Against the slanderers, by right of retort

This is the one sheet in the Amphitheatrum that is not about the work at all. It is about the people who attack the man doing it, and Khunrath signs it as a legal act: also by the best right of retort.

The picture is built as a courtroom stacked vertically. At the top, in a radiance among the clouds, is the Name in Hebrew, and cut directly beneath it, in the vocative, is Henrice Khunrath. That is a remarkable thing to put on a plate: not a dedication and not a prayer, but the Name turned to face the author by name, above his head, while below him the air fills with his enemies. Under both runs a line of Virgil, yield not to evils but go against them more boldly. The archive lost all three of these for a while, because the cut it held began below them.

The sky is the second storey and it belongs to the slanderers. They are flies, dragonflies, and devils in scholars' hats, and the chief of them is given an office on a banner across his wings, prefect of the devil-talkers, while he sprinkles filth from a bucket over everything beneath. Nothing here is grand. Khunrath's point is that abuse is vermin: numerous, airborne, and beneath argument.

The ground floor is the rock at the centre, and the rock is the answer to all of it. An arch cut into it says the thing still stands and always and everywhere endures, and inside the arch, over a small pediment, is what the thing is. Around the rock, on stones and scrolls and tablets, Khunrath letters where knowledge actually comes from, and the list is the most useful thing on the sheet: fire, which proves and judges everything even spagyrically; the proper and genuine names of things; the consensus of philosophers, agreeing with the law of nature and with the testimony of Scripture; handwork, partly his own and partly what came to him from others; the teaching handed down by a master; experience; the sharp distinction of use from abuse; the signature of natural things; the order of the macrocosmic book of nature; the patient reading of hieroglyphs; and revelation. A man defending himself against the charge of making things up answers by printing his sources.

Down both margins, in ruled boxes, the defence is conducted by other people: Jerome on Hosea, that nothing is easier than to judge, idle and asleep, the labour and the vigils of others; Seneca, that the abuse of the ignorant is to be heard with an even mind and that a man walking toward honourable things must despise contempt itself; and one box that is Khunrath's alone, and is the best sentence on the plate. Not even Jehovah pleases everybody, he writes, whether he rains or clears the sky: much less I, Doctor Henricus Khunrath. And who shall escape the sly slanders of the envious?

At the right edge one enemy is given a body rather than a face, a coiled form with two words wound along it, the poison of the tongue. Under everything, filling the foot of the sheet, is a long German paragraph in which the same argument is made again at length for readers with no Latin, which tells you who Khunrath expected to be reading the attacks.