The Alchemical Transformations of the Mutus Liber (1677)

Most appear on its first plate, where we are told that the book’s author, “Altus”, has created “hieroglyphic figures” to illustrate the “hermetic philosophy”. They hover over a sleeping Jacob, dreaming of the angels on the ladder of heaven, one of whom is attempting to wake him with his trumpet. This is a biblical scene, but, for those in the know, it also provides keys to the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone, the mythical substance that could turn lead into gold.

According to the modern alchemist Eugène Canseliet (1899–1982), since the trumpets are both igneous and vitreous, they represent saline, and the two angels are a metaphor for the “cohobation of the spirit on the material”. For full effect, he claims, you must read the enigmatic numbers and letters beneath the title backward. The following fourteen plates provide more or less step-by-step instructions on the “humid way” (as opposed to the “dry way”) of creating the stone.

Collect and harvest the dew from a cloth left outside overnight (plate 4); distill it, putting the coagulated remnants in a flask to be presented to the Lunar Vulcan and subsequently fermented (plate 5); turn the ferment into “rose” (plate 6); combine distillates to create ammonia and cream of tatar before purification, when mercury will be bound to antimony by iron (plate 7); conduct a first exposure (plate 9); weigh, recompose, and wait ten days (plate 10); conduct a second exposure (plate 12) and a second recombination and multiplication (plate 13); and finally, combine saltpeter, ammonium chloride, and coal, which after three days will create the white stone and the red stone with which the transmutation can be affected (plate 14). Various readers have interpreted the pair of figures as allegories for the complementary natures that must be brought together in the process of alchemy (male and female, Sun and Moon, sulphur and mercury), but they also evoked Nicolas and Perrenelle Flamel, the fourteenth-century Parisian couple who supposedly succeeded in manufacturing the Philosopher’s Stone. The text that was long thought to be Nicolas’ account of their discovery — the _Exposition of the Hieroglyphicall Figures which he caused to bee painted upon an Arch in St.

Innocents Church-yard in Paris_ — had been published for the first time in 1612, causing a sensation and quickly making him one of alchemy’s most-cited masters. Before explicating his “hieroglyphicall figures”, the _Exposition_ tells of Nicolas’ discovery of an ancient alchemical text written by “Abraham the Jew”, full of strange images and alien tongues. With the assistance of an Iberian Jewish convert named Master Canches, Flamel was able to decipher the manuscript — and his wife, Perrenelle, helped him put it into action.

Unfortunately, Nicolas’ book was a seventeenth-century fake. Although the Flamels were real — Nicolas’ tombstone can be visited today at the Musée de Cluny in Paris — there is no evidence that the couple were alchemists, nor that they had any great fortune that could not have been acquired through Nicolas’ work as a scribe and Perrenelle’s inheritances. (The _Exposition_’s real author, its publisher P. Arnauld de la Chevalrie, was generally careful to only cite authorities from before the Flamels’ time, but a single reference to the sixteenth-century German alchemist Lambspring slipped in.) Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing.

Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. Both the legend of the Flamels and the _Mutus Liber_ were productions of the seventeenth-century rebirth of interest in alchemy, just as early modern science was taking off. Although medieval alchemy had declined under pressure from humanists — whose objections to searching for the Philosopher’s Stone were more moral than scientific — the discovery of early chemistry reinvigorated early modern scientists’ belief that transmutation was possible.