Mutus Liber (The Silent Book)

The Mutus Liber ("Silent Book") is a remarkable alchemical work consisting almost entirely of fifteen symbolic engravings and virtually no text, depicting a man and a woman performing the labours of the Great Work under the guidance of gods and angels. First published at La Rochelle in 1677, it appeared under the name Altus, a pseudonym generally decoded as Jacob Saulat, sieur des Marez. Its images famously encode a process built around the gathering of celestial dew on cloths stretched in a field, read by some as a literal chemical operation and by others as an allegory, through the stages of the work to the final production of the stone. The point of its silence is deliberate: it presents the operation as something to be understood by the initiated eye rather than read, throwing the whole burden of meaning onto the reader's interpretation, which is exactly why it has attracted such varied readings from the seventeenth century down to Jungian and modern esoteric commentators.

Mutus Liber consists of fifteen engraved plates and virtually nothing else: a title page, the plates, and a few words of Latin. It was printed at La Rochelle in 1677 under the name Altus, and it is the most complete attempt in the alchemical corpus to communicate an operation entirely in images.

The plates show a man and a woman working together through the stages of the Work, watched and assisted by figures of the gods and by angels. Sheets are spread to gather dew, vessels are heated, the sun and moon preside over successive operations, and in the final plate the adepts stand beside a recumbent figure with the instruction to read, read, read, pray, work and find.

Whether the sequence encodes a laboratory procedure that could be followed, or a spiritual progression, or a deliberate impossibility, is the whole argument about the book, and it has not been settled. The dew gathering plate in particular has been read as literal instruction and as pure allegory by serious commentators.

The identity behind Altus is usually given as a La Rochelle figure of the period, but the identification rests on later testimony rather than on the book, and the atlas does not assert it.

A second edition with an additional plate appeared in the eighteenth century, and the plates were re-engraved more than once, so the images circulating today are copies of copies and differ in detail from the La Rochelle originals.