You start unable to name what stands in an alchemical engraving. You finish reading one you have never seen, unaided, and you can say who said what each figure meant.
IThe HeavensLearning to read the alchemical imageSymbolica
Book One · Naming
The world as these makers believed it was built, from the outer sphere down to one human body. You learn what every figure is, and who drew it that way.
About 208 pages. Cover: a detail of The Hand of the Mysteries, J. Augustus Knapp, 1928.
IIThe DescentLearning to read the alchemical imageSymbolica
Book Two · Reading against
Everything in these pictures that has to die, fall or come apart. One figure carries several readings, and you learn who held each.
About 120 pages. Cover: a detail of Knight, Death, and the Devil, Albrecht Dürer, 1513.
IIIThe Great WorkLearning to read the alchemical imageSymbolica
Book Three · Reading a sequence
One operation from the sealed vessel to the finished stone. You read each picture as a step, and know where you stand in it.
About 216 pages. Cover: a detail of Occultum Lapidem, the Philosopher's Stone, J. Augustus Knapp, colour plate, 1928.
In 1616 a book printed in Strasbourg told of a traveller invited to a royal wedding. Over seven days he sets out, passes tests, watches deaths and a resurrection, and arrives at the wedding of a king and a queen. The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz reached English in Ezechiel Foxcroft's translation of 1690. The three books follow its road: the invitation, the descent, the wedding and what it makes.
Integrae Naturae Speculum Artisque Imago, Robert Fludd, 1617: the first plate of the first chapter. Fludd’s Latin is put into English by the archive.
The plate, with nothing on it
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Each book ends on one plate with no labels. You read it alone, and the next book opens on the same plate, decoded, so you can check your own reading before you go on.
In three steps, which are the three books. First learn the vocabulary: the sun and moon, the seven planets and their metals, the four elements, and the figures that stand for each. Then learn that one figure carries several readings, and which author held which. Then read a series of plates as the steps of one operation, in order. Every reading in the book is quoted from a named source.
No. Book One starts from naming what stands in the picture, and every figure is shown marked on the plate before anything is said about it.
Each one is quoted from the person who gave it, with the work, the year and the page: Fludd, Maier, Waite, Hall and the rest. Where the sources disagree, the book says who holds which view. The pictures are public domain, from the Internet Archive, the Getty Research Institute, the Wellcome Collection and the Metropolitan Museum.
It is in preparation and no date is set. Book One is announced first in the Sunday letter.
Yes. Every plate and every reading on thesymbolica.com stays free, with nothing behind a login. The book is a road through the same material, made to be read from the first page to the last.
The book is announced first in the Sunday letter. Leave an address and the letter comes every Sunday: one picture, one symbol marked on it, what it meant and who said so. The archive stays free and nothing sits behind a login. Leave any time.
Free, one letter a week, unsubscribe in one click. How the address is used.
Looking for a single plate to hang? Prints are listed separately.