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Matching Alchemical Engravings.
Some books resist being read aloud. You can summarize a novel over dinner, and a history book lends itself to bullet points, but a certain strain of…
The Mutus Liber arrived in 1677 as a book with almost no words in it. Fifteen engraved plates, published in La Rochelle by Pierre Savouret, credited to an…
The Mutus Liber, the "silent book" of alchemy, has no text to argue with. A sequence of engraved plates, a title page, and little else: no preface, no…
Of the fifteen plates in the Mutus Liber, the eleventh is the one where the whole doctrine squeezes itself into a single drop of water.
Somewhere near the start of the Mutus Liber, a ladder leans against the sky. Figures climb it, and above them angels wring out clouds like wet linen,…
Open a copy of the Mutus Liber and the first thing you notice is what is missing.
Somewhere right now a tattoo needle is tracing a design that a mathematician composed, by his own account, in Antwerp over twelve days in January 1564.
From Monas Hieroglyphica
Fifteen engravings, not one word of explanation. That was the whole teaching of the Mutus Liber.