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+--- Thread: Francis van Helmont and the Alphabet of Nature (/showthread.php?tid=390)
Francis van Helmont and the Alphabet of Nature - Paul Ferguson - 08-18-2023
"Largely forgotten today in the shadow of his more famous father, the 17th-century Flemish alchemist Francis van Helmont influenced and was friends with the likes of Locke, Boyle, and Leibniz. While imprisoned by the Inquisition, in between torture sessions, he wrote his Alphabet of Nature on the idea of a universal “natural” language."
"The theory he propounds is that the ancient and therefore uncorrupted Hebrew characters are actually diagrams illustrating how the lips and tongue should be positioned when uttering the sounds they make. A series of woodcuts in the book show cross sections of heads in profile with the speech organs exposed to reveal how they are shaped exactly like Hebrew letters."
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/francis-van-helmont-and-the-alphabet-of-nature/