Alchemical Medicine, Spirituality, and the Language of Nature

In early modern Europe, alchemy was both experimental “science” and religious service and sources relate how adepts received their knowledge of the natural world through divine inspiration. Accordingly, the alchemist sought to enact both physical changes in matter and spiritual changes in himself. This chapter investigates the Basilica Chymica (Frankfurt 1609), which connects scientific empiricism with a religious approach. In its double role as a book of nature and a devotional, the book became a standard reference for the healing arts all over Europe. By the end of the seventeenth century, no less than fifteen Latin editions and several vernacular translations had been published. This chapter explores the work’s impressive frontispiece, designed by Angelus Sadeler, an engraver at the court of Emperor Rudolf II. The chapter asks to what extent one can characterize this highly detailed frontispiece as an example of what Roman Jakobson has termed an “inter-semiotic translation.” Furthermore, the book itself thematizes translation in three stages: divine language, the language of nature and human language. The work thus argues that when God speaks, He creates; when nature speaks, it gives birth, and when humans speak, they translate the “signatures” of nature into a text consisting of letters.