The Alchemical Transformations of the Mutus Liber (1677)

The Mutus Liber — “Mute Book” — is a work of few words. 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.)

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. Even Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle, icons of the scientific revolution, spent a great deal of time in alchemical pursuits, and as William R. Newman has argued, early experimental science grew out of methods and insights that had first been developed by alchemists.

That alchemy was still considered a standard scientific undertaking is attested to by the royal letters of patent that appear on the Mutus Liber’s final plate, which claim that the book had been brought to Louis XIV’s attention by a certain Jacob Saulat, Sieur des Marez. (Canseliet points out that “Saulat” is a close anagram of “Altus”.) In addition to granting Saulat copyright, the letters insist that a copy of the Mutus Liber be sent to the newly-founded public library in Paris, as well as the royal library in the Louvre.

The reputation of alchemy would quickly change. Even as the Mutus Liber was being printed, the so-called “Affair of the Poisons” was rocking Paris. A huge number of aristocrats — including Madame de Montespan, Louis’ official mistress — were found to have patronized sorceresses and alchemists in order to procure “inheritance powders” (poisons) and aphrodisiacs. Hundreds of people were arrested and thirty-six executed. Around the same time, the nascent Parisian Academy of Sciences was turning its back on alchemy. The Search was exiled from Science and condemned to the realm of Magic.

That was still not the end for the Mutus Liber. The copy featured here, one of the only extant first editions, belonged to the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who reproduced some of its images in his Psychology and Alchemy (1944). For Jung, alchemy was not a search for the transmutation of metal, but for the transmutation of the self, a kind of Yoga for the Western man. Studying the enigma of Mutus Liber and other alchemical works was a path toward better understanding one’s own consciousness. And indeed, the motto on plate 14 seems as well suited to that as to discovering the key for untold riches. “Ora lege lege lege relege labora et invenies”: Pray, read, read, read, reread, work — and you will discover.