Heinrich Khunrath

Khunrath was a physician trained at Basel, a Paracelsian, and the author of the Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae, an incomplete version in 1595, the fuller edition posthumously in 1609, which is remembered almost entirely for its engraved plates.

The famous one shows a single vaulted chamber divided between an oratory, where a bearded figure kneels at a tent-altar under a Hebrew inscription, and a laboratory crowded with furnaces, alembics and instruments, with a music-strewn table between them. The motto attached to the workbench states the doctrine in six words: without divine inspiration no man is great. Prayer and furnace-work are not two activities but one, and the alchemical operation cannot succeed without the operator's sanctification.

That fusion, Lutheran devotion, Paracelsian chemical medicine, and Christian Kabbalah, with Christ identified as the stone of the philosophers, is why he is treated as a forerunner of the Rosicrucian manifestos that appeared a few years after his death, though he founded nothing and joined nothing. The Sorbonne condemned the Amphitheatrum in 1625.

Modern occult writing tends to treat his plates as coded diagrams of a psychological or purely spiritual process. Peter Forshaw's scholarship has argued the opposite and more interesting case: Khunrath meant the laboratory literally, was a practising chemical physician, and the spiritual reading that detaches his alchemy from actual furnaces is a later imposition on him.

The Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae owes its long life less to its Latin, a dense weave of scripture, cabala and Paracelsian alchemy, than to its plates, and to one plate above all: the alchemist's laboratory-oratory. The engraving shows a single vaulted room; at the left the adept kneels in a tented oratory before an altar of books, at the right stand the furnace and vessels of the laboratory, musical instruments lie on the central table with a motto that sacred music disperses sadness and evil spirits, and across the scene runs the doctrine in a sentence: ora et labora, pray and work, the two halves of one art in one room. It is the definitive visual statement of alchemy as spiritual discipline, endlessly reproduced wherever that thesis is argued, and its companion plates, the cosmic rose, the hermaphroditic Rebis, the emerald tablet mountain, gave later theosophy and Rosicrucianism much of their imagery.

The book had a stranger administrative afterlife. Issued in part at Hamburg in 1595 and completed posthumously at Hanau in 1609, it circulated for a generation before the theology faculty of the Sorbonne formally censured it in 1625 as impious and dangerous, a condemnation that, as such condemnations do, preserved its notoriety. Khunrath himself died poor in 1605; his room with the altar and the furnace became the standard portrait of the art he practised, and of the claim that its true work was on the worker.