSVM”, with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet distributed among the words, the five final letters on two small tablets at the bottom and a triangle at the top containing the Tetragrammaton as a tetraktys with “OMNIA” beneath; and outermost, a ring of compartments holding the Ten Commandments in Hebrew, with the names of the angelic orders — Seraphim, Malakhim, Ishim and Chayyot ha-Qodesh among those that can be read — at the joints between them. It is, in Forshaw’s summary, the Decalogue, the Hebrew alphabet, the angelic orders, the Sefiroth, the divine Names and the Tetragrammaton “combined with the Pythagorean Tetraktys”: the whole of Reuchlin’s Kabbalah drawn as a seal with the crucified Word at its centre. The first Isagoge opens on the Trisagion — “Holy, holy, holy, YHVH of hosts, who was, who is, who will be; the heavens are full, the whole earth is full of the majesty of his glory” — and the first of the seven laws that the Porta plate would later carry, the rest following at the head of the second; Arndt’s Iudicium says of the figure that it “comprehends all three lights, natural, supernatural and divine — Magic, Kabbalah and Theology — and encloses all three in the first single figure for the sake of the Holy Trinity”, the Hebrew names in the circle being “first the names of God, or divine power … of which there are seventy-two”, and then “the names of the angels, which are nothing but angelic powers”.⁴⁸

The second circular figure: Adam the androgyne and the ladder#

The second circle is the plate of the theosopher. At the top the pointed Tetragrammaton blazes in a fire lettered “ARCHETYPOS”, its rays carrying the attributes of God — “Aeternus, Terribilis, Verax, Zelotes, Maximus, Iustus, Longanimis, Fortis, Misericors, Solus Sapiens, Multus benignitate, Optimus, Omnia videns”; beneath it the word “VNIO” and a curtain of descending tongues of flame lettered with ten virtues, “TIMOR DEI, TEMPERANTIA, HVMILITAS, IVSTITIA, PATIENTIA, FORTITVDO, MISERICORDIA, PRVDENTIA, BENIGNITAS, CASTITAS”. A square, the four elements, encloses a large triangle whose three sides carry the words “SPIRITVS” (right), “CORPVS” (base) and “ANIMA” (left), interwoven with the sentence “LINEA VIRIDIS CABALISTARVM GIRANS VNIVERSVM”, the Cabalists’ green line encircling the universe — a Kabbalistic image transmitted by Reuchlin — and, in an outer band, “FINIS HOMINIS: VERVM AC SVMMVM BONVM: FRVI יהוה PATERNO, FRATERNO, ATQ. AMICO: IOBILEVS AETERNVS, SABBATHVM MAGNVM”, and in an inner, “QVAERITE PRIMVM REGNVM DEI, ET IVSTITIAM EIVS, ET HAEC OMNIA ADIICIENTVR VOBIS”. In the upper corners of the square hang the book with seven seals — “worthy is IHSVH alone to take the book and open its seals: Halleluiah” — and the two tables of the Law with the curse of Deuteronomy 27. Inside the triangle stands a small two-headed figure, a bearded male face on the left and a beardless female face on the right, sharing one halo lettered “HOMO”, arms raised with open, empty hands, the raised arms themselves lettered “ORA” and “LABORA”; its collar reads “binarium reiiciens”, rejecting the dyad, its robe “CHRISTO indutus: eum imitans”, clothed with Christ, imitating him, the ribbon at its feet “DEVM time, et mandata eius observa”, and the lower body dissolves into flame; dotted rays around it read “SAPIENTIA יהוה incarnata”. Below the square, on a rock, runs the sentence of contrition — “Adam the microcosm, androgyne, catholic by formation and by nature, earthly in person, vile and unclean because of sins — beat him down with the fiery pestle of the Decalogue of contrition into a dusty clod, greening with the fertile salt of conversion; dissolve him” (the verbs, reverberato, exolvito, are commands) — and over the square the sentence of regeneration, “evil abandoned, thrice-reunited, let the fiery-minded, catholic Adam be sublimed by regeneration”. Three rings surround the square. The innermost describes the new birth through the elements, “out of the new water of obedience, in the Holy Spirit … out of the dust of penitence, in sackcloth and ashes … the water of burning tears … extract patiently”; the middle is a chain of cross-shaped links carrying the ten steps of the ladder, “FIDES, MEDITATIO, COGNITIO, AMOR, SPES, ORATIO, CONIVNCTIO, FREQVENTIA, FAMILIARITAS, SIMILITVDO”, with the ten grades of cognition on its inner edge, “OBIECTVM, MEDIVM, SENSVS EXTERIORES, SENSVS INTERIOR communis, PHANTASIA, IVDICIVM INFERIVS, IVDICIVM SVPERIVS, RATIO, INTELLECTVS, MENS”; and the outer carries, in capitals with italic glosses, the formula “REIICIATVR BINARIVS ET TERNARIVS PER QVATERNARIVM AD MONADIS SIMPLICITATEM REDVCETVR” — the italic glosses making the ternary Father (“Sit יהוה … pater”), Son (“יהשוה … ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ … crucifixus, frater”) and Spirit (“amicus”), the monad “in his throne” and the reduction “in thyself, triune, reborn, truly catholic”. Forshaw reads the plate as “man the microcosm as Adam-Androgyne at the centre of hyperphysical or supernatural magical practices”, “animated by God’s breath, Ruach Elohim, bounded by the square of the four elements, while above is the Archetype of God ready to transform the purified Theosopher with the Holy Spirit of Ruach-Hokmah-El”, and traces the rejection of the binary to “the same terminology found in Trithemius, Paracelsus and Dorn”; the second Isagoge is its text, a “know Jehovah, know thyself” carried through every mode of knowing. The androgyny is not the alchemical hermaphrodite of the next plate but the Adam of Genesis 1:27 before the division of the sexes, “male and female”, the microcosm entire; the flame into which the lower body dissolves is the “fiery-minded” (mentigneus) man consumed and renewed by the fire from above.⁴⁹

The third circular figure: the Rebis, the bird Azoth and the globe of Chaos#

The third plate is the alchemy. At the apex, in rays, the Hebrew for fire; beneath it an arch of cloud defining the goal — “LAPIS PHILOSOPHORVM, NATVRAE (ARTE MINISTRANTE) MIRACVLVM: ELIXEIR VNIVERSALE: QVINTA ESSENTIA, IN CORPORE SVO, GLORIFICATO: SAL FVSIBILE ET OLEVM INCOMBVSTIBILE; SAPO SAPIENTVM; TERRA THEOSOPHORVM CATHOLICA, SANCTA, IN QVA … EST LIGNVM VITAE, ET TABERNACVLVM יהוה CVM HOMINIBVS” — the Philosophers’ Stone, miracle of nature with art ministering, universal elixir, fifth essence in its glorified body, fusible salt and incombustible oil, soap of the wise, holy catholic earth of the theosophers in which is the tree of life and the tabernacle of God with men; under it a small triangle lettered Urim and a second arch, “out of these two compose the catholic fountain of nature”. Below the arches a great bird with spread wings fills the upper half of the circle, a dark raven’s head and neck with a serpent beside it, white swan’s wings and a peacock’s fanned tail: on its breast the word “AZOTH”, whose O is Dee’s Monas hieroglyphica, along its wings “AVIS HERMETIS”, the bird of Hermes, on a ring at its neck “benedicta viriditas”, and beside it “ESSENTIA”, “ANIMA”, “MVNDI”. Two ribbons descend from it, “HVMIDITAS GLVTINOSA” and “VNCTVOSA PERMANENS”, to the two heads of the Rebis: a naked figure with a clean-shaven male head ringed with the sun’s rays at the left and a female head with a crescent moon at the right, “COMPONE” on its collar, “FIGE” on its chest, the sign of Sulphur on the left breast and of Salt on the right and of Mercury at the navel, “RE-BIS” across the belly, “OMNIA” beneath, “SOLVE” and “COAGVLA” on its arms and “Lac virginum”, virgin’s milk, at its right. To the left a winged dragon cries “DRACO VOLANS, qui non moritur, nisi cum fratre suo, superbè clamans: TE DEVORO” — the flying dragon, which dies only with its brother, proudly crying: I devour thee — and at the right “DRACONIS soror, intrepidè respondens: TE, VICISSIM, VORO”, the dragon’s sister fearlessly answering: I in turn devour thee. The Rebis holds a sphere lettered “MATERIA PRIMA”, ringed “IGNIS”, “AER”, “AQVA”, “TERRA”, and containing a dotted square and triangle lettered “AGENS”, “PATIENS”, “SEPARA”, “DISSOLVE”, “EXTRAHE”, “DEPVRA”, “ANIMA”, “SPIRITVS”, “CORPVS” with “YAH” beneath a small flame at the centre; outside the sphere, “ETIAM MVNDVS RENOVABITVR IGNE”, the world too will be renewed by fire, and, vertically, “ΧΑΟΣ”. Beneath is a terrestrial globe on which Europe, the Mediterranean, Africa and Asia can be made out, containing a nested sphere “ENS PRIMVM CREATVM: ΧΑΟΣ: TRIVNVM ΚΑΘΟΛΙΚΟΝ”, ringed “ΜΟΡΦΗ … ΗΥΛΗ … ABYSSVS … RVACH ELOHIM INCVBABAT AQVIS … TENEBROSA” — the first created being, Chaos, triune and catholic; form and matter; the abyss on which the Spirit of God brooded. Two long italic texts fill the left and right of the circle and describe the two natures of the Stone: on the left the volatile — “the ethereal spirit, heaven, seat of the soul … fire … our sulphur, gathering the homogeneous, separating the heterogeneous … the pure, catholic air … the water of life, not of the vine … the soul, spark of the soul of the greater world … our wine, the blood of the earth, in which, as also in sacred things, the soul dwells … Adam purified; the comely king; the seed of the man Gabricus … gold, and that our potable gold”; on the right the fixed — “the water … the white eagle … the fountain for our catholic king; the earthly magnet drawing heaven, that the superior may be married with the inferior: the matrix or womb of the greater world, in which the Ruach Elohim, by the mediation of heaven, is conceived and made a body … the seed of the woman Beya: the moon’s spittle: the juice of lunaria: virgin earth, catholic … the fixed part of our stone, congealing, coagulating and fixing; the salt of the earth, catholicon, by its greenness making all sterile things fruitful … dry water that does not wet the hands … Eve washed: the beautiful queen; Beya; the shining moon; the true lunaria; silver, and the most secret Saturn of the philosophers”. The outer ring states the theme of the Magnesia in one sentence, “BONVM ΜΑΚΡΟΚΟΣΜΙΚΟΝ, h.e. NATVRAE, PER ARTEM, ΚΑΘΟΛΙΚΟΝ, SVMMVM, DONVM יהוה TRIVNIVS; HOMINI, AD MONADIS SIMPLICITATEM, REDVCTO, EX MVNDI MAIORIS FILIO, TRIVNO, HERMAPHRODITO, CATHOLICO; IN REGIMINE TRIVNO, AD VSVM FINEMQVE, CATHOLICE, TRIVNVM”, with a tetraktys of ten dots at its head. Forshaw explains the word AZOTH as “formed of the first and last letters of the three matrix languages, Latin, Greek and Hebrew” — A and Z, alpha and omega, aleph and tau — and notes the Monas in its O and the “Urim” above; the bird’s three colours are the raven’s black, the swan’s white and the peacock’s tail of the work, nigredo, albedo and cauda pavonis; the two dragons are the fixed and volatile that devour each other; and the “matrix or womb of the greater world in which the Spirit of God is made a body” is the sentence Libavius denounced. The third Isagoge, the longest, is the treatise on the world-soul and its sparks that Jung would quote.⁵⁰

The fourth circular figure: the Oratory-Laboratory#

The fourth plate is a room, and the only one of the twelve that has a floor. A great hall in exact one-point perspective — the work of Vredeman de Vries, whose “HF Vriese pinxit” is cut under the front edge of the table — recedes under a flat ceiling of joists and cross-beams to a doorway at the back; the front beam reads “SINE AFFLATV DIVINO, NEMO VNQVAM VIR MAGNVS”, no one was ever a great man without divine inspiration, Cicero’s sentence, interrupted by the ring of a hanging star-shaped chandelier; the floor is tiled in receding squares. At the far left, before an organ case, stands the oratory: a domed, tent-like tabernacle with looped curtains, its top lettered “SIC OMNIA”, its drum “ORATORIVM. FELIX CVI יהוה A CONSILIIS”, happy he whose counsellor is Jehovah, its valance carrying the letters of the author’s name and a line of Hebrew, its curtain “HOC AGENTIBVS NOBIS ADERIT IPSE DEVS”, to us doing this God himself will be present. Inside hangs an oil-lamp over a tablet “NE LOQVARIS DE DEO ABSQ. LVMINE”, do not speak of God without light, and on the desk lie two open books, one showing two circular diagrams that recall the first two figures, the other a psalter open at “יהוה facit voluntatem timentium eum. P. 145”, the Lord does the will of them that fear him. On a tasselled cushion before it kneels the theosopher, seen from behind and a little from the left, bareheaded and bearded in a long gown, his arms spread wide with open palms towards the books. Beside him a low bench holds a censer whose smoke forms the scroll “Ascendat ut fumus, ORATIO, sacrificium DEO acceptabile”, let prayer ascend like smoke, a sacrifice acceptable to God — a line absent from the state of 1595 and added in 1609, as Forshaw notes — with a shell-shaped cup on a foot; under the desk an arched niche holds an hour-glass and a skull under the words “DISCE BENE MORI”, learn to die well. In the middle of the hall a long table on baluster legs is draped with a cloth whose front reads “MVSICA SANCTA tristitiae spirituumque malignorum fuga, quia SPIRITVS יהוה libenter psallit in corde gaudio pio perfuso”, and on it lie four instruments — a viol with its bow, a harp, a lute and a small cittern, in Forshaw’s identification “a lyra da braccio and harp … a lute and what appears to be a cittern” — with books, an inkstand and quills, a bell, dishes and weights, a domed object under a patterned cover on a cushion at the far end and a balance standing on a box beside it, in front of the portico’s right column; glass vessels stand beneath the table between its legs. Beyond the table the doorway is a classical portico with a pediment, its frieze cut “DORMIENS VIGILA”, sleeping, keep watch. The right half of the room is the laboratory: a great chimney-hood on a column, its diagonal beam lettered “LABORATORIVM” and its mantel “SAPIENTER TENTATVM, SVCCEDET ALIQVANDO”, what is wisely attempted will one day succeed, with the motto “Nec temere, nec timide” on the hood; shelves of bottles with tiny labels (“hyle”, “Sal”, “AZOTH”, “ROS celi”); the base of the column marked “EXPERIENTIA” and the furnace-block behind it “RATIO”; a large open furnace with bellows, tongs and a hook, a spouted cask dripping into a bowl, a coal-basket, a curtain drawn aside at the far right; and in the foreground a small distilling furnace with an alembic marked “anima” and a receiver monogrammed for spiritus, a tall closed vessel lettered “FESTINA LENTE”, make haste slowly, and a box of flasks in a bath marked “Maturandum”, to be matured. No “ORA” and no “LABORA” stand over the two halves, as is often said; the words on the plate are ORATORIVM and LABORATORIVM, and “ORA” and “LABORA” are lettered on the raised arms of the Adam of the second figure and, with “Theo-sophicè” and “Physico-chymicè”, on the piers of the citadel’s gate. Forshaw’s reading is the standard one: “the left-hand side of the image, the Oratory, is the realm of God, connected with Christian-Cabala and the spiritual aim of divine union … the right-hand side is the realm of Nature, and shows the Laboratory concerned with Physical-Chemistry”, and the central table with its instruments signifies “man as he relates to these two realms via magic”; the four instruments “could be taken as symbolising the harmonies vibrating between heaven and earth”. Yates saw in it “a visual expression of the kind of outlook which John Dee summed up in his Monas hieroglyphica, a combination of Cabalist, alchemical, and mathematical disciplines”, noting the perspective “drawn with all the expertise of the modern perspectivist”; Jung reproduced it in Psychology and Alchemy as “Laboratory and oratory”; Forshaw’s 2010 study of its music and his 2024 essay on it as an “amphitheatrical microcosm” are the fullest accounts, and he calls it “by far the best-known engraving from Heinrich Khunrath’s Amphitheatre”. The fourth Isagoge is a brief “aenigma” ending “Halleluiah … Phy Diabolo”; the plate is its own commentary.⁵¹

The five hieroglyphic figures of 1602#

The “Gymnasium of Nature” — Khunrath’s caption calls it the “Adumbratio GYMNASII Theo-magici, macro-cosmici, catholici”, the sketch of the theo-magical, macrocosmic, universal school of nature — is a wide mountain landscape seen from a height, full of people at work: a river with boats and a timber raft laden with barrels, a ploughman with his oxen, men with wheelbarrows, a farmstead and water-mills, fishermen with nets, a smoking limekiln or smelting furnace, travellers on the paths, deer and swans. At the upper left a beam of light strikes down from the Tetragrammaton in the clouds, lettered “CVM NVMINE LVMEN, ET IN LVMINE NVMEN”, with the godhead light, and in the light the godhead; at the upper right the highest mountain is inscribed “PORTA AMPHITHEATRI SAPIENTIAE AETERNAE, SOLIVS VERAE” over a dark tunnel-mouth, with a small domed temple lettered “ORATORIVM” on its slope and, on a rock face, the Greek “ΠΑΝΤΑ ΛΙΘΟΝ ΚΙΝΕΙ”, move every stone. In the left foreground, on the near bank, a bearded hermit sits praying in a grotto with an open book and a skull beside him, the arch reading “PRECATIO” and “ELEEMOSYNA”, a block “IEIVNIVM” — prayer, alms, fasting — and a rock beside it “VNVS ESTO TECVM SED CAVE NE SOLVS”, be one with yourself, but beware of being alone (a second reading hermit, at the far left beside a pair of sawyers, has the rock “Impulsu Spiritus Sancti”, by the impulse of the Holy Spirit); at the lower right a man kneels in prayer, seen from behind with arms spread, the “PSALTERIVM” open on the ground beside him. The long Latin caption explains that in this school, “liberally built by Jehovah Elohim for all”, the “wonderful wisdom of Jehovah, written in the great catholic book of nature by the finger of God’s omnipotence”, is taught “naturally-magically” by the “essential and really existing godhead and light of nature, a little spark of eternal wisdom”; that “the fathers and elders of the faithful sons of doctrine, the ancient magi or sages and philosophers, for whom the world stood for books, its parts and regions for pages, its innumerable fruits for letters and languages”, frequented it of old, and that its students, “praying and working”, draw from it “partly by the signature or divine hieroglyphic characterisms of nature, by which things themselves converse with men cabalistically and explain what they are, partly by the most sagacious Vulcanic anatomy” — that is, by chemical analysis — the “solid and perfect knowledge” of eternal wisdom, so that “from the creature, as from a bright and clear mirror of nature, we can see and know the Creator … and Jesus Christ whom he sent; ourselves; and the inexhaustible treasures of the godhead and light of nature”, and learn “to live well and to die blessedly”. “Which is impossible for one-eyed sophists. This is the summit of sincerer philosophy! Fie on the calumniator!” The “Porta Amphitheatri”, the gate, is the plate Yates reproduced as “The Cave of the Illuminati”: a rocky hillside in whose centre a huge natural arch, lettered “PROCVL HINC ABESTE PROFANI” over its crown and “IN OMNIA OMNIBVS” on its face, opens into a tunnel that runs straight into the rock towards a blaze of light at its far end, where a tiny figure with outstretched arms walks away from the viewer into the light. A broad flight of seven steps leads up into the tunnel; a man in a hat climbs at the left and another with a staff stands on the steps at the right; in the foreground two bearded scholars in gowns stand together, one pointing up at the gate, a third raises both hands in astonishment, a small animal sits on the ground, a bird perches on a bush. Seven rays fan out from the light, each carrying one “oracular law”: “I. LAVAMINI, MVNDI ESTOTE” — be washed, be clean; “II. יהוה VNVM OMNIVM EFFECTOREM; CETERAS POTESTATES MINISTRAS HABETOTE” — hold ye Jehovah the one maker of all things, the other powers his ministers; “III. AD PRIMVM VOTA PRECESQ. AD INFERIORES HYMNI SVNTO” — to the first, vows and prayers; to the lower, hymns; “IV. QVOD SI FORTE PETITIO AD INFERIORES PROCESSERIT, NISI SVB MODO DELEGATAE à PRIMO ADMINISTRATIONIS, INTENTIO NON ESTO” — if a petition should go to the lower, let there be no intention save under the form of an administration delegated by the first; “V. ΑΓΓΕΛΟΙ à NOBIS AD יהוה ET INDE AD NOS VOLITANTES, REVERENTIA TREMORQ. SVNTO” — let the angels flying from us to Jehovah and thence to us be met with reverence and trembling; “VI. ERGA ILLOS, SECVNDVM PROBATIONEM NOTAM, IVCVNDA OBEDIENTIA ESTO” — towards them, after known proof, glad obedience; “VII. SACRA, QVORVM MYSTERIA SIC TRACTATVRI VENITIS, PALAM DIGNIS, CLAM PROFANIS, SVNTO” — let the sacred things, whose mysteries you thus come to handle, be open to the worthy, hidden from the profane. On the left rock: “a mystery indeed truly divine, and which deservedly seizes all beholders, especially the more inward, into admiration and love of it”; on the right: “Jehovah granting to will, to know, to be able and to be, well”. The caption identifies the staircase with the “mystical ladder of seven theosophical grades” of the book’s prologue and says that the ascent is made “by the drawing of God the Father, as much immediate, by pure enthusiasm (fie on the calumniator!), as variously mediate”, and that only to those “divinely inspired” is it given, “according to the seven oracular laws shining before the gate”, to enter and to see, “Christian-Kabbalistically, divine-magically and physico-chymically, with the eyes both of the body and of the mind”, “what the wisdom, goodness and power of the Creator may be”.⁵²

The “Pyramides” — “Designatio PYRAMIDVM Petrosarum Triumphalium”, the delineation of those triumphal rocky pyramids — is a tall conical mountain rising from a lake in the middle of the plate, its whole front face smoothed and cut with the “VERBA SECRETORVM HERMETIS”, the Emerald Tablet in the Latin of the Vulgate tradition, from “VERVM SINE MENDACIO, CERTVM ET VERISSIMVM, QVOD EST INFERIVS, EST SICVT QVOD EST SVPERIVS” to “COMPLETVM EST QVOD DIXI DE OPERATIONE SOLIS”, followed, “Auff Deutsch”, by a German version — “the SUN is his FATHER, and the MOON is his MOTHER; the WIND has carried him in its belly; his NURSE is the EARTH … and therefore am I called HERMES TRISMEGISTVS, having three parts of the WISDOM of the whole world” — and by the opening of Ficino’s Pimander, “MERCVRIVS TRISMEGISTVS, in PIMANDRO”: “when I was thinking about the nature of things, and lifting the point of my mind to things above … I am, said he, PIMANDER, the MIND of the DIVINE POWER; see what you wish, and I shall be present with you everywhere. I desire, said I, to learn the NATURE OF THINGS and to KNOW GOD. To this he: embrace me with your mind, and I shall instruct you in all that you desire. When he had said this, he changed his form, and suddenly revealed all things”, with the subscription “Sic et cuivis DOCTRINAE filio fideli. AMEN”, so also to every faithful son of doctrine. From the summit a plume of fire rises, with smaller flames on the lesser peaks; the sun shines at the upper left; a church and village stand on the far shore and boats on the water; at the lower left five men in hats, caps and gowns stand at the water’s edge looking up at the inscription, one pointing, one leaning on a staff, a small dog at their feet; at the right a gorge with a cascade of water is built over with wooden walkways and rails, a hanging trough, a barrel- or wheel-shaped object at the foot of the fall, two labourers — one with a sack, one climbing with a staff — a man with a raised arm and a small dog on the walkway: a works of some kind, a mill, a sluice or a mine, whose purpose the plate does not declare; two swans swim at the lower right beside a fish-trap. The tiny caption reads the plate as an eschatology: the pyramids are “of the radical or primigenial catholic humour of this world, and of the seed of the new earth that will remain after the dissolution of the heavens by fire, the melting of the boiling elements and the burning-up of the earth and its works (Isaiah 65:17; 2 Peter 3:13; Revelation 21:1)”, “divinely built” as “most shining torches and truth-telling codices of the more solid doctrine of MAGNESIA, the due subject of the universal Stone of the philosophers”, enduring like a miracle “truly Saturnially” through the world’s “conflagration, corruption, purgation and universal renewal”, and dedicated to “ALCHEMY, the art of arts, most ancient, certain, most sagacious, holy (so that, as Thomas Aquinas among others attests, it either finds a man holy or makes him holy), wonderful and wonder-working”. Forshaw notes the plate’s combination of “both Latin and German versions of the hermetic Emerald Tablet” with the Pimander; Forshaw’s Frankfurt commentary reads the flames as the planetary metals; the works on the right, which occupy a third of the plate, have not been discussed in the literature, and whatever they are — no picks, wedges or cut blocks mark a quarry — they read most naturally as the “laborando” of the title-page set against the “orando” of the scholars on the shore.⁵³

The “Arx”, the citadel, is the plate Lévi described as “the philosophers’ stone standing in the midst of a fortress surrounded by an enclosure with twenty gates without exit”, and Forshaw as “the Alchemical Citadel”. Seen from above, in the middle of a flat country with a chapel and walled graveyard at the lower left, a walled town with a domed building at the lower right, ships, a lighthouse and a harbour with a treadwheel crane at the top right and a thatched farmstead, a church spire, a cart and pigs at the top left, a great circular wall encloses a moat and a seven-pointed star-shaped fortress with seven bastions, in whose court a triangular rock — the Stone — rises with a winged dragon on its summit; a radiant triangle above the dragon’s head is lettered with the Hebrew Aben, stone, and the dragon’s wings carry “LONGITVDO DIERVM” and “DIVITIAE”, its crest “GLORIA”, its body “SAPIENTIA” and “VITA” — length of days, riches, glory, Wisdom’s gifts in Proverbs 3:16. The faces of the rock are cut with the Stone’s own speech: “PETRA PHILOSOPHALIS, qui Mundi majoris Naturae ΠΑΝ … omnium Seminarium habens” — the philosophical rock, the All of the nature of the greater world, the seed-bed of all things — and “absque ME Lapide philosophorum Pri-materiali Catholico, filii Artis, nihil potestis facere. EGO ELIXEIR magnum vobis sum via, veritas et vita. Nam fundamentum Medicinae universalis aliud nemo potest ponere, praeter id quod positum est, quod magni illius DEI et Servatoris nostri, nempe IHSVH CHRISTI, in libro Naturae magno Effigies symbolica, Naturalis et magna” — without me, the pri-material catholic Stone of the philosophers, sons of art, you can do nothing; I, the great Elixir, am to you the way, the truth and the life; for other foundation of the universal medicine can no man lay than that which is laid, which is the symbolic, natural and great likeness, in the great book of nature, of that great God and our Saviour, IHSVH Christ. The bastions and walls are lettered with the operations — “ATHANOR: IGNIS”, “VAS: SIGILLVM”, “COMPOSITIO”, “AZOTH: PONDVS”, “MVLTIPLICATIO FERMENTANDO”, “SOLVTIO PVTRESCENDO”, “DISSOLVTIO”, “PVRIFICATIO”, “INCERATIO”, “COAGVLATIO: FIXATIO”, “FERMENTATIO”, “LAPIDIS CATHOLICI SPECIFICATIO” — and a small shield at the foot of the causeway carries “PROIECTIO” and “APPLICATIO”; the inner walls flanking the approach read “A IEHOVA FACTVM EST ISTVD” and “ET EST MIRABILE IN OCVLIS NOSTRIS”, from Psalm 118. One straight causeway leads from the outer wall to the only true gate, a classical arch lettered “NON OMNIBVS”, not for all, with “Theo-sophicè ORA” on its left pier and “Physico-chymicè LABORA” on its right, a winged and radiant Mercury sign above the arch, a small kneeling figure with raised arms above that, the sun on the left post and the crescent moon on the right; at the foot of the causeway, on a pedestal lettered “OPERA BONA” between “FIDES” and “TACITVRNITAS”, stands a half-length bearded figure in cap and gown holding a caduceus — Hermes, the guardian of the way — with the two secrets of the art on either side, “MATERIAE ex qua debitae COGNITIO” and “Materiae legitimae PRAEPARATIO”; two figures with scrolls “VOLENTE יהוה” and “יהוה ADSISTENTE”, Jehovah willing, Jehovah assisting — the first veiled, with “Aurum potabile phil.: phy Diabolo!”, the second a bearded man facing the viewer — flank the approach beside the paths of “TINCTVRAE ad Alb. et Rubeum”, “PARTICVLARIA varia” and “ELIXEIRIA parva”. The outer wall has twenty-one gate-compartments, of which twenty are false, each lettered with a malpractice and a one-word verdict — the “PARTICVLARIA transmutatoria super ☽ in ☉ ex Oleo, Floribus, et Tinctura ☉”, judged “IGNOMINIA”; the “FIXATIO ☿ … plumbei”, “CONFIDENTIA STERILIS”; “MERCVRIVS vulgi vulgariter coagulatus pro Luna, vel pro Sole”, “DECEPTIO”; “PARS cum parte”, “SOPHISTICATIO”; the “CATHOLICON … VNIVERSALE (ut ipsi vocant) … sive TINCTVRA ex VEGETABILIBVS”, “PHANTASIA ERRONEA”; “SPES VANA”; “CONFVSIO” — while wandering alchemists on foot, on horseback and with carts approach the wall from every side, and groups of scholars in the foreground point at it. The caption names the fortress: “ΥΠΟΘΥΠΩΣΙΣ ARCIS Pri-materialis, Catholicae, Naturalis … Mercurialis, validissimae, MAGNESIA, quasi Magnes-IAH, vel magnum AES-IAH, dictae; in qua Sola et Vna IEHOVA MEDICINAM CATHOLICAM, seu LAPIDEM Philosophorum VNIVERSALEM … proposuit” — the sketch of the pri-material, catholic, natural, most strong Mercurial citadel called Magnesia, as it were Magnes-Iah or the great ore of Iah, in which alone and one Jehovah has set forth the catholic medicine or universal Stone of the philosophers, “offered to the human race by the grace of his goodness, and at the same time selling it freely and for nothing” — “as it were besieged by all the sophists (whose characterism is to love vanity and seek after lying), unknown to them for ever and impregnable”, and it shows, the caption ends, “graphically and orthodoxly” the “foundation, lawful use and genuine fruits” of the art “by the narrow and central path of TRUTH”, and “the abuse, its origin and its followers, by the broad and circumferential way of FALSITY”. Forshaw’s reading, that the plate presents “twenty false entrances describing physico-chemical malpractices and only one leading to the interior and the attainment of the Philosophers’ Stone”, and that the Hebrew Aben, Father and Son in the Stone, stands at its centre, is the standard one; on the impression examined the words “I am the way, truth, and life” are cut on the rock beneath the dragon rather than issuing from its mouth, and the “Hermes with his caduceus” who guards the gate in Forshaw’s description is the half-figure on the pedestal at the causeway’s foot, the arch itself bearing the planetary sign.⁵⁴

The “Calumniators” is the plate of the enemies, and the one most often missing from copies. Bordered on all four sides by columns of German and Latin invective and maxims — “calumniators and slanderous devil’s-hounds; contemptuous blow-flies; God- and honour-forgetting devil’s-heads; honour-thieving, shamefully lying poets; busybody high and particular school-foxes and pedants; arrant-chymical wild fools” along the top; “art has no hater but the ignorant”, “it is uncivil to judge from one small part of a book”, “nothing is so easy as for the idle and sleeping to dispute about another’s labour and vigils”, “to mock is easy, to imitate difficult”, “truth is pressed, not oppressed”, “Seneca: you are not yet happy if the crowd has not laughed at you”, “he who praises me to my face and rails behind my back, may the pestilence strike him”, “to please the few, and those theosophically learned, is the sign of truth” — it shows, under the Tetragrammaton in a cloud and the ribbon “HENRICE KHVNRATH TV, NE CEDE MALIS, SED CONTRA AVDENTIOR ITO: TIBI ADSVM” (Virgil’s “yield not to evils, but go more boldly against them”, with “I am with thee”), a rock of Truth at the centre whose block reads “FILIVS MVNDI MAIORIS. Daniel 2. v. 34. et 45.” — the stone cut without hands — and whose arch, “ADHVC STAT, ET SEMPER VBIQ. … DVRABIT!”, it still stands, and everywhere and always will endure, encloses the “ANTRVM NATVRAE SATVRNIVM CATHOLICON”, the catholic Saturnine cave of nature, over the words “Veritatem sitientibus”, for those who thirst for truth. Around the rock, on their own stones, stand the fifteen “foundations of my dogmas” that the caption names: “the symbolic HARMONY of IHSVH Christ with the Philosophers’ Stone, and conversely”; “the proper and genuine NAMES, which in the cardinal languages are the essences of things”; “FIRE, proving and judging all things, even spagyrically”; “the sharp and orthodox DISTINCTION of use from abuse”; “the divine characterism of NATURE, called the natural SIGNATURE of natural things”; “the natural ORDER and series in the macrocosmic book of NATURE, eternally immutable by the divine will and institution”; “the wise investigation and application of the HIEROGLYPHICS, in which many hidden mysteries of the sages lie”; “the orthodox CONSENSUS of the philosophers, according to the law of nature and the testimony of Holy Scripture”; “CHEIROTECHNIA, handicraft, as a gift of God’s grace, partly my own, partly others’ that has come to me”; “the TRADITION of my teacher, faithfully agreeing with the light of nature”; “the EXPERIENCE of those of whom, among the sons of doctrine, there is a weighty, learned and constant report that they have had the Stone of the wise out of this our MAGNESIA”; “the most holy, infallible codex of the BIBLE of God”; “ARCANE REVELATION from God the Father of lights, either immediately by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit or mediately by a good angel”; “the truth-telling macrocosmic BOOK of the godhead and light of NATURE”; “the HIEROGLYPHIC of the most wise and most secret SPIRIT of the world, by which all things are animated, vivified, generated, regenerated and preserved”; and “the common notions … and the testimony of conscience … sound reason in the philosophical arts”. At the lower left a hooded man seen from behind, leaning on a staff, carries the scroll “PRO EO, VT ME DILIGERENT, DETRAHEBANT MIHI; EGO AVTEM ORABAM” — for my love they were my adversaries, but I gave myself unto prayer (Psalm 109) — and at the lower right a man with a sword, pointing at the rock, “AVXILIVM MEVM à IEHOVAH, QVI FECIT CELVM et TERRAM” (Psalm 121). The calumniators fill both sides, richly dressed and animal-headed: on the left an ox-headed man with the shield “Ne sutor ultra crepidam”, an ass-headed man, a bearded man with bell and book labelled “Anti-Christischer Pfaffe”, a hare-headed man in a ruff, a fox- or cat-headed woman, a goat-headed piper; on the right a fiddler in a tall hat making “shamefully lying, honour-thieving CARMINA”, an owl-faced man with spectacles reading a book, a dog-headed soldier with a lance, a bird-headed soldier and others; above them, “BEELZEBVB PRINCEPS muscarum”, a crowned bat-winged devil with a horn and the scroll “ANNIHILEMVS”, commands “beloved faithful, calumniate boldly, something always sticks; and spare not the truth”, and “PRAEFECTVS DIABOLORVM”, a hatted demon, sprays “blasphemat; sit anathema, maranatha” from a feather-brush; flies, a dragonfly and a great spider fill the sky, and a lion and a dragon sit in a den at the foot of the rock. Along the bottom runs the plate’s own summary — “One heeds it; the second despises and derides it; the third considers it: what does it matter? Each judges as he either understands, or is affected” — and the long bilingual caption, which answers “once for all” the “calumnious, backbiting” abusers of Khunrath’s good name, his writings and his “theosophical and philosophical labours, directed with all my might to the honour of God and the profit of my neighbour”, “in scripture and in picture, not offensively but defensively, and by the best right of retorsion”, and ends: “a man would have much to do who set out to make each and every fool wise. Yes, who can do that? — let alone that I, Doctor Heinrich Khunrath, could or should do it.” The plate is dated “in the 1602nd year after the incarnation of the eternal Word” and carries, beneath the signature, the motto “SVRGERE NOLO NIMIS; NOLO IACERE TAMEN”, I do not wish to rise too high, yet I do not wish to lie low. Forshaw identifies among the figures “a bovine figure with mortar, pestle and bellows, presumably one of the unkempt ‘Bad Chemists’”, and an ass-headed neighbour who “most likely represents … the type of alchemist contemptuously known as ‘puffers’”.⁵⁵

The owl, and the iconography of the whole#

The smallest engraving is the most famous. On a single leaf, often bound facing the title, an owl with large round spectacles on its beak sits facing the viewer on a low mound, two lighted torches crossed in front of its breast with their butts at its feet, and a lighted candle in a tall candlestick on either side; the tablet beneath reads “WAS HELFFEN FAKELN LICHT ODER BRILN, SO DIE LEVT NICHT SEHEN WOLLEN” — what use are torches, light or spectacles, if people will not see. It is a copperplate copy of the woodcut device that closes the Magnesia of 1599 (“Was helffn Fackeln, Liecht oder Brilln, wann die Leute nicht sehen wölln”) and the Athanor of 1615, and which the Leipzig editor of 1783 called “the usual sign found in all his writings”. The owl, bird of Minerva and of the night, is Khunrath’s reader who has every aid to sight and uses none.⁵⁶

Read together, the twelve plates have a small and consistent vocabulary. God is the Tetragrammaton in flame or in cloud, written as a tetraktys and never as a figure; Christ is the crucified body without a cross at the centre of the seal, and the name IHSVH elsewhere; the Spirit is the dove, the beam of light, the “Ruach Elohim” of the title and the globe; the angels are names. Man is the androgyne of the second figure, the kneeling theosopher of the fourth, the hermit and the praying man of the Gymnasium, the scholars at the shore and the gate — small figures, most of them seen from behind or in profile, though the caduceus-bearer and the scroll-bearer of the citadel and one of the scholars on the Pyramides shore look out at the viewer, as Christ does from the seal; the enemies have faces too, and most of them are animals’. The matter is the sphere in the Rebis’s hands, the globe of Chaos, the rock of the Pyramides, the rock in the citadel, the rock of Truth in the Calumniators — a stone, in every case, with words cut into it — and the Stone is a dragon on a rock, a triangle in rays. Light runs through everything: the flames of the Names, the rays of the Porta, the beam of the Gymnasium, the lamp of the oratory, the plume of the Pyramides, the torches and candles of the owl. The gate, the staircase, the causeway and the tunnel are the ascent of the seven grades made architecture; the enclosure — the rings of the seal, the square of the elements, the wall with twenty false gates — is the boundary between the worthy and the profane that the title’s “e millibus vix uni” and the citadel’s “non omnibus” draw in words. The instruments of the laboratory are shown as they were used, and Vredeman’s perspective gives the theosopher a real room; but the room is the microcosm, the rock is Christ’s likeness, and the landscape of the Gymnasium is the “great world-book” with its “parts and regions for pages”. Töllner called his study of four of the plates “the endless commentary”, and Szulakowska argues that they were “intended to excite the imagination of the viewer so that a mystic alchemy can take place through the act of visual contemplation”; Forshaw, who has now described every one, treats them as the diagrams of a system in which “Christian Cabala, divine magic and physico-chemistry” are shown, plate by plate, as one art. What every reader has seen is the man on his knees between the tabernacle and the furnace. It is the image of the entry’s whole subject, and Khunrath, who had it engraved twice, knew that it was.⁵⁷

Reception and significance#

Khunrath’s first readers were his friends, and the first of them was Johann Arndt. In the Ikonographia of 1596 Arndt praised the “excellent philosopher and knower of nature”; on Christmas Day 1599 he told Wolfart that from the Amphitheatrum he had learned “to know God and true wisdom out of the scripture of the great and the little world”; his “Oratio theosophica ad Fontem Sapientiae Christum” stands among the commendatory poems of 1609 under the name Christianus Cordatus; and the Iudicium on the four figures printed in 1608, if it is his, is the earliest reading of the plates by a contemporary. Hanns-Peter Neumann has argued that the Liber naturae, the fourth book of Arndt’s Wahres Christentum (1610), the most widely read Lutheran devotional work of the century, draws on Khunrath; and Gilly has shown that “Theosophia” itself, as the name of a movement, passed through this circle into the manifestos of the next decade. Andreas Libavius attacked its author in the Examen philosophiae novae of 1615 and the polemics around it as a representative of the “conspiracy with devils” and “Magia Gabalistica” of the Paracelsians; the Swedish antiquary Johannes Bureus transcribed the legends of the 1609 plates and commented on them at length in his Cabbalistica; the Weissenburg physician Anton Frey wrote in 1623 that he had found in Khunrath’s writings, “especially his Amphitheatrum, most worthy of cedar (to use the words of the most learned Croll set in a marginal note)”, “more wisdom, doctrine and utility than in all others” and “nothing dishonest, fallacious or impious” — the “cedar” being the classical tag for a book that deserves to be preserved; and Johann Friedrich Jung, a Strasbourg jurist and customs official who worked as an editor for Zetzner, made a splendid manuscript copy of the 1595 edition with the four circles in colour and a portrait of himself in his own oratory. Michael Maier borrowed heavily from the Warnungs-Vermahnung for his Examen fucorum pseudo-chymicorum of 1617; Abraham von Franckenberg, Boehme’s friend and editor, added an “Auditorium” to Khunrath’s oratory and laboratory in the Raphael oder Artzt-Engel of 1676. Whether Boehme read Khunrath is undocumented; whether Fludd did, unknown; the pairing of the four — Dee, Khunrath, Maier, Fludd — is Szulakowska’s and Yates’s, not the sources’.⁵⁸

The Rosicrucian reception was double. Yates made Khunrath “a link between a philosophy influenced by Dee and the philosophy of the Rosicrucian manifestos”, in whose work “we meet with the characteristic phraseology of the manifestos, the everlasting emphasis on macrocosm and microcosm, the stress on Magia, Cabala, and Alchymia as in some way combining to form a religious philosophy which promises a new dawn for mankind”, and proposed that the Porta plate “may well have suggested imagery in the Rosicrucian Fama”; Gilly’s archival work has confirmed the influence and reversed the tone. The circle at Tübingen that produced the manifestos was shaped, in Groh and Biehler’s summary, by “the theosophical doctrines of Valentin Weigel” and “the alchemist Heinrich Khunrath” as well as by Brocardo and Postel; the pseudonymous defenders of the brotherhood — Adam Haslmayr, “investigator of holy theosophy”, Julianus de Campis, who wanted the brethren to be “theosophers and no preachers”, and Daniel Mögling, who divided their knowledge into “Theosophia” and “Parergon” and coined “Pansophia” — spoke Khunrath’s language. But the Fama denounced books and figures published “in contumeliam gloriae Dei” under the name of chemistry; the Confessio Fraternitatis of 1615 sneered at “one chief among them, an amphitheatrical actor, a man ingenious enough for imposture”; and Johann Valentin Andreae’s Mythologia Christiana of 1619 parodied Khunrath’s coinages (“Orbimperpottendificunta, undiquoquoversatum bombitarantarantia, verbocinatoria”) and had him hawking medicines labelled “Christiano-Cabalicum, Divino-Magicum, Phicochymicum”. Gilly’s verdict is that Andreae “did not harbor any sympathy for Khunrath”, and that he meant to put as much distance between himself and Khunrath as quickly as he could, so as not to expose his own Hermetic-Rosicrucian programme of reform to the attack he could foresee; Forshaw’s fourth volume accordingly sets “An Anti-Khunrathian Rosicrucian: Johann Valentin Andreae” beside “Pro-Khunrathian Rosicrucians and Paracelsians”. Éliphas Lévi’s “sovereign prince of the Rose-Cross” has no basis at all.⁵⁹

The orthodox answer came from Paris. Marin Mersenne’s Quaestiones in Genesim (1623) condemned those who “have wished to give a natural sense to Holy Scripture, as Khunrath has done in his Amphitheatre, Fludd in all his works”; the Sorbonne’s censure of 1625 followed, and the book stayed on the wrong side of Catholic Europe thereafter. In Protestant Germany it went on being printed. The Chaos was reissued in 1616, the unsold sheets of the Amphitheatrum with a Frankfurt title in 1653, the Confessio and De igne at Strasbourg in 1699 and 1700, the Chaos at Frankfurt in 1708 with a biography drawn from Gottfried Arnold and Johann Moller; the owl appeared in a Berlin Herzstärkung der Chymisten of 1771; and between 1783 and 1788 Adam Friedrich Böhme of Leipzig, in the years of the Gold- und Rosenkreuzer’s ascendancy, reprinted De igne with Arndt’s Iudicium, the Athanor with the first bibliography of Khunrath’s writings, the Magnesia and the Chaos, followed by the Drey Fragen at Frankfurt, their editor calling Khunrath “one of the great Hermetic philosophers”. Moller’s Cimbria literata (1744) had already counted twelve “chimerical editions” of the Amphitheatrum; the ADB of 1882 could still print a “Prague 1598”.⁶⁰

The nineteenth century made him an occultist. Lévi’s Histoire de la magie (1860) called him “a personage little known to those who have not made a special study of the occult sciences”, “sovereign prince of the Rose-Cross, worthy in every respect of that scientific and mystical title”, whose “pantacles are splendid as the light of the Zohar, learned as Trithemius, exact as Pythagoras”, and took its epigraph from his “definition of the great work”; the Rituel de la haute magie (1861) read the Citadel plate as the fortress with twenty gates without exit and “one only that leads to the sanctuary of the great work”, declared that Khunrath “represents and sums up the most learned Gnostic schools”, that his Christ “is that of the Abraxas, the luminous pentagram radiating on the astronomical cross”, and that Khunrath, with Lull and Flamel, “very probably made real gold”, and prescribed “the two-headed Androgyne of Khunrath” for the magic lamp. Stanislas de Guaita expounded “the pantacle of the Rose-Cross” — from his description, the seal of God with Christ at its centre — as “a marvellous pantacle, that is to say the hieroglyphic summary of a whole doctrine” in L’Initiation (1889); Papus and Marc Haven supplied “keys” to the plates in La Clef mystérieuse (1906); the Bibliothèque Chacornac issued the plates in phototype (1898) and, in 1900, Grillot de Givry’s complete French translation, the only one in any language until the twenty-first century. In England A. E. Waite, in The Real History of the Rosicrucians (1887), made Khunrath “the chief representative” of “an advanced school of illuminati” who “under the pretence of alchemical pursuits appear to have concealed a more exalted aim”; in the Lives of Alchemystical Philosophers (1888) he classed him “as a follower of Paracelsus”, “a hierophant of the psychic side of the magnum opus”, whose Amphitheatrum “seems to be the voice of the ancient chaos, but its curious folding plates are exceedingly suggestive”, and is the earliest source for his death “in obscurity and poverty”; and in The Secret Tradition in Alchemy (1926) he made him the “point of departure” of “Divine Alchemy” — “it emerges with complete certainty that Khunrath is concerned solely with an itinerarium mentis in Deum”, “prior to Jacob Böhme, prior to Robert Fludd and the other Rosicrucian apologists” — while conceding that “the way to the Stone itself — I mean, the Physical Stone — remains under its invariable veils: its First Matter is Magnesia, and this discloses nothing”, and calling for “a critical examination of his writings”.⁶¹

That examination came in three waves. C. G. Jung, who cited the Amphitheatrum by the “1604” of its redated engraved title and drew on the Chaos as well, made Khunrath a principal witness of Psychology and Alchemy (1944), Alchemical Studies and Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955–56): the filius macrocosmi “as opposed to the ‘son of man’, who was the filius microcosmi”; the salt that “is not only the physical centre of the earth but the sal sapientiae”; the “salt-point in the midst of the great fabric of the whole world”; and, in “On the Nature of the Psyche” (1946), the “scintillae Animae Mundi igneae, Luminis nimirum Naturae, fiery sparks of the world soul” from the third Isagoge, which became the historical foundation of Jung’s theory of the “multiple luminosities” of the unconscious; the Lab-Oratory is a plate of Psychology and Alchemy. Will-Erich Peuckert’s Pansophie (1936) filed him under a term that was Mögling’s, not his; John Warwick Montgomery (1963) put Arndt and Khunrath together as “Lutheran astrology and alchemy”; Yates (1972) made the plates “a visual introduction to the imagery and the philosophy” of the manifestos and the Lab-Oratory “the Cabalist-Alchemist”. The second wave was philological and iconographic: Ralf Töllner’s Der unendliche Kommentar (1991) on four of the plates; Umberto Eco’s Lo strano caso della Hanau 1609 (1989), which compared copies and sorted the phantom editions; Antoine Faivre’s “La théosophie par l’image” (1993); Joachim Telle’s articles in the Alchemie-Lexikon (1998) and the Brill Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (2005); Urszula Szulakowska’s The Alchemy of Light (2000), which set Khunrath between Dee and Fludd in a history of optical and geometrical alchemy; Carlos Gilly’s essays of 2002 and 2014, his bibliography of the works and manuscripts, and the frommann-holzboog reprint of both editions with the 1756 German translation (2014); and Hereward Tilton’s study of the Achilles consilium (2006). The third is Peter Forshaw’s: a Birkbeck doctorate on the Amphitheatrum and, from 2005, the articles on the Monas and the plates, on Libavius, on the “vitriolic reactions” to alchemical Genesis-exegesis, on the Lab-Oratory and its music, on Christian Kabbalah in the alchemists, on the presentation copy to Wolfart and on the “necessary conjunction” of Kabbalah, magic and alchemy, culminating in The Mage’s Images: Heinrich Khunrath in His Oratory and Laboratory, four volumes (2024–25) — a bio-bibliography and study of every image; “Theosopher & Christian Cabalist”; “Mage & Alchemist”; and a reception history “from Rosicrucians to modern occulture” — the first monograph on Khunrath in any language, followed at once by Vladimír Karpenko, Ivo Purš and Martin Žemla’s Khunrath in Context (2025), which reads him against Renaissance thought, the Reformation and laboratory practice, and by Žemla’s studies of his “theosophical reform” and of his debt to Ficino’s metaphysics of light. The plates have entered the museums: the Getty’s Art of Alchemy (2016–17) showed a plate of the Amphitheatrum under the caption “Chaos”, the Frankfurt exhibition and volume on Merian’s illustration of alchemy (2024) placed the Lab-Oratory in the tradition of illustrated alchemy that Merian inherited, and the Ritman Library’s manuscript copy of 1702 is the record of a reader who copied the book page for page. Beyond scholarship the Lab-Oratory has had the afterlife of a proverb — on the covers of histories of alchemy and of the Rosicrucians, on postcards and posters, as the standard illustration of “the religious alchemist” — and the bespectacled owl of the second.⁶²

Khunrath’s significance is threefold. He gave the name “Theosophia” its modern currency, as the common banner of the Paracelsian, Weigelian, Kabbalistic and Hermetic dissent from school philosophy and confessional theology, a generation before Boehme; the “theosophers” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries inherited the word from his title pages. He stated, more systematically than anyone before him, the reciprocal analogy of the Philosophers’ Stone and Christ — the filius macrocosmi and the filius microcosmi — which the Rosicrucian and Pietist alchemists, the Gold- und Rosenkreuzer, Waite and Jung would each take in their own direction, and which the Sorbonne recognised, in condemning it, as the point at which alchemy became theology. And he made the alchemist’s vocation visible: the theosopher on his knees between the tabernacle and the furnace, praying and working in one room under the words “do not speak of God without light”, is the image through which four centuries have pictured what the “religious alchemist” was, and it is a portrait of its inventor.

Bibliography#

Primary#

Khunrath, Heinrich. De signatura rerum naturalium theses. Basel: Typis Oporinianis, 1588.

——, ed. Zebelis Regis et Sapientis Arabum vetustissimi, de interpraetatione quorundam accidentium … observationes accuratissimae. Prague: Michael Peterle, 1592.

——. Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae solius verae, Christiano-cabalisticum, divino-magicum, physico-chymicum. [Hamburg: Jakob Lucius the Younger?], 1595. Four circular engravings by Paullus van der Doort, the fourth after Hans Vredeman de Vries.

——. Confessio Henrici Khunrath de chao physico-chemicorum catholico. Magdeburg, 1596. Reprinted Strasbourg: Johann Albert Dolhopff, 1699.

——. Von hylealischen, das ist, pri-materialischen catholischen oder algemeinem natürlichen Chaos der naturgemessen Alchymiae und Alchymisten … Confessio oder Bekentnus. Magdeburg: the heirs of Andreas Gene, 1597. 2nd edn, Magdeburg: Joachim Schmiedt for Johann Francke, 1616; Frankfurt: Georg Heinrich Oehrling, 1708; as Alchymisch philosophisches Bekenntnis vom universellen Chaos der naturgemässen Alchymie, Leipzig: Adam Friedrich Böhme, 1786; facsimile of the 1708 edition, Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1990.

——. Symbolum physico-chymicum … de chao physico-chymicorum catholico and Naturgemes-alchymisch Symbolum, oder gahr kurtze Bekentnus … von allgemeinem, natürlichen, dreyeinigen … Chao der naturgemessen Alchymisten. [Hamburg]: Philipp von Ohr for the heirs of Hans Binder, 1598.

——. Magnesia catholica philosophorum; Das ist, Höheste Nothwendigkeit in Alchymia …. Magdeburg: Johann Bötcher for Johann Francke, 1599. Modernised as Magnesia catholica Philosophorum, oder eine in der Alchymie höchst nothwendige und augenscheinliche Anweisung, Leipzig: Adam Friedrich Böhme, 1784.

——. Warhafftiger Bericht vom philosophischen Athanor, auch Brauch und Nutz desselbigen. Magdeburg: Johann Bötcher, 1599. 2nd edn, [Magdeburg: for Johann Francke?], 1603; 3rd edn, [Magdeburg]: “in Verlegung des Autoris”, 1615; modernised as Wahrhafter Bericht vom philosophischen Athanor, Leipzig: Adam Friedrich Böhme, 1783.

——. Quaestiones tres per-utiles … Das ist, Hochnützliche, unumbgängliche und gar nothwendige drei Fragen. Leipzig: Thomas Schürer (printed at Eisleben by Bartholomaeus Hörnig), 1607. Reissued Frankfurt and Leipzig: Johann Georg Fleischer, 1788.

——. De igne magorum philosophorumque secreto externo et visibili: Das ist, Philosophische Erklährung von und über dem geheymen, eusserlichen, sichtbaren Gludt- und Flammenfewer der uhralten Magorum oder Weysen. Edited by Benedictus Figulus. Strasbourg: Lazarus Zetzner, 1608. Reprinted Strasbourg: Johann Albert Dolhopff, 1700; Leipzig: Adam Friedrich Böhme, 1783.

——. Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae, solius verae, christiano-kabalisticum, divino-magicum, nec non physico-chymicum, tertriunum, catholicon. Edited by Erasmus Wolfart. Hanau: Guilielmus Antonius, 1609. Issues with cancel titles Magdeburg: Levinus Braunss, 1608, and Frankfurt: Tobias Gundermann, 1653.

——. Tractatus physico-medicus von recht gründlicher … Curation Tartari, Grieses, Sandes, Steins. Edited by Johannes Thurnmüntzer. Hof: Matthäus Pfeilschmidt, 1611.

——. “Consilium de Vulcani magica fabrefactione armorum Achillis” (MS 1597; Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, Rål. 4). Printed in Johannes Staricius, HeldenSchatz, pp. 1–86. Frankfurt: Nicolaus Stein, 1615.

——. Amphithéâtre christiano-kabbalistique, divino-magique, physico-chimique, ter-tri-uno-catholique de l’éternelle sapience seule vraie. Translated by Émile-Jules Grillot de Givry. Paris: Bibliothèque Chacornac, 1900. The twelve plates in phototype, Paris: Chacornac, 1898; with keys by Papus and Marc Haven as La Clef mystérieuse, Paris: Ficker, 1906.

——. The Amphitheatre Engravings of Heinrich Khunrath. Translated by Patricia Tahil, edited by Adam McLean. Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks 7. Edinburgh: Magnum Opus, 1981.

——. Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae – Schauplatz der ewigen allein wahren Weisheit: Vollständiger Reprint des Erstdrucks von [Hamburg] 1595 und des zweiten und letzten Drucks Hanau 1609. Edited by Carlos Gilly, Anja Hallacker, Hanns-Peter Neumann and Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann. Clavis Pansophiae 6. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 2014. With the German translation of 1756, Arndt’s Iudicium, Gilly’s introduction and his bibliography of the works.

——. Anfiteatro della sapienza eterna, sola, vera. Translated by Giulia Ferretti. Pesaro: Metauro, 2014.

——. Oheň mágů. Translated by Pavel Krummer. Prague: Volvox Globator, 2019.

[Arndt, Johann, attrib.] “Iudicium philosophi anonymi über die 4 Figuren des grossen Amphitheatri.” In Khunrath, De igne magorum (1608), pp. 107–23.

Ashmole, Elias, ed. Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum. London: J. Grismond for Nathaniel Brooke, 1652.

Dee, John. The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee. Edited by James Orchard Halliwell. London: Camden Society, 1842.

Duplessis d’Argentré, Charles. Collectio judiciorum de novis erroribus. Vol. 2. Paris, 1728.

Lévi, Éliphas. Histoire de la magie. Paris: Germer Baillière, 1860.

——. Dogme et rituel de la haute magie. 2nd edn. 2 vols. Paris: Germer Baillière, 1861.

Moller, Johann. Cimbria literata. Vol. 2. Copenhagen, 1744.

Waite, Arthur Edward. The Real History of the Rosicrucians. London: George Redway, 1887.

——. Lives of Alchemystical Philosophers. London: George Redway, 1888.

——. The Secret Tradition in Alchemy: Its Development and Records. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1926.

Witte, Henning. Diarium biographicum. Danzig: Martin Hallervord, 1688.

Secondary#

Daut, Berthold. “Betrachtungen zu Heinrich Khunrath.” Antiquariat Lange, online (undated).

Eco, Umberto. Lo strano caso della Hanau 1609. Milan: Bompiani, 1989.

Faivre, Antoine. “La théosophie par l’image.” Aries 15 (1993): 42–48.

Ferguson, John. Bibliotheca chemica. 2 vols. Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1906.

Forshaw, Peter J. “The Early Alchemical Reception of John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica.” Ambix 52 (2005): 247–69.

——. “Alchemy in the Amphitheatre: Some Consideration of the Alchemical Content of the Engravings in Heinrich Khunrath’s Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom (1609).” In Art and Alchemy, edited by Jacob Wamberg, 195–220. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006.

——. “Curious Knowledge and Wonder-Working Wisdom in the Occult Works of Heinrich Khunrath.” In Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, edited by R. J. W. Evans and Alexander Marr, 107–29. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.

——. “Vitriolic Reactions: Orthodox Responses to the Alchemical Exegesis of Genesis.” In The Word and the World: Biblical Exegesis and Early Modern Science, edited by Kevin Killeen and Peter J. Forshaw, 111–36. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

——. “‘Paradoxes, Absurdities, and Madness’: Conflict over Alchemy, Magic and Medicine in the Works of Andreas Libavius and Heinrich Khunrath.” Early Science and Medicine 13 (2008): 53–81.

——. “Oratorium – Auditorium – Laboratorium: Early Modern Improvisations on Cabala, Music, and Alchemy.” Aries 10 (2010): 169–95.

——. “‘Behold, the dreamer cometh’: Hyperphysical Magic and Deific Visions in an Early-Modern Theosophical Lab-Oratory.” In Conversations with Angels: Essays Towards a History of Spiritual Communication, 1100–1700, edited by Joad Raymond, 175–200. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

——. “Cabala Chymica or Chemia Cabalistica — Early Modern Alchemists and Cabala.” Ambix 60 (2013): 361–89.

——. “Unexpected in the Octagon: Heinrich Khunrath’s Presentation Copy to Erasmus Wolfart.” In Octagon: The Quest for Wholeness, edited by Hans Thomas Hakl, vol. 2, 71–89. Gaggenau: Scientia Nova, 2016.

——. “Michael Maier and Mythoalchemy.” In Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier’s “Atalanta fugiens” (1618) with Scholarly Commentary, edited by Tara Nummedal and Donna Bilak. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020. Online.

——. “Oratorium – Laboratorium in Khunraths Amphitheatrvm Sapientiae Aeternae” and the commentaries on the hieroglyphic figures. In Merian und die Alchemie, virtual exhibition, Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, 2021. Online.

——. “A Necessary Conjunction: Cabala, Magic, and Alchemy in the Theosophy of Heinrich Khunrath (1560–1605).” In Innovation in Esotericism from the Renaissance to the Present, edited by Georgiana D. Hedesan and Tim Rudbøg, 97–133. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

——. “Khunrath, Heinrich.” In Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy, edited by Marco Sgarbi. Cham: Springer, 2022 (online 2017).

——. “An Amphitheatrical Microcosm: Heinrich Khunrath’s Oratorium-Laboratorium.” In Opus Magnum: Matthäus Merian d.Ä. und die Bebilderung der Alchemie, edited by Berit Wagner and Corinna Gannon, 237–46. Heidelberg: arthistoricum.net, 2024.

——. The Mage’s Images: Heinrich Khunrath in His Oratory and Laboratory. 4 vols. Aries Book Series 37–40. Leiden: Brill, 2024–25. Vol. 1, Prologue: Bio-Bibliography & Introduction to Khunrath’s Images; vol. 2, Theosopher & Christian Cabalist; vol. 3, Mage & Alchemist; vol. 4, Epilogue: Reception (from Rosicrucians to Modern Occulture) & Bibliography.

Gilly, Carlos. “The Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae of Heinrich Khunrath.” In Magia, alchimia, scienza dal ’400 al ’700: L’influsso di Ermete Trismegisto / Magic, Alchemy and Science 15th–18th Centuries: The Influence of Hermes Trismegistus, edited by Carlos Gilly and Cis van Heertum, vol. 1, 341–50 (Italian text 325 ff.). Florence: Centro Di, 2002.

——. “Heinrich Khunrath und das Entstehen der frühneuzeitlichen Theosophie”, “Das Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae von Heinrich Khunrath” and “Verzeichnis der Werke von Heinrich Khunrath.” In Khunrath, Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae – Schauplatz der ewigen allein wahren Weisheit (2014), 9–22, 133–81, 531–58.

Groh, Dieter, and Birgit Biehler. “Universalwissenschaft, Millenarismus und Zweite Reformation.” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 117 (2006): 25–62.

Hotson, Howard. “Heinrich Khunrath (c. 1560–1605).” Cabinet, University of Oxford, April 2019. Online.

Humberg, Oliver. Der Alchemist Conrad Khunrath: Texte und Dokumente aus Leipzig, Schleswig und Hamburg mit Studien zu Leben, Werk und Familiengeschichte. Quellen und Forschungen zur Alchemie 2. Elberfeld: Humberg, 2006.

Jung, C. G. Psychology and Alchemy. Collected Works, vol. 12. 2nd edn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.

——. Alchemical Studies. Collected Works, vol. 13. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967.

——. Mysterium Coniunctionis. Collected Works, vol. 14. 2nd edn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.

——. “On the Nature of the Psyche.” In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Collected Works, vol. 8. 2nd edn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.

Kangro, Hans. “Khunrath, Heinrich.” In Dictionary of Scientific Biography, edited by Charles Coulston Gillispie, vol. 7. New York: Scribner, 1973.

Karpenko, Vladimír, Ivo Purš and Martin Žemla. Khunrath in Context: An Alchemist in the Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom. Universal Reform 4. Leiden: Brill, 2025.

Montgomery, John Warwick. “Cross, Constellation, and Crucible: Lutheran Astrology and Alchemy in the Age of the Reformation.” Ambix 11 (1963): 65–86.

Neumann, Hanns-Peter. Natura sagax – Die geistige Natur: Zum Zusammenhang von Naturphilosophie und Mystik in der frühen Neuzeit am Beispiel Johann Arndts. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004.

Peuckert, Will-Erich. Pansophie: Ein Versuch zur Geschichte der weissen und schwarzen Magie. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1936.

Szulakowska, Urszula. The Alchemy of Light: Geometry and Optics in Late Renaissance Alchemical Illustration. Symbola et Emblemata 10. Leiden: Brill, 2000.

Telle, Joachim. “Khunrath, Heinrich.” In Alchemie: Lexikon einer hermetischen Wissenschaft, edited by Claus Priesner and Karin Figala, 194–96. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1998.

——. “Khunrath, Heinrich.” In Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, edited by Wouter J. Hanegraaff, with Antoine Faivre, Roelof van den Broek and Jean-Pierre Brach. Leiden: Brill, 2005.

Tilton, Hereward. “Of Electrum and the Armour of Achilles: Myth and Magic in a Manuscript of Heinrich Khunrath (1560–1605).” Aries 6 (2006): 117–57.

——. “Of Ether, Entheogens and Colloidal Gold: Heinrich Khunrath and the Making of a Philosophers’ Stone.” In Alchemical Traditions: From Antiquity to the Avant-Garde, edited by Aaron Cheak. Melbourne: Numen Books, 2013.

Töllner, Ralf. Der unendliche Kommentar: Untersuchungen zu vier ausgewählten Kupferstichen aus Heinrich Khunraths “Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae solius verae” (Hanau 1609). Ammersbek bei Hamburg: Verlag an der Lottbek, 1991.

Yates, Frances A. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972.

Žemla, Martin. “Heinrich Khunrath and His Theosophical Reform.” Acta Comeniana 31 (2017): 43–60.

——. “Ficino in the Light of Alchemy: Heinrich Khunrath’s Use of Ficinian Metaphysics of Light.” In Platonism and its Legacy, edited by John F. Finamore and Tomáš Nejeschleba, 282–95. Lydney: Prometheus Trust, 2019.