Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens (1618)
Four Guides to Alchemy in Maier
Maier’s forty-second emblem presents inquiry as a difficult journey at night. A traveller follows Nature while carrying a staff and lamp and wearing spectacles. The discourse gives these aids precise counterparts: Nature guides, reason supports, experience improves sight, and reading supplies light. Maier treats the four as interdependent, comparing their cooperation with the wheels of a vehicle. His discussion of experience includes trials remembered, witnessed or reliably heard about and compared with one another. His account of reading stresses returning patiently to good authors. The result is a historical model of how an alchemist should learn, combining attention to materials with judgment and study. It describes Maier’s programme of inquiry, rather than establishing the truth of the transformations he sought.
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In the sources
Four corresponding aids
DocumentedThe emblem and discourse connect Nature, reason, experience and reading with the traveller’s guide, staff, spectacles and lamp.
Experience and repeated reading
DocumentedThe discourse describes comparing past trials and returning repeatedly to good authors.
Context & interpretation
This entry describes Maier’s seventeenth-century account of learning. It provides no laboratory or medical instructions and does not equate his alchemy with modern experimental science.
Original passages
Source 1
Atalanta Fugiens
Natura, Ratio, ExperientiaOpen this page in the book
Passage & edition details
Location recorded at citation review: Atalanta Fugiens (1618), Emblem 42, printed p. 177
Original Latin plate or discourse and printed pagination actually inspected; historical English translation consulted for interpretation.
- Edition
- IMJ-0287-E001
- Reader page
- IMJ-0287-E001-P0178
- Original scan leaf
- 185
- Recorded leaf number
- 185
- Current Reader position
- 178
- Reader verification
- Source-preserving update confirmed
Source 2
Atalanta Fugiens
Naturam, Rationem, Experientiam & LectionemOpen this page in the book
Passage & edition details
Location recorded at citation review: Atalanta Fugiens (1618), Emblem 42, printed p. 178
Original Latin plate or discourse and printed pagination actually inspected; historical English translation consulted for interpretation.
- Edition
- IMJ-0287-E001
- Reader page
- IMJ-0287-E001-P0179
- Original scan leaf
- 186
- Recorded leaf number
- 186
- Current Reader position
- 179
- Reader verification
- Source-preserving update confirmed
Source 3
Atalanta Fugiens
lectio bonorum authorumOpen this page in the book
Passage & edition details
Location recorded at citation review: Atalanta Fugiens (1618), Emblem 42, printed p. 179
Original Latin plate or discourse and printed pagination actually inspected; historical English translation consulted for interpretation.
- Edition
- IMJ-0287-E001
- Reader page
- IMJ-0287-E001-P0180
- Original scan leaf
- 187
- Recorded leaf number
- 187
- Current Reader position
- 180
- Reader verification
- Source-preserving update confirmed
Illustrations
Continue exploring
Ceres, Thetis and Alchemical Nurture
Maier pairs the nurture of Triptolemus and Achilles with the gradual strengthening of his philosophical stone.
Same subject and traditionMercury and Vulcan at the Hearth
Two Mercuries and a furnace introduce Maier’s distinction between the subject’s inward qualities and the heat applied from outside.
Same subject and traditionNaaman’s Washing in Maier
The biblical washing in Jordan becomes Maier’s analogy for the purification of the philosophers’ brass.
Same subject and traditionPallas and the Golden Rain in Maier
Pallas’s birth and a shower of gold at Rhodes become an explicitly allegorical reading of myth and alchemical wisdom.