Mutus Liber, the alchemy book that speaks only in images

In 1677 an alchemical book almost without text appeared at La Rochelle in France. It was entitled Mutus Liber, the 'silent book', and consisted of fifteen engraved plates, accompanied only by a few Latin captions and biblical references. Its implicit message was clear: the alchemical work is not explained in words, but shown to those able to understand it with the eyes and the spirit.

Fifteen plates without words

The first plate shows a man asleep beneath a starry sky, while two angels blow trumpets along a ladder rising towards the clouds, a clear allusion to Jacob's dream in Genesis. The following plates show a man and a woman at work in a laboratory, among furnaces, vessels and alembics, together with scenes of dew being gathered with cloths spread over the fields.

In one of the last plates a Latin inscription urges the reader to pray, read, read again and work in order to find. In the final plate the figure who lay asleep in the first is raised upwards, in a scene of ascension that closes the cycle. The captions of the first plate refer to biblical verses on the dew of heaven and the fatness of the earth, taken from the blessing of Isaac.

The hidden author

On the title page the author signs with the pseudonym Altus. The printing privilege was granted to a Sieur de Marsy, and the book was printed by Pierre Savouret. The author's identity is disputed: the most widespread hypothesis identifies him with Isaac Baulot, an apothecary of La Rochelle, but it remains a conjecture based on clues, and other names have been proposed over time.

The book gained a second life thanks to Jean-Jacques Manget, a Genevan physician, who included it in 1702 in his Bibliotheca chemica curiosa, a large two-volume collection of alchemical texts. Since then the Mutus Liber has been reproduced, redrawn and commented on countless times, becoming one of the best-known texts of the French alchemical tradition.

How it has been read

For many commentators the plates represent the stages of the alchemical great work, with the couple working together symbolising the union of the male and female principles. The gathering of dew has been read both as a material operation and as an image of grace descending from heaven. Both readings belong to the book's long history of interpretation, without one excluding the other.

In the twentieth century the Mutus Liber attracted the attention of esoteric writers and of historians of images. For the former it is a coded text to be meditated upon; for the latter, a document of seventeenth-century visual culture, in which alchemy appears as a pious, patient and laborious art, practised within the family and under the eye of God.

The appeal of the Mutus Liber lies in its radical choice. At a time when alchemical treatises multiplied in obscure words and ever more complex allegories, this book gave up writing almost entirely, entrusting the image with the task of guarding and at the same time revealing its secret to those who knew how to look.