The Alchemical Transformations of the Mutus Liber (1677)

The Mutus Liber, a seventeenth-century "mute" alchemical manual attributed to a mysterious Altus, presents its method almost entirely in images: an initial plate overlays a biblical dream of Jacob with hermetic symbols that alchemists read as keys to the Philosopher’s Stone, and fourteen subsequent engravings map a pictorial laboratory protocol. Modern commentators decode its iconography into stepwise processes of the humid way: harvesting overnight dew, distillation and fermentation of coagula, conversion to a rose-like stage, formation of ammonia and cream of tartar, purification where mercury is united with antimony via iron, staged exposures with recombinations and wait periods, and a final calcination using saltpeter, ammonium chloride and coal claimed to yield a white and then red stone for metal transmutation. The paired human figures and other motifs are read as metaphors for complementary constituents - male/female, Sun/Moon, sulphur/mercury - or as evocations of the Flamel legend.

Contextual history traces how such works flourished during a seventeenth-century revival of alchemy even as experimental science emerged: some celebrated natural philosophers practiced both labors, royal imprimaturs appear on the book, and its publication was tied to contemporary debates about legitimacy. A notorious poisoning scandal and the rising Academy of Sciences pushed transmutation toward occultity, yet the work later resurfaced in psychological discourse when Carl Jung used its imagery to argue alchemy’s value as a model for inner transformation, summed up by its injunction to pray, study repeatedly, and labor to discover.