A satirical engraving, supposedly of Pico della Mirandola, engraved in Dresden by Mathias Oesterreich and issued in a series of humorous prints in 1750.

   

Just putting this excellent booklet on here as an attachment for those who missed it the first time round.

THE INCOMPLEAT CHEMIST, BEING AN ESSAY ON THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CHEMIST IN HIS LABORATORY, WITH A DICTIONARY OF OBSOLETE CHEMICAL TERMS OF THE PERIOD

Attached Files

  The Incompleat Chemist Smithsonian.pdf (Size: 3.01 MB / Downloads: 224)

It is interesting that some Freemasonic emblems draw so directly from alchemical imagery that it  can be, at first glance, difficult to tell them apart.

This 19th-century manuscript in the Hessian State Archive, Darmstadt, MS HStAD D 4 585/7 is titled:-

Tempelherren (Serie der Ordensmeister und der Hohenpriester, Reflexiones primae et secundae noctis, Eid der Tempelherren, Regeln und Statuten, Tapis des Tempels, Grundriss des Tempels, Zeichnungen)


   

Hermes with a winged helmet and heels, holds a caduceus in his left hand and a key marked 'I close' in his right. 
Attached to his left arm is a key marked 'I open'. 
He stands upon a circle, around which is labelled the Animal, Vegetable, Mineral and Starry realms.
Inside the circumference is Materia Prima, Magnesia, Lapis and Chaos, and within this is a square with the four elements labelled each on one of the sides. 
Within this is a triangle with Agens, Patiens and Quinta Essentia; at the vertices are salt, sulphur and mercury, and its edges are labelled on the outside - separation, dissolution and depuration, and on the inside - soul, spirit and body.

From Johann de Monte Raphaim, (probably a pseudonym), Vorbothe der am philosophischen Himmel hervor-brechenden Morgen-Röthe. 
Hamburg: zu finden bey Samuel Heyl, 1716.


   

I cannot read German, but there are so many texts I would like to read.

Paul Ferguson made the suggestion that I could transcribe and machine-translate old German printed alchemical texts.

This involved finding clean and clear scans of alchemical texts. 

I then run these images through a program called Transcribus, which can read the old Fraktur fonts. This program works, but the interface is difficult to understand. It took me many attempts to find out how to work it consistently.

Next, one takes the output, now in Roman characters and puts it through the DeepL translation program. Amazingly, it requires only a little editing. It may be clumsy and not exactly beautiful English, but it does make it possible to get an understanding of the drift of the text.


Here is the opening section of Reusner's Pandora, 1582, which relates to the start of the Buch der heilgen Dreifaltigkeit.

------------------------------------------------------------

'In 1688 William Cooper, a London bookseller, published A catalogue of chymicall books. For two decades he had collected these titles, locating, identifying and recording details of 422 English books.1 This list documents one component of the history of alchemy. It also provides a measure of the vitality of alchemical pursuits in Restoration England.'

by Lauren Kassell.

https://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/files/kassell-...vealed.pdf

Interesting and well-written article about the first English translator of Paracelsus, John Hester:

https://www.academia.edu/3689138/John_He...in_England

    .
From an oldish (1998) Sotheby’s catalogue, this b/w shot of a small painting with the title: "An Alchemist in a Courtyard."

Really atypical for this type of picture, for it is neither the chaotic vessels strewn place of a bumbling fool at his furnace, nor the dimly lit room of a studious philosopher poring over his tome, athanor at his elbow.

Here we have an open scene. On the right-hand side, a vista of flower gardens. On the left, a clean, spacious, orderly laboratory. On the foreground, distillation taking place at an almost commercial scale.

Now the museum curators and the auction catalogue compilers have that tendency of labeling any painting with a vial in it an ‘alchemy' scene.

A physician examining to the light the urine of his patient: "Alchemist […]"
A quack surgeon performing a trepanation has two bottles on his shelves? "Alchemist […]"

Anyway, what do you make of this image? I was leaning for a depiction of a perfume maker (as the artist choose to depict the rose (?) bushes and some cut flowers on the table.) But it could be a lot of things. Bruce T. Moran, in his Distilling Knowledge (2005) has a whole chapter on ‘Alchemy in Artisan and Daily Life.'
.

Sebastian Wirdig (1613-1687)

Nova medicina spirituum: curiosa Scientia et doctrina, unanimiter hucusque neglecta, et a nemine merito exculta, Medicis tamen et Physicis utilissima: In qua Primo Spirituum naturalis Constitutio, Vita, Sanitas, Temperamenta, Ingenia, Calidum innatum, Phantasiæ vires, Astrorum influentiæ [Metemphyschosis - Greek], rerum Magnetismi, Sympathiæ et Antipathiæ, Qualitates hactenus occulta, sensibus tamen manifestæ, aliaque cætero quin abstrusa et paradoxa; Dehinc Spirituum præternaturalis seu morbosa Dispositio, Causæ, Curationes per naturam, per Diætam, per Arcana majora, Palingenesiam, Magnetismum seu Sympatheismum, Transplantationes, Amuleta, ingenue et dilucide demonstrantur.
Hamburg 1688.

This work contains two emblematic engravings as frontispieces to its two parts.

   


Frontispiece to the first book. 123x126mm. Jove in the clouds, suspends by a chain, an old man, Prometheus, who lights a torch from the Sun and then passes this flame down to a winged cupid with a bow and quiver of arrows. He lights his own torch from that of Prometheus and, in turn, brings it to the earth. This cupid stands between two ranks of gods, who include Aphrodite, Dionysius, a goddess with flowers, Pan, a goddess with cornucopia, Hephaestus-Vulcan. In the foreground, a man and a woman throw rocks over their shoulders, and behind them appear small human men and women. "S. Wirdig. Invenit. Cornelius Nicholas Schurtz delineavit et sculpsit Norimbergae 1673."


   

Frontispiece to the second book. 121x127mm. Similar to item 1 except that this takes place at night, and Prometheus' torch is lit from the Moon. Hermes-Mercury, complete with winged helmet, sandals and caduceus, takes the place of the cupid. The six gods who sit on each side of Mercury are Saturn, a goddess bearing flowers, an old bent-backed man, the skeleton of Chronos, Neptune and a bearded figure wrapped in a fur coat. "S. Wirdig. Inventor. Cornelius Nicholas Schurtz delineavit et sculpsit Norimber."]



I found this description of the work:-

"A theory of magnetic attraction and repugnance formulated by Tenzel Wirdig, professor at Rostock, who published his Tenzelius Wirdig, Nova medicina spirituum in 1673. Wirdig believed that everything in the universe possessed a soul, and that the Earth itself was merely a larger animal. Between the souls of things in accordance with each other there was a "magnetic sympathy" and a perpetual antipathy existed between those of an uncongenial nature. To this sympathy and antipathy Wirdig gave the name magnetism. He stated:-"

"Out of this relationship of sympathy and antipathy arises a constant movement in the whole world, and in all its parts, and an uninterrupted communion between heaven and earth, which produces universal harmony. The stars whose emanations consist merely of fire and spirits, have an undeniable influence on earthly bodies; and their influence on man demonstrates itself by life, movement, and warmth, those things without which he cannot live. The influence of the stars is the strongest at birth. The newborn child inhales this influence, and on whose first breath frequently his whole constitution depends, nay, even his whole life."

Gregoire Mariette (1646-1710) Region elementaire ou sublunaire qui comprend les corps simples.
Gregoire Mariette, Paris, 1696  (51x36 cms)

A late 17th-century diagram summing up the nature of the four elements and their influences.

"Celestial chart hand coloured, presents the universe as a place that is simultaneously ordered and chaotic, spiritual and temporal, familiar and fantastical. A rare separately issued map of the cosmos, integrating ancient Pagan and medieval Christian cosmology with Renaissance beliefs and experiences. Originally published in Italian by Antonino Saliba in 1582, the map was later reissued in Latin by Cornelis de Jode in a slightly modified format (lacking one of the nine rings). This copy is a new edition published by Gregoire Mariette. Shows eight concentric rings, from the inner ring depicting the infernal regions to an encircling ring of fire populated by demons, phoenixes and salamanders. The fourth ring is a hemispheric map on a south-polar projection. Within the spandrels are decorative images of the sun and moon. The diagram is surmounted by a title with flanking hemispheric maps. The cosmic model of concentric rings was derived from Aristotle and Ptolemy, which in modified forms prevailed until the seventeenth century. The Ptolemaic model comprised nine spheres around the earth: five planets, the sun, the moon, the stars, and the primum mobile. This departure from the classical content of the nine spheres while retaining the structure, is entirely typical of the fluid state of Renaissance science."