Rennaissance Alchemy

The European alchemical writers of the Renaissance combined the Hellenistic Egyptian texts preserved in the Arab world, the Jewish Kabbalistic writings, the Greek texts of Aristotelian physics and cosmology (also preserved in the Arab world), together with the newly translated Hermetic and Neoplatonic texts that became accessible in Europe from the mid-fifteenth century onwards.  It is debatable whether the equation of the alchemical stages with the inner spiritual ascent was added during its transmission through the Arabic knowledge corpus, or had been there from the beginning. It is however fully articulated in alchemical writings from the sixteenth century onward. These texts show a variety in the number of stages in the ascent, but seven is the favourite,  being portrayed in the engravings of many alchemical works. 

Lambsprinck, Die lapide philosophico libellus (edition of 1678)

The anonymous sixteenth century alchemical writer known as Lambsprinck was possibly associated with the Benedictine Abbey of Lammspring, near Hildesheim in Germany.   In his Die lapide philosophico  he portrays the ascent via a staircase of seven steps, leading to the figure of the King, symbolising the philosopher’s stone, seated on his throne.

Joannis Danielis Mylius (1583-1642) in his Anatomia auri (1628) uses the symbolism of a tree to represent the ascent. The seven planetary gods are on successive branches and Hermes Trismegistus, the semi-mythical teacher of the Corpus Hermeticum, seated at the top. In his Opus medico-chymicum (1618), Mylius uses a more complex image for the ascent: seven trees, each with the glyph of one of the planets, surround the figure of the alchemist, while the same planetary symbols appear in the heavens marking the celestial spheres. Above them is the angelic realm, represented by the Hebrew tetragrammaton, the one true name of God, at the top. 

Stephan Michelspacher, Cabala, Spiegel der Kunst und Natur in Alchymia (Augsburg, 1615) 

Little is known of the Tyrolean engraver and publisher, Stephan Michelspacher other than that he practiced medicine in the Paracelsian tradition in Tyrol (Alpine Austria) in the early part of the seventeenth century, leaving in c.1613 to start a publishing house in Augsburg which he ran until at least 1619. In the third of his engravings in Cabala, Spiegel der Kunst und Natur in Alchymia  (1615) (‘Cabala, mirror of art and nature in Alchemy), Michelspacher shows a stairway rising into heaven, each of its seven steps labelled with one of the alchemical stages and governed by the one of the planetary gods. This can be viewed as an implied reference to Jacob’s ladder connecting the terrestrial and celestial worlds.  

Extract from John Noyce, The Inner Ascent (lulu, 2018)