Heinrich Khunrath and the Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae

Among the most famous images in the history of alchemy is one showing a large hall divided in two. On the left a man kneels in prayer before an altar; on the right are furnaces, alembics and laboratory instruments; in the centre stands a table with musical instruments. It is a plate from Heinrich Khunrath's Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae, and it sums up his idea at a glance: the alchemical work is inseparable from prayer.

A Paracelsian Physician

Khunrath was born in Leipzig around 1560. He studied at various German universities and in 1588 took his doctorate in medicine at Basel, the city where Paracelsus had taught some decades earlier. He practised as a physician in several cities, including Hamburg and Dresden, and appears to have frequented for a time the Bohemian milieu, then very open to alchemical studies. He died in 1605, probably in Leipzig, and the fullest edition of his major work appeared only after his death.

Like other Paracelsians, Khunrath regarded nature as a book written by God, to be read alongside the Bible. The true alchemist, for him, was not a seeker of gold but a believer who, by studying matter, discovered the traces of creation. In 1597 he published a treatise in German on the primordial chaos from which, according to his doctrine, the matter of the world originates.

The Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom

The Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae had a first edition in 1595, but the best-known version is the posthumous one printed at Hanau in 1609. The text is built as a commentary on biblical verses, above all from the wisdom books, which Khunrath reads in a Christian, Kabbalistic and alchemical key. Eternal wisdom is Christ himself, and the amphitheatre is the space in which the reader contemplates it.

The power of the work lies in its large engraved plates. Beside the oratory-laboratory, whose architectural design is attributed to Hans Vredeman de Vries, appear circular figures rich in symbols: Christ at the centre of a rose of light, the gate of eternal wisdom, the alchemical rebis uniting masculine and feminine, and a figure devoted to the divine names in Hebrew characters.

Prayer and Laboratory

The message of the oratory-laboratory is summed up in the inscriptions that accompany it, including calls to prayer and to work and a reminder never to abandon inner vigilance. The laboratory, in this vision, is also a place of worship, and the alchemist who works on metals works at the same time on his own soul. It is a formula that would enjoy great success in the esotericism of later centuries.

Not everyone liked the work. In 1625 the Paris faculty of theology censured it, judging the mixture of Scripture, Kabbalah and alchemy dangerous. This did not check its success: its plates were copied, studied and reinterpreted by generations of readers, down to the historians of art and esotericism of the twentieth century.

Khunrath belongs to the same spiritual family as Agrippa, Paracelsus and Dee: men convinced that knowing nature was a way of knowing God. With the Amphitheatrum this conviction found perhaps its most powerful visual expression, an image in which the science of things and the inner life share the same room.