Depicting Medieval Alchemical Cosmos

J.M.
Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 45-86 (2013) 45-86 Early Science and Medicine 18-1-2 (2013)
45 www.brill.com/esm
ISSN 1383-7427 (print version) ISSN 1573-3823 (online version)
Depicting the Medieval Alchemical Cosmos: George Ripleys Wheel of Inferior Astronomy
Jennifer M. Rampling*
University of Cambridge
Abstract Alchemical images take many forms, from descriptive illustrations of apparatus to complex allegorical schemes that link practical operations to larger cosmological structures. I argue that George Ripleys famous Compound of Alchemy (1471) was intended to be read in light of a circular figure appended to the work: the Wheel. In the concentric circles of his lower Astronomy, Ripley provided a terrestrial analogue for the planetary spheres: encoding his alchemical ingredients as planets that orbited the earthly elements at the core of the work. The figure alludes to a variety of late medieval alchemical doctrines. Yet the complexity of Ripleys scheme sometimes frustrated later readers, whose struggles to decode and transcribe the figure left their mark in print and manuscript. Keywords alchemy, George Ripley, Wheel, astronomia inferior, pseudo-Lull, diagrams, alchemical imagery
*Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Free School Lane, Cambridge, CB2 3RH, United Kingdom (jmr82@cam.ac.uk). This research was funded by a Darwin Trust of Edinburgh Martin Pollock doctoral scholarship and a Wellcome Trust postdoctoral research fellowship [090614/Z/09/Z]. Further support for archival visits was provided by the British Society for the History of Science and the award of the 2008 Richard III Society Bursary of the Institute for Historical Research. I am grateful to all these bodies for their generous support. My warm thanks also to those institutions which, by permitting self-service digital photography for research use, have made the task of comparing different versions of Ripleys Wheel possible and affordable: the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Cambridge University Library; Corpus Christi College Library, Oxford; Edinburgh University Library; The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh; and Trinity College Library, Cambridge.
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/15733823-0003A0003
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J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86
Introduction The heavenly bodies of medieval Aristotelianism moved in circles, incorruptible and immutable. Far below in the terrestrial sphere, European alchemists pursued change. Whether seeking to transmute base metals into silver and gold, or sick bodies into firm and healthy ones, exponents of alchemy sought to achieve remarkable physical transformations, which they sometimes strove to represent in pictorial form. These forms varied, as did the range of alchemical theories and practical procedures that coexisted in late medieval Europe. In this variety, we can witness the efforts of diverse practitioners to represent phenomena inaccessible to the eye alone: the hidden principles and structures of matter, and the means by which these might be manipulated and brought to fruition. Yet one recurring feature of alchemical iconography is its frequent departure from earthly realms, through the evocation of astronomical figures and cosmological schemes. Alchemical writing often develops the idea of a physical or analogical correspondence between heaven and earth: a relationship most frequently and conveniently expressed by the use of the seven planetary symbols (Sol, Luna, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) to denote the seven metals (usually gold, silver, quicksilver, copper, iron, tin and lead respectively). Such correspondences need not have immediate practical implications.1 Rather, the presentation of alchemy as a terrestrial or inferior analogue to celestial astronomy suggested a framework within which alchemical transmutation was both possible and compatible with an established world view.2 The description of alchemy as
1)For instance, astrological timings seldom feature in alchemical practicae: Joachim Telle, Astrologie und Alchemie im 16. Jahrhundert. Zu den astroalchemischen Lehrdichtungen von Christoph von Hirschenberg und Basilius Valetinus, in August Buck, ed., Die okkulten Wissenschaften in der Renaissance (Wiesbaden, 1992), 227-53, at 230-31; William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton, Introduction: The Problematic Status of Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, in Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, ed. William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 1-37. 2)On alchemy as astronomia inferior, see Julius Ruska, Turba Philosophorum: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Alchemie. Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Medizin, 1 (1931), 80; Telle, Astrologie und Alchemie, 238-40; Newman and Grafton, Introduction, 18. On these correspondences more generally, see Michela
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astronomia inferior, although better known in early modern contexts through the usage of the Benedictine Abbot Johannes Trithemius, astrologer-mathematician John Dee, and astronomer Tycho Brahe, was previously developed in medieval treatises, including the Lumen luminum (or De perfecto magisterio), discussed below.3 These macrocosmic relationships could also be represented as figures or diagrams, allowing diverse philosophical and practical allegiances, capable of supporting multiple levels of exegesis, to be condensed into a single image.4 A variety of genres and types of alchemical illustration developed alongside one another in Latin Europe. While recognising that medieval pictorial forms elude strict typologies, the historian Barbara Obrist has usefully distinguished between verbal and non-verbal figures.5 To the former belong lists, tables and associated diagrammatic constructs.6 The latter vary from plain, descriptive pictures of furnaces and apparatus, to the elaborate sequences of figurative illustrations that have become characteristicone might even say emblematicof modern compenPereira, Heavens on Earth. From the Tabula Smaragdina to the Alchemical Fifth Essence, Early Science and Medicine, 5 (2000), 131-44. 3)Nicholas H. Clulee, Astronomia inferior: Legacies of Johannes Trithemius and John Dee, in Secrets of Nature, ed. Newman and Grafton, 173-233; Jole Shackelford, Paracelsianism and Patronage in Denmark, in Patronage and Institutions: Science, Technology and Medicine at the European Court, 15001750, ed. Bruce Moran (Woodbridge, 1991), 88-109, at 95-105. 4)The eponymous glyph of Dees Monas hieroglyphica (Antwerp, 1564) and its imitations, including the hieroglyphic star of Philipp Gabella, provide well known early modern examples: Clulee, Astronomia inferior. 5)Barbara Obrist, Visualization in Medieval Alchemy, Hyle. International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry, 9 (2003), 131-70; online (unpaginated) at http://www.hyle.org/ journal/issues/9-2/obrist.htm (Accessed 20 April 2012). On the problems associated with classification of medieval diagrams, see John North, Diagram and Thought in Medieval Science, in Villards Legacy: Studies in Medieval Technology, Science, and Art in Memory of Jean Gimpel, ed. Therese Zenner (Ashgate, 2004), 265-87; Christoph Lthy and Alexis Smets, Words, Lines, Diagrams, Images: Towards a History of Scientific Imagery, Early Science and Medicine, 14 (2009), 398-439, at 420-24. 6)Diagram is used throughout in its modern sense. For early modern use of diagrammata, see Ian Maclean, Diagrams in the Defence of Galen: Medical Use of Tables, Squares, Dichotomies, Wheels, and Latitudes, 14801574, in Transmitting Knowledge: Words, Images, and Instruments in Early Modern Europe, ed. Sachiko Kusukawa and Ian Maclean (Oxford, 2006), 135-64, at 135.
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dia of alchemical art.7 As Obrist notes, images were almost entirely absent from Latin alchemical texts until the second half of the thirteenth century.8 When they do appear, figures usually accompany treatises whose function is, at least in part, to situate alchemy within an authoritative framework, particularly that of Aristotelian natural philosophy.9 The pictorial elements of these works often refer to larger cosmological structures, striving towards the legitimation of alchemy as both scientia and as ars. One of the earliest surviving attempts, a sequence of images accompanying the Book of Secrets of Constantine of Pisa, grafts alchemical material onto pre-existing pictorial forms. In this case, the appropriation is both philosophical and theological, as part of an attempt to relate the qualities of metals to the six days of Creation within a pedagogical context.10 While Constantines figure offers one of the earliest medieval examples, in this essay I shall focus on an image from the very close of the middle ages. This is a circular figure attached to the Compound of Alchemy, or Twelve Gates, of the English alchemist George Ripley, Canon of Bridlington (d. ca. 1490).11 This late fifteenth-century diagram,
7)In practice, non-verbal figures may include text, and vice versa. For a scholarly analysis of the substance and context of several medieval sequences, see Barbara Obrist, Les dbuts de limagerie alchimique: XIVe-XVe sicles (Paris, 1982). 8)Obrist, Visualization. An important exception is analysed in Obrist, Cosmology and Alchemy in an Illustrated 13th Century Alchemical Tract: Constantine of Pisa, The Book of the Secrets of Alchemy, Micrologus, 1 (1993), 115-60. Earlier Greek alchemical works sometimes included both verbal and non-verbal figures, although these were less frequent in Arabic works; cf. Obrist, Visualization. 9)On thirteenth-century attempts to establish alchemys status as an academic discipline, see Constantine of Pisa, The Book of the Secrets of Alchemy: Introduction, Critical Edition, Translation and Commentary, ed. Barbara Obrist (Leiden, 1990); William R. Newman, Technology and Alchemical Debate in the Late Middle Ages, Isis, 80 (1989), 423-45; William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the. Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 2006). 10)Obrist, Cosmology and Alchemy; Constantine of Pisa, The Book of the Secrets. 11)On Ripley, see Jennifer M. Rampling, Establishing the Canon: George Ripley and His Alchemical Sources, Ambix, 55 (2008), 189-208; eadem, The Catalogue of the Ripley Corpus: Alchemical Writings Attributed to George Ripley (d. ca. 1490), Ambix, 57 (2010), 125-201 (henceforth CRC); Lawrence M. Principe, Ripley, George, in Alchimie. Lexikon einer hermetischen Wissenschaft, ed. Claus Priesner and Karin Figala (Munich, 1998), 305-6.
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embellished with English and Latin texts, is a curious hybrid: combining pictorial representation, discursive text and allegorical verse, and encompassing a remarkable range of earlier material in terms of both pictorial form and alchemical doctrine. Thanks to the interest and frustration it evoked in subsequent copyists and publishers, it also teaches us a good deal about techniques for interpreting and the mechanics of producing figures of elaborate design and elusive meaning in the early modern period. Ripleys Compound is one of the best known works of English alchemica. Dated by colophon to 1471, the year of King Edward IVs restoration to the throne of England, this Middle English poem enjoyed a wide circulation from the late fifteenth century onwards, in English, Latin, and European vernaculars.12 In an engaging structural conceit, the alchemical work is represented as a twelve-gated castle, each gate corresponding to a chemical process. Ripley outlines these in twelve chapters, from the outer gate, Calcination, to Projection, the final test of the elixirs transmutational efficacy. However, he makes little reference to his architectonic device within the actual text, instead focusing on the processes themselves. This neglect stems from the fact that Ripley had appropriated the twelvefold structure and much of the content of individual gates from another work, the Scala philosophorum (Ladder of the Philosophers).13 While the twelve rungs or gates offer a convenient taxonomy, throughout the poem Ripley reaches for another device to convey the subtleties of his art: a wheel or figure, also referred to as the Coelum philosophorum (Philosophers Heaven). It is this figure, rather than the twelve taxonomic gates, that provides the clearest model for understanding Ripleys work, through its representation of alchemy as lower Astronomy.
12)For a census of extant manuscripts, see CRC. On the Compounds European reception, see Jennifer M. Rampling, John Dee and the Alchemists: Practising and Promoting English Alchemy in the Holy Roman Empire, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 43 (2012), 432-36; eadem, Transmission and Transmutation: George Ripley and the Place of English Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, Early Science and Medicine, 17 (2012), 477-99. 13)Rampling, Establishing the Canon. Ripley attributed the Scala to Guido de Montanor.
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The Stuff Extremes Are Made Of Wheels and circles are familiar tropes of medieval alchemy, often denoting the squaring of the circlethe transformation of the four Aristotelian elements. An element changes when its previous form is destroyed and it assumes another, through substitution of its primary elementary qualities. Thus earth (cold and dry) becomes water (cold and moist) by losing its dryness, while water in turn becomes air (hot and moist) as coldness yields to heat. In alchemy, these revolutions map conveniently onto certain observed processes, most obviously the dissolution of a solid into a liquid, and its volatilisation by distillation or sublimation. The theory prohibits an element from transforming into its contrary without intermediate transition through a middle term. A concern with cyclical transformations is also characteristic of the influential alchemical doctrines pseudonymously attributed to Raymond Lull.14 For example, the Testamentum, the foundational work of the pseudo-Lullian corpus and one of Ripleys major sources, describes the reduction of material compounds into their constituent elements:
Before [Nature] can pass right through by the circular wheel of elements, it is necessary she be divided into four parts, so she can cross by the four elementary qualities, namely from dryness into cold, and from gross into simple, and from cold into moist, and from heavy into light, and from moist into hot, and from bitter into pleasant and sweet.15
14)On pseudo-Lullian alchemy, see Michela Pereira, The Alchemical Corpus attributed to Raymond Lull (London, 1989); eadem, Prima Materia. Echi aristotelici e avicenniani nel Testamentum pseudolulliano, in Aristoteles Chemicus. Il IV Libro dei Meteorologica nella tradizione antica e medievale, ed. Christine Viano (Sankt Augustin, 2002), 145-64; Jennifer M. Rampling, The Alchemy of George Ripley, 14701700 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2009), ch. 2. 15)[N]atura, priusquam poterit pertransire per rotam circularem elementorum, necesse est quod dividatur in quattuor partes, ut possit transire per quattuor qualitates elementares, videlicet de sicco in frigido, et de grosso in simplum, et de frigido in humidum, et de ponderoso in leve, et de humidum in calidum, et de aspero in suave et dulce. Ps. Lull, Il Testamentum alchemico attribuito a Raimondo Lullo: Edizione del testo latino e catalano dal manoscritto Oxford, Corpus Christi College, 244, ed. Michela Pereira and Barbara Spaggiari (Florence, 1999), I: 248. Translations are mine unless stated otherwise.
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The elemental wheel, able to turn both forward and back, also provides an elegant analogy for the metallogenetic framework of the Testamentum, in which substances can be rewound to an earlier state, digested, and set in motion once more. The author suggests that, although completed by nature, metals may still be undone, allowing nature to begin her work afresh. An analogy is made with the biological function of ingestion:
Metals are generated by vapours of the said sulphurs and mercuries by successive decoction, which are true extremes without mean, with a perfect closure in the work of nature. However, when they are [taken from] their mines, Nature contrives through corruption to go back by circular motions, undoing and generating them a second time, and with another turn, such that they attain a new generation through digestion in their mines and there they are dispersed by its movement until they attain a better kind, just as the generation of flesh happens in the body of an animal through digestion of food and drink.16
This process assumes a natural evolution of metals, whereby the less perfectly digested bodies, such as lead, are gradually improved through renewed digestion. The possibility of such material retractions encourages the alchemist to ape natures processes: to reduce a metal to an earlier extreme, then rebuild it in a purer and more valuable form. The reversibility of these circular motions was also important to Ripley, describing the decomposition of metals: Thys done, go backward, turnyng thy Wheele againe.17 This complex material odyssey also had theological connotations. In the alchemical cosmology of the Testamentum, the four Aristotelian elements are described as being formed from the fifth essence: a primordial
16)[G]enerata per vapores dictorum sulphurum et argentorum vivorum per successivam decoccionem sunt metalla, que sunt vera extrema sine mediocritate cum perfecta clausura in opere nature, sed per corrupcionem, quando sunt extra suas mineras, intendit natura ad redeundum per motus circulares, illa corrumpendo et iterum generando; et ista altera vice terminantur in novam generacionem per digestionem in suis mineris et illic per suum motum digeruntur, donec terminentur in speciem meliorem, sicut generacio carnis fit in corpore animalis per digestionem comedendi et bibendi. Testamentum, I: 22. 17)Calcination 18. George Ripley, The Compound of Alchymie, in Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, ed. Elias Ashmole (London, 1652), 107-93 (hereafter TCB), at 133.
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substance from which God created the heavens, the angels, and terrestrial matter.18 All matter originally shared in the purity of its parent substance, until the time of sin when Creation was corrupted by the Fall of Man.19 Post-lapsarian nature, stripped of her unsullied building blocks, lost the ability to generate true perfection: For, by reason of her gross and corrupt matter, Nature cannot make a thing as perfect as she did at the beginning.20 While this situation will be ultimately and catastrophically remedied in the refining fires of Judgement Day, in the meantime both human and divine intervention are necessary to achieve material perfection. By helping nature regain her lost status, the alchemist therefore contributes to a very serious enterprise: the absolution of matter. While Ripley clearly regarded his alchemy in terms of material processes, his work is invested with this additional, spiritual dimension. Thus, in the Compound, the perfection of matter is continually related to the souls journey through the fires of purgatory, and on to paradise:
For lyke as Sowles after paynys transytory Be brought into paradyce where ever ys yoyfull lyfe; So shall our Stone after hys darknes in Purgatory Be purged and joynyd in Elements wythoute stryfe.21
18)Testamentum, I: 12-14. For a corpuscular reading of this passage, see William R. Newman, Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, An American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1994), 98-103; for a contrary view, see Pereira, Prima Materia, 155-59. 19)Ista quattuor elementa sic creata remanserunt pura et clara racione clare partis nature ex qua erant creata usque ad tempus peccati, quod exivit a natura et adhuc est ad tempus indulgencie post peccatum. Sed postquam mortui sunt homines et animalia et nascentia terre desiccata cum destruccione generacionis, veniendo de corrupcione in generacionem et de generacione in corrupcionem, sic quod de corporibus impuris resolutis mutantur elementa in id, quod contagiat et corrumpit elementa, per quam corrupcionem omnis res viva est parve duracionis. Testamentum, I: 14. 20)[Q]uoniam natura non potest facere rem tam perfectam, racione sue materie grosse et corrupte, sicut fecerat in suo principio. Sed natura in operando imperfeccionis participat cum magna corrupcione propter materiam elementorum minus purorum, quam quotidie ipsa invenit. Testamentum, I: 14. 21)Putrefaction 14. TCB, 151.
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This attractive analogy recurs more powerfully in the Compounds concluding Recapitulation. The protagonists are a couple familiar in medieval alchemical literature, the red man and his white wife. Together, they traverse the wheel of seasons, from marriage in the west, purgatorial eclipse in the north, spring-like resurrection in the east, and triumphant ascension in the south:
Then to wyn to thy desyre thou need'st not be in dowte, For the Whele of our Phylosophy thou hast turnyd abowte.22
Ripley often describes the motions of the philosophical wheel throughout the course of the Twelve Gates.23 At certain points he also advises his audience to consult an accompanying figure, which provides the key to understanding the whole poem:
Have thou recourse to thy Whele I councell the unto, And stody tyll thou understond eche Chapter by and by.24
Although no fifteenth-century version of the figure survives, numerous sixteenth and seventeenth-century manuscripts testify to the complexity of Ripleys design: a quadripartite wheel, composed of concentric spheres with captions and verses (see Fig. 1).25 This has been little studied, yet its design closely matches the instructions provided in the text.26 Ripley himself refers to a figure, for instance at the tenth gate, Exaltation:
This circulation beginne thou in the west, Then into the south, till they exalted bee, Proceede duely, as in thy figure I haue taught thee. 22)Recapitulation 5. TCB, 187. 23)Calcination 17-18, Solution 11-13, Congelation 29, Cibation 5, Fermentation 15, and Exaltation 8-9. 24)Recapitulation 10. TCB, 188. 25)These manuscripts are discussed below; cf. CRC. 26)The authenticity of the Wheel has not been previously established: hence, a recent edition of the Compound notes only that some manuscript copies of the Compound also included a visual, astronomical figure, the counterpart of the engraved Wheele mentioned in his Worke that appears in the 1591 edition: Stanton J. Linden, Introduction, George Ripleys Compound of Alchemy (1591), ed. idem (Aldershot, 2001), xix.
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Figure 1:Wheel. Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, MS Anonyma 2, vol. 5, 28v. (By kind permission of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh) In which processe clearely thou mayst see, Fro one extreame how to another thou mayst not go, But by a meane, since they in qualities contrarious be.27
27)Exaltation 9-10 (my emphasis). TCB, 180. In most copies of the Wheel, the directions appear upside down (at 90 in some cases) in relation to modern compass points. Thus West is usually placed at the right side of the figure, while South appears at the top, being approached clockwise through North and then East.
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One of the functions of Ripleys Wheel is thus to model the shift of elementary qualities between extremes, via a mean. The figure efficiently incorporates the four elements and their secondary qualities, the compass points, seasons, dimensions (height, depth, and two sides, or latitudes), signs of the zodiac, and, from medicine, the four administering virtues (digestive, expulsive, retentive and attractive) into the single, circular image.28 Using this figure, one may calculate in an instant that a cold, moist temperament is the mean between a cold, dry one and a hot, moist one; that the expulsive and attractive virtues are the extremes of the digestive virtue; and that to pass from north to south one must first traverse the east. The Wheel therefore provides a digest of the range of transformations detailed throughout the Gates. Ripley also drew upon earlier pictorial forms for the design of the figure itself. The wheel of elements lends itself very well to diagrammatic representation, particularly in the form of a rota, or wheel. Such use of circular figures to classify knowledge, including calendrical, geographical and astronomical information, was characteristic of natural philosophical treatises from the early middle ages onwards.29 In De natura rerum, Isidore of Seville described several such rotae, including a quadripartite wheel of the year, in which each of the four seasons was assigned an appropriate pair of secondary qualities, suggesting the passage between seasons as one of continual motion rather than discrete stages. These figures were valuable in depicting contrariety: thus, in the wheel of seasons, summer (hot and dry) faces its opposite, winter (cold and wet). Such quadripartite wheels might also group information on the four cardinal directions, elements, bodily humours, and signs of the zodiac (the latter divided into four groups of three).30 Another advantage
28)In the Testamentum, the four administering virtues are reinterpreted as qualities resulting from the dissolution into one substance of two quicksilvers, active and passive. Testamentum, I: 154. 29)For the medieval use of rotae, particularly for quadripartite systems, see John E. Murdoch, Album of Science: Antiquity and the Middle Ages (New York, 1984), 52-61, 35658; Wesley M. Stevens, The Figure of the Earth in Isidores De natura rerum, Isis, 71 (1980), 268-77; Barbara Obrist, La cosmologie medievale. Textes et images I. Les fondements antiques (Florence, 2004), 50 and passim; cf. Maclean, Diagrams in the Defence of Galen, 140, 158. 30)On the significance of the number four in ancient and medieval cosmologies, see
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of the rota, besides its usefulness in illustrating contraries and suggesting rotation, is that it may be divided into concentric circles: a feature which provides the basis of many medieval cosmological diagrams. The value of wheels both in tabulating and manipulating information is also apparent in the geometric diagrams of the historical Lull and his alchemical followers. By allocating letters of the alphabet to particular ingredients and processes, the authors of Ripleys main pseudo-Lullian sources, the Testamentum and Liber de secretis naturae, represented the combination and reiteration of letters in complex schemes, usually circular (see Fig. 2).31 While Ripley was probably influenced by such figures, his own Wheel differs from these Lullian models in aiming to condense the entire alchemical opus into a single figure.32 Its quadripartite design looks back to Isidorean models, incorporating the elements, secondary qualities, seasons, and cardinal directions, each quarter accompanied by verses and scriptural references. Four grades of perfection (origin, imperfection, perfection, plusquam perfectum) are also accommodated.33 At the same time, the Wheel mimics cosmological schemes, comprising an inner circle nested within ten concentric spheres. In this version, the stars depicted are not the heavenly bodies, but their terrestrial equivalents: the four metallic bodies used in Ripleys alchemy. These are the Sun,
Anna C. Esmeijer, Divina Quaternitas: A Preliminary Study in the Method and Application of Visual Exegesis (Assen, 1978). 31)The alchemical diagrams are not combinatorial in the manner of authentic Lullian figures: Pereira and Spaggiari, Testamentum, cxxxix-clxiii; Pereira, Le figure alchemiche pseudolulliane: un indice oltre il testo?, in Fabula in Tabula. Una storia degli indici dal manoscritto al testo elettronico, ed. Claudio Leonardi, Marcello Morelli and Francesco Santi (Spoleto, 1994), 111-18, at 115-16. On combinatorial figures, see Murdoch, Album of Science, 60. 32)On this point I disagree with Urzula Szulakowska, who construes the Compounds wheel references as an attempt to represent pseudo-Lullian computational circles as a castle with twelve doors which had to be negotiated by a circular sea-voyage: Szulakowska, The Alchemy of Light: Geometry and Optics in Late Renaissance Alchemical Illustration (Leiden, 2000), 21; cf. Pereira, Le figure alchemiche pseudolulliane, 115-16. Unlike another populariser of pseudo-Lullian writings, Christopher Parisiensis, Ripley seems to have been less interested in reproducing Lullian wheels or alphabets; I also find no reference to a sea voyage in the body of the Compound. 33)These terms are also represented in other contexts, for instance in rotae designed to assist with syllogistic reduction. See Murdoch, Album of Science, 59.
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Figure 2:Ps. Lull, Testamentum. Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 244, 55a. (By kind permission of the President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford)
Moon, Venus, and Mercury, equating to gold, silver, copper, and mercury. This correspondence is noted in the accompanying verse:
Our heaven this Figure called is Our table also of the lower Astronomy Which vnderstood thou may not misse To make our Medicen parfetly On it therefore set thy study And vnto God both night and day For grace and for ye Author pray.34 34)TCB, 117.
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In astronomical terms, the stars are here presented out of order. Indeed, towards the centre of the scheme the function of the circles changes, from representing space, in the form of the heavens, to providing it, as cells in which relevant information can be tabulated. Rather than planets, the three inner circles contain the names of colours and primary and secondary qualities associated with various stages of material transformation. Ripleys Coelum philosophorum depicts an alchemical rather than astronomical cosmos: a true lower Astronomy that describes the generation of heavenly perfection from mutable, terrestrial elements. Yet, significantly for our understanding of Ripleys alchemy, his celestial orbits conceal practical information on the proportions of substances to be used. Within the four planetary spheres, Roman numerals indicate the relative proportions of ingredients to be used: one part of the Sun for three of the Moon, eight of Venus, and twelve of Mercury (see Fig. 3). The correct proportion of his ingredients is one of the secrets that Ripley alludes to but does not state explicitly within the body of the poem. Another is the identity of his famous Green Lion, an imperfect metallic body that provides a mean between the two perfect bodies, gold and silver. Ripley never discloses the Lions nature within the text of the Gates, except to emphasise that it does not signify vitriol.35 The Wheel reveals all:
The sphere of Venus is 8, the goddess of love, which is the mean of joining the tinctures between Sun and Moon, and it is a body easily converted to either, and therefore it is put in the work for an imperfect body, and it is called the Green Lion.36
The Green Lion therefore denotes eight parts of copper. Yet to unpick these puzzles, text must be read in light of image, as Ripley warns:
Diligently looke thou, and to thy figure attend, Which doth in it containe these secrets great & small.37
35)Congelation 24, Admonition 4. TCB, 167; 190. 36)Sphaera Veneris VIII deae amoris, quae est medium coniungendi tincturas inter solem et lunam, et est corpus de facile couertibili ad vtrumque et ideo ponitur in opere pro imperfecto corpore et dicitur leo viridis. TCB, 117. On Ripleys use of copper in the Compound, see Rampling, Establishing the Canon, 205. 37)Recapitulation 1. TCB, 186.
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Figure 3:Wheel (detail of planetary spheres). Cambridge University Library MS Ff.2.23, 32Ar. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)
Creating Heaven on Earth Thus far, Ripleys appropriation of the language and diagrammatic forms of astronomy is relatively straightforward: as a means of encoding practical information. However, the diagram invokes the heavens in another sense: as a context for explaining how celestial perfectionthe philosophers stonecan be generated within the sublunary sphere. While the reduction of alchemical prime matter into its elemental components is framed in terms of division, the opposite process, or circling of the square, is constructive: a single, fifth element is created through repeated cycles of elemental transitions. The ultimate object of the Wheel is not to square the circle, but to illustrate how a square of paired, contrary qualities (most obviously, those of the four elements) may, by continual rotation through their means, generate a fifth, perfect
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substance: the quintessence. This precept is inscribed in the innermost ring of the Wheel, encircling its central axis:
When thou hast made the quadrangle round then is all the secrett found.38
The notion of generating a single substance from the quadrangle of elements was a well established alchemical doctrine by the late fourteenth century.39 The Wheels alternative appellation, Coelum philosophorum, leads us to another of Ripleys most influential sources, the pseudo-Lullian Liber de secretis naturae, seu de quinta essentia (The Book of the Secrets of Nature, or of the Quintessence).40 Most of this treatise was in turn derived from the Liber de consideratione quintae essentiae of the Spiritual Franciscan John of Rupescissa, who described the manufacture of a medicinal quintessence by repeated distillation, or circulation, of spirit of wine. John hailed his quintessence as our heaven: a homogeneous substance whose incorruptibility provided an analogue for the immutable fifth element of the heavenly bodies.41 This
38)TCB, 117. The hub itself usually contains either a cross, with the four elements labelled (Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh MS Anonyma 2, Vol. 5), or a motto: centrum lapidis (University of Edinburgh MS Laing III.164; Cambridge, Trinity College Library MS O.2.16, Pt. 3; Cambridge University Library FF.ii.23), lapis noster (British Library MS Sloane 2580A; Lambeth Palace, Sion College MS Arc.L.40.2/E.6, Pt. 1), or simply centrum (Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 1445, Pt. 1). 39)See, inter alia, the Rosarium philosophorum of John Dastin (inc. Desiderabile desiderium) in Theatrum chemicum, prcipuos selectorum auctorum tractatus de chemi et lapidis philosophici antiquitate, veritate, iure, prstantia et operationibus... , ed. Lazarus Zetzner, 6 vols. (Ursel and Strasbourg, 16021661) (henceforth TC ), III: 663-98, at 682: Aperi & claude, solve & nota, extende & plica, ablue & dessica, hoc facito continue donec in quadrangulum vertatur & in rotundum. 40)Ripley draws upon the Liber de secretis naturae particularly in his Preface to the Compound: see Rampling, The Alchemy of George Ripley, ch. 2. 41)On John of Rupescissa (Jean de Roquetaillade) and the quintessence, see F. Sherwood Taylor, The Idea of the Quintessence, in Science, Medicine and History, ed. Edgar A. Underwood, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1953), I: 247-65; Robert P. Multhauf, John of Rupescissa and the Origin of Medical Chemistry, Isis, 45 (1954), 359-67; Robert Halleux, Les ouvrages alchimiques de Jean de Rupescissa, Histoire littraire de la France, 41 (1981), 241-77; Leah DeVun, Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time: John of Rupescissa in Medieval Europe (New York, 2009). Although Ripleys aim in the Compound is gener-
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reading informs the alchemy of another Ripleian poem associated with the Compound, the Epistle to Edward IV:
We have an Heauen yncorruptible of the Quintessence, Ornate with Elements, Signes, Planetts, and Starrs bright.42
The separation of sub- and supralunary regions in Aristotelian physics ultimately prevented Johns attempt to link the celestial and the alcoholic quintessence from becoming more than an analogy.43 In Ripleys alchemical cosmos, however, the coelum provides the unifying premise for a compilation of other analogies between earthly elements and Heaven in all its sensesperfected matter, celestial region and Christian paradise. The Wheel illustrates the attainment of terrestrial perfection in relation to another interesting theoretical position, distinct from the pseudoLullian corpus: the notion of plusquam perfectum, or more-than-perfect. This explanation for the transmutational efficacy of the philosophers stone is encountered in Ripleys main source text, the Scala philosophorum, and, given its importance for reading the Wheel, is worth considering in more detail here. The first rung of the Scala, Calcinatio, describes the aims of the alchemists work:
We are seeking to operate spiritually on the above artificial operation, in a contrary sense, namely by killing the live and spiritually reviving the dead, and disposing outwardly to something more-than-perfect.44
ally chrysopoetic rather than medicinal, in Fermentation 8 he does refer to the Quyntessens ... whych helyth Dysesys all. 42)Epistle 21. TCB, 114. The Epistle also refers to Our lower Astronomy (stanza 20) and instructs, And of the Quadrangle make ye a Figure round (15). On the relationship between the Epistle and the Compound, see CRC. 43)On Johns difficulties in this regard, see DeVun, Prophecy, ch. 4. Johns Heaven was later echoed in the title of Philipp Ulstads popular Coelum philosophorum seu de secretis naturae liber (Fribourg, 1525). 44)[A]d artificialem operationem superis sensu contrario spiritualiter operari nitimur: natura tamen imitando, scilicet vivum occidendo, atque spiritualiter mortuum resuscitando, & ad plusquam perfectum exterius disponendo. Jean-Jacques Manget, Bibliotheca chemica curiosa, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1702) (hereafter BCC), II: 138.
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This notion of super-perfection is encountered in several alchemical texts from the early fourteenth century onwards. It is set out with particular clarity in the influential Rosarius philosophorum, attributed to Arnald of Villanova.45 The Rosarius argues that, in order to raise imperfect metals to the perfection of gold and silver, the elixir must itself be more perfect than the precious metals. Imperfect metals cannot perfect themselves, nor can they be improved using the perfect bodies, gold and silver, since such a dilution would serve only to diminish the perfection of the latter. By the same reasoning, any transmuting agent would have to be better than the perfect bodies:
It is necessary that that which is Elixir is made more purified and digested than gold or silver; therefore, that the Elixir itself has to turn all imperfect diminished bodies to another perfection, into gold and silver, which can hardly complete themselves And for this purpose the working will be made in our stone, so that its tincture may be improved in it more than in its [own] nature.46
The conclusion that the elixir must be more than perfect is even more explicitly stated in the Speculum alchimiae, sometimes attributed to Roger Bacon. The author of this fourteenth-century treatise employs similar reasoning to the Rosarius, reiterating that base metals cannot be improved simply by adding precious ones:
If this perfection might be mixed with the imperfect, the imperfect should not be perfected with the perfect, but rather their perfections should be diminished by the imperfect, and become imperfect. But if they were more than perfect, either in 45)A large number of pseudo-Arnaldian texts carry this or a similar title. I refer to the text with the incipit Iste namque Liber vocatur Rosarium, printed as the Thesaurus thesaurum, et Rosarium philosophorum (BCC, I: 662-76). On the difficulties posed by the various Rosarii, see Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. (New York, 1934), III: 55-66; Antoine Calvet, Les Oeuvres alchimiques attribues Arnaud de Villeneuve. Grand oeuvre, mdecine et prophtie au Moyen-ge (Paris-Milan, 2011). 46)Quoniam est necessarium, qud illud quo est Elixir, magis fit depuratum & diges tum, qum aurum vel argentum, e qud ipsum Elixir habet convertere omnia imperfecta alia perfectione diminuta corpora in aurum vel argentum, quod ipsa minim perficiere possunt: quia si de perfectione sua alteri darent, ipsa imperfecta existerent: e quia non possunt tingere, nisi quantum se extendunt. Et ad hoc fiet operatio in lapide nostro, ut melioretur ejus tinctura in eo plus qum in sua natura. BCC, I: 665.
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a two-fold, four-fold, hundred-fold, or larger proportion, they might then well perfect the imperfect.47
This concept of plusquam perfectum provides a natural complement to the pseudo-Lullian doctrine of means, whereby passage from one extreme to another is only possible through an intermediate stage or substance. By conceiving of imperfection, perfection, and super-perfection as steps on a ladder of means, the alchemist obtains theoretical space in which to contemplate restarting the process of metallic evolution. This task would otherwise be frustrated by the workings of nature, or, more accurately, its lack of working. In nature the state of perfection, once achieved, provides the terminus of the scale, since the evolution of metals ceases with the accomplishment of gold and silver. However, by considering the perfect metals as means, with imperfection at one extreme, it becomes not only possible but necessary to infer the existence of a super-perfect state at the opposite extreme. This conclusion provides powerful support for the role of the artificer in improving on natural processes. Such speculations mark a point of departure from the pseudo-Lullian corpus. In the post-lapsarian state of decay described in the Testamentum, nature can no longer achieve material perfection unaided. Only through a painstaking removal of the corrupt outer layers can the pure, original substance of the elements be extracted, then recombined to recreate the quintessence from which all matter ultimately derives. In the Testamentum, the emphasis is therefore upon reclaiming a lost perfection rather than attempting to surpass it. Indeed, the concept of plusquam perfectum may be seen as contravening the salvific dimension of the Testamentums alchemical philosophy. Ripleys Wheel accommodates the existence of a state beyond terrestrial perfection, relating it to the notion of material redemption. Two sets of accompanying verses make this point explicitly, comparing the redemptive power of the stone, which must be reborn in the womb of mercury, with the incarnation of Christ. In the first sequence of four verses, one positioned at each of the Wheel s corners, Ripley recounts
47)I use the 1597 English translation in Ps. Roger Bacon, The Mirror of Alchimy composed by the Thrice-Famous and Learned Fryer, Roger Bacon, ed. Stanton J. Linden (New York and London, 1992), 8 (my emphasis).
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the passion, death and resurrection of Christ as an analogy for the death, purification, and exaltation of the stone.48 These begin:
as holy scriptur maketh mencion in the wome of a virgin immaculat cryst dessendyd for our redempcyon from hys hye trone to be encarnat So here the son dessendyth from hys estate forth from the south passyng in to the west thorow the occean laboryng with out rest.49
Each verse has its secular equivalent within the outer sphere of the Wheel: four couplets which together chart the journey of the materials of the work, the red man and his white wife, from their first dissolution to the attainment of a state higher than gold:
Here the Red man & the wyffe I-spowsed with the spyrit off lyffe. Here to purgatory must hem goo There to purged by payne And woo. Here the[y] be purged off ffilthe originall & maid ressplendent as is the cristal. Here from paradise they go to [wo]nn Bryhter maid nor is the Son.50
Both sets of verses reinforce the notion of progressive, clockwise movement around the Wheel: a dynamic and teleological circulation from imperfect prime matter into super-perfect quintessence. In Ripleys Wheel, scriptural authority, proportions of ingredients, the pseudo48)When reproducing text from manuscript, I have retained original spelling and capitalisation, using italics to denote the expansion of contractions. | denotes a line break. Information necessary to convey the sense of a word or passage is included within square brackets. 49)Trinity College MS O.2.16, Pt. 3, 127v. This version (like those in Ashmoles edition and several other early copies) differs substantially from that printed by Rabbards: As Christ the Scripture making mention, | In the holy wombe descended of Marie: | From his high throne for our redemption, | Working the holy Ghost to be incarnate, | So here our Stone descends from his estate, | Into the womb of our Virgin Mercuriall, | To helpe his brethren from filth originall. Rabbards version thus provides a more overtly alchemical reading, besides introducing the third person of the Trinity. 50)RCP of Edinburgh MS Anonyma 2, vol. 5, 28v.
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Lullian theory of means, Rupescissas heaven and the notion of plusquam perfectum combine in a single, complex figure: a remarkable state-of-the-art of late fifteenth-century English alchemy. Reinventing the Wheel One curiosity of the Wheels design is that, although the Compound encapsulates a variety of pseudo-Lullian doctrines, the figure is closer in appearance and function to traditional Isidorean models than the diagrams employed in his Lullian sources. Given the extent of Ripleys borrowings from another authority, the Scala philosophorum, we might expect to find in this work the source for his rota. Indeed, the Scala is replete with the language of purgatory and seasonal change: metaphors which inform the Compound as a whole, and the Wheel in particular.51 In stanzas 11-13 of his second gate, Solution, Ripley explains that all bodies have three dimensions: altitude, latitude, and profundity. Our Whele must rotate through these dimensions, using a seasonal analogy: beginning in the West, then proceeding through the dark, wintry eclipse of the North (In darknes of Purgatory wythowten Lyght) before rising, spring-like, in the East, where blackness gives way to Colours passyng varyable. As the Wheel turns through the East and into summer, the white work is attained, For there the Sunne with daylight doth vprise. Finally it ascends to the autumnal Chayre of Fyre in the South, when the fruits of the harvest will be gleaned:
For there ys Harvest, that ys to say an end Of all thys Warke after thyine owne desyre: Ther shynyth the Son up in hys own sphyre, And after the Eclyps ys in rednes wyth glory As Kyng to rayne uppon all Mettalls and Mercury.52
Printed versions of the Scala offer no obvious parallel to Ripleys vivid account.53 The Recapitulatio does compare winter and summer to the
51)BCC, II: 141, 143, 145-46. 52)Dissolution 13. TCB, 138. 53)On the print history of the Scala, see Rampling, Establishing the Canon, 198-200.
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Works of the Moon (silver) and Sun (gold) respectively.54 However, Ripleys Wheel instead takes hyems (winter) to signify a process: putrefaction.55 Fortunately, an unabridged version of the Scala survives in a late fifteenth-century copy: Cambridge, Trinity College Library MS O.8.9. Here, the chapter on Solutio includes a lengthy passage that describes the transformation of one form into another, via a series of spiritual qualities with infinite means.56 These qualities correspond to the third and highest order of medicine described in the influential Summa perfectionis of pseudo-Geber,57 as well as the three spatial dimensions of length, breadth, and depth (longitude, latitude and profundity). Furthermore, the Scala explains that the three may be combined into the fivefold (quinario), just as appears in the displayed figure.58 Sadly, no copy of this figura, or tabula, survives. However, the text of the Scala enables us to partially reconstruct it. Thus, the first quality is said to be found at the entrance to the work, related to the secondary qualities of the element of earth (coldness and dryness) and to the west (occidentalia). This corresponds to the first side of our table of Inferior Astronomy.59 The correspondence with Ripleys own figure of the lower
54)[S]ic autem opus Lunae nimis album, & opus Solis nimis rubeum: quia album opus est hyemis, rubeum ver aestatis, BCC, II: 146. Purgatorial language is invoked in Cibatio and Fermentatio, BCC, II: 143; 144. 55)The seasons appear as analogies for alchemical processes in a variety of fourteenthcentury treatises, including the Studio namque florenti (TC, IV: 941-54, at 943-44) and Practica vera alkimia (TC, IV: 912-34, at 917); see Thorndike, History of Magic, III: 182 n.24, 184, 189. 56)Cambridge, Trinity College Library MS O.8.9, 14r. 57)On the three orders, see The Summa Perfectionis of Pseudo-Geber. A Critical Edition, Translation and Study, ed. William R. Newman (Leiden, 1991), 546-48; 752-53. Ripleys Wheel was later interpreted in light of the Geberian orders by Eirenaeus Philalethes, A Breviary of Alchemy, printed in Ripley revivd: or, an exposition upon Sir George Ripleys Hermetico poetical works... (London, 1678); cf. Newman, Gehennical Fire, figure 3F. 58)Omne totum ponitur in tribus, | scilicet terminis dimensionalibus, in quibus moue tur terra, quorum com|plecio latet in quinario, sicut apparet in figura proposita Altera vero | spiritalis, celestina, cum infinitis medijs, que tercio ordini | medicinarum per Geberum expressatarum ibidem comparatur, quarum vtramque conti|net tres dimensiones relatiuas, videlicet longitudinem, latitudinem, | & profunditatem. Trinity College MS O.8.9, 13v-14r. 59)Vnde prima qualitas spiritalis scilicet primi lateris longi|tudinis, latitudinis tabule
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Astronomy is even more apparent when we compare the Scala text to the first side of the Wheel: The fyrst side or west latitude of the stone and the entry into the practice, earthy in qualitie, occasionate, occidental.60 The second side of the Scalas figure, opposite the first (and hence third on Ripleys Wheel ), denotes the quality of causing airiousness, the easterly, the perfect, and the entrance of this speculative table, or our art. Between these two sidesthe starting point and the attainment of perfectionlies the mean of imperfection, characterised as depth, or profundity:
For the quality of profundity, or dark secrecy, is called watery, northerly, and imperfect. And just as one cannot pass from extreme to extreme except through a mean, so neither may one pass from the imperfect to the more-than-perfect except through the perfect. Upon which perfection a much higher thing is indeed worked by nature.61
Accordingly, altitude, the fourth and final point on the table, corresponds to the attainment of a super-perfect state of matter, plusquam perfectum:
But the more-than-perfect quality, which is the highest dimension, resplendent, fiery, autumnal, is called altitude, the clear summit, and also the spiritual longitude, which in the fourth step has to finally stand fast.62
While Ripleys treatment is not identical to that of the Scala, the latter evidently supplies the foundation of his Wheel. The Scala text also explicitly unites the doctrine of means with the concept of super-perfection, positing the attainment of a more-than-perfect state from an imperfect
nostre inferioris astronomie, dicitur | qualitas causati terrei, frigidi, sicci, occidentalia, & introitus experien|cie nostre artis. Ibid., 14r. 60)TCB, 117. 61)Qualitas enim profunditatis, seu obscuri occulti, dicitur aquatica | aquilonaris imperfecta. Et sicut non est transitus de extremo ad ex|tremum, nisi per medium, sic nec de imperfecto ad plusquam perfectum, | nisi per perfectum. Ad quam quidem perfectionem, ac eciam post preparaciones | superius, multum operatur natura. Trinity College MS O.8.9, 14r. 62)Sed plus quam perfecta qualitas, que est di|mensio suprema, fulgens, ignea, autumpnalis, dicitur altitudo, | manifestum cacumen, atque longitudo spiritalis, que in quarto gradu | finaliter habet consistere. Ibid.
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starting point. The same concept is illustrated by Ripleys Wheel, which, starting with the entry to the practice in the west, proceeds from the imperfect (north), via the perfect (east) to, finally, the altitude of the stone in the south shining more than perfect the end of practice. In both works, the four elements are rotated into a single, fifth essence: a fixed and super-perfect substance with the quality of transmuting imperfect bodies to the perfection of precious metal. Rather than rolling fully-formed from Ripleys imagination, the Wheel owes its origins to the same source as his Twelve Gates: the Scala philosophorum. It is possible that Ripley even had an image to work from: the table of Inferior Astronomy alluded to in the Scala. Yet, although allusions to the Scalas figure survive (including a reference earlier in the chapter to secundum figuram), the actual table has long since parted company from its text. From what remains, we cannot establish whether the figure was intended to be circular or rectangular. An initial search for comparable figures yields several possibilities. One treatise in a late fifteenth-century manuscript, British Library MS Harley 3528, does include a rectangular figure.63 Attributed to Ortholanus by the scribe, this short, illustrated text provides a Christianized commentary on the second part of the Lumen Luminum minus et perfecti magisterii (The Lesser Light of Lights and Perfect Magistery), a thirteenth-century work pseudonymously ascribed to either Aristotle or Al-Razi, which offers some Aristotelian underpinnings for alchemical theory and practice.64 The Ortholanus commentary begins in a similar vein, explaining that all bodies within the sublunary sphere possess four qualities, humours, complexions, odours, and colours, and exist within three dimensions: longitude, latitude, and profundity.65 These fourfold principles are illustrated not by a rota, but by an Aristotelian square of
63)British Library MS Harley 3528, 101v-103r (inc. Omnia corpora que et summo opifice; expl. Item vocant mundum medium. Deo gracias). 64)Printed as Aristotles De perfecto magisterio: TC, III: 76-127. The text in MS Harley 3528 also shares some similarity with the Practica vera alkimica attributed to Ortholanus in TC, IV: 912-34. The author of the Practica has sometimes been equated with the Hortulanus who authored a famous commentary on the Emerald Tablet. On the difficulty of identifying and dating Hortulanus/Ortholanus, see Thorndike, History of Magic, III: 176-83. 65)[Q]ue omnia compre|henduntur sub tribus dimencionibus Ita quod omne corpus dimencio|natur que sit longitudo latitudo & profunditas. MS Harley 3528, 101v.
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opposition.66 The commentary also relates the alchemical work to the transition from purgatory to earthly paradise in a style highly reminiscent of Ripleys treatment in the Compound. The late fifteenth-century dating makes it hard to determine whether the commentary was a source for the Scala, or was in fact derived from it. Either way, the Scalas description of its figure as a table is perhaps more appropriate for a square than a rota. While Ripleys choice of a circular figure may represent his innovation, another related rota does survive in a manuscript also dating from the second half of the fifteenth century, British Library MS Sloane 3747 (see Fig. 4). It illustrates a short Latin treatise, entitled Sphaera inferioris astronomiae. This Sphere of inferior astronomy has many similarities with Ripleys Wheel, including four smaller circles at the corners of the figure, each assigned a season, dimension, and secondary quality.67 The Sphaera is also divided into concentric circles. Rather than suggesting planetary orbits, these are numbered to denote the three Geberian orders of medicine, moving inwards from the first to the third order and finally the quintessence (represented by E) in the centre.68 Yet the influence of the true heavens is more conspicuous here than in Ripleys Wheel, for the outer circle indicates which astrological house rules each of the three orders, in each quarter.69 Other influences are harder to map. The accompanying treatise offers little clarification regarding date or origins, once more leaving open the question of whether it derives from the Lumen commentary, the Scala, or even Ripleys own Wheel. The aim of the figure, stated at the beginning of the text, is to demonstrate how the four elements may be transformed:
66)Ibid., 103r. 67)The two rotae have several captions in common (Sol tenet ignem, etc.), text which also appears in MS Harley 2407 (15th cent.), 54r. 68)Quinta autem | littera scilicet E ponitur in centro spere coloris | rubei ad designandum quintam essenciam | ex 4 elementis ortam & per circulacionem eleuatam | in incoruptibilitatem (And the fifth letter, namely E, is placed in the centre of the sphere, of a red colour, to denote the quintessence, born out of the four elements and through circulation elevated into incorruptibility). MS Sloane 3747, 81v. 69)For instance: In primo ordine aquarius In 2 geminis In 3o libra & hic digestiua in the third quarter. The travails of the alchemical couple are described in the two inner circles, e.g. hic purgant maculas proprias. A detailed table of proportions completes the sphere: de notat hac spera que sit proporcio vera. Ibid., 80v.
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Figure 4:Sphaera inferioris astronomiae. The British Library, London, MS Sloane 3747, 81v. ( The British Library Board) From elementary quadrangularity into the centre, inducing roundness by the circulation of one into another until they be made altogether fire: simple, pure, subtle, tingeing and fixed, which is called the quintessence or quinary, temperate and free of repugnance.70
This text reminds us of Ripleys goal, to make the quadrangle round. Throughout the treatise, the resonance with Ripleys own views is strik70)[Q]uadrangularitate | elementari in centralem producuntur rotunditatem | per circulacionem vnius in alterum donec fiant totaliter ignis | simplex purus subtilis tingens & fixus qui dicitur | quinta essencia seu quinaritas temperata tocius | repugnancie vacua. Ibid., 81r.
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ing, and adds to our sense that both the image and text must be somehow linked to Ripleys oeuvre.71 Although this question is unlikely to be definitively resolved, the Sphaera remains, to my knowledge, the earliest surviving witness of a wheel of inferior astronomy. Besides representing an original and integral part of the Compound, it is clear that Ripleys own Wheel exemplifies ideas and images which were already circling both literally and figurativelyin fifteenth-century England. The example of the Scala reveals Ripleys role as a late medieval alchemical commentator, who reshaped the Latin prose treatise into one of the most distinctive examples of English alchemical poetry. Rather than adapting the text alone, Ripley extended his programme to include the reinvention of the Scalas quadripartite figure, with the addition of verses and clues to his own alchemical methodology. The Wheel also marks the climax of a series of sustained analogies throughout the poem: allegorical readings of scripture; the posthumous adventures of the red man and his white wife; the revolutions of the philosophical wheel itself. The result is an extraordinary, multi-purpose figure: a practical hieroglyph which later generations would use to unlock the secrets of Ripleys poem. Indeed, it is the Wheel, rather than the famous twelve gates, which encapsulates the alchemy of the Compound. The importance of the Wheel in Ripleys alchemical thinking is underlined by its reappearance in his influential Medulla alchimiae (Marrow of Alchemy) of 1476.72 Ripley includes the process for an aqua composita, in which he describes the sequence of anticipated colour changes. While its contents are presented as part of the recipe, we have no difficulty identifying the source of this purple passage:
And between blackness and future whiteness there shall appear a green colour, with so many colours afterward as can be thought of by human wit. But when a white colour begins to appear, like the eyes of fishes, it may be known that summer is near; whom autumn will auspiciously follow with ripe and long-awaited redness, after ashy and citrine colour. For then, first descending in due course from his southern seat, perfect, natural and shining by gross solution, into the pale west, imperfect, lateral; then into the north, dark, purgatorial, changeable and watery;
71)This manuscript is a member of the Corthop Group discussed in Rampling, The Alchemy of George Ripley, ch. 4; CRC, 128, 137. 72)On the Medulla, see CRC.
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and thence into the east, lateral, bright, past, perfect, white and crystalline, paradisiacal and summery; and finally, the fiery chariot taken into the south, empirical, fiery, preceding redness, celestial, autumnal, highest, and more-than-perfect, completing the circle, it passes through the philosophical wheel.73
It seems that George Ripley, one of alchemys great recyclers, could not resist giving his wheel a final turn. The Wheel in Circulation Thus far, various meanings of the Wheel have been unpicked, and likely sources suggested. The question remains of how Ripleys complicated figure was read and used by its eventual audience. Was it perceived as a vital key to understanding, or an awkward appendage to be skimped or omitted? And, given the problems posed for copyists by this unwieldy figure, did mistranscription contribute to the Wheels appearance and meaning over time? Although no fifteenth-century copy of Ripleys Wheel survives, relics of its presence are discernible in several early copies of the Compound. Southampton City Record Office MS SC 15/97, dating from around 1500, includes Latin and English verses and captions extracted from the Wheel (16v-17r). The verses also appear in a manuscript of the early sixteenth century, British Library MS Sloane 3170 (46v-49), in which the Latin and English texts are grouped together to denote their position relative to the Wheel: an arrangement suggestive of transcription directly from the figure.
73)Inter ni|gredinem autem et futuram albedinem color viridis apparebit cum tot postmodum colori|bus quot ab humano ingenis poterunt excogitari. Sed cum color albus instar ocu|lorum piscium inceperit apparere: sciri poterit quam prope est estas quam post cine|ricium et citrinum cum matura et expectata rubedine autumpnus prospere in|sequetur. Tunc enim debito cursu primo ab australi sua sede, perfecta, naturali, et | fulgida descendens per solucione grossam in occidentem pallidam imperfectam lateralem | deinde in [septem]trionem nigram tenebrosam purgatorialem alterabilem et aquosam, abindeque | in orientem, lateralem, luminosum, preteritum, perfectum, album, cristallinum, paradisidicum et | estiualem ac demum accepto curru igneo in meridiem, empiricam, igneam, pre rutilam, | celestinam autumpnalem, supremam et plusquam perfectam circuiens rotam pertransist [sic] philosophalem. Cambridge, Trinity College Library MS R.14.58, Pt. 3, 3v.
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The earliest extant copy of the figure itself may be the large, coloured version in Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh MS Anonyma 2, vol. 5, dating from the turn of the fifteenth or beginning of the sixteenth century (see Fig. 1). The earliest dated figure is from the Liber Georgii Golde in Cambridge, Trinity College Library MS O.2.16. The significance of the Wheelor, as it is described in Goldes manuscript, the Sphere is emphasised on the Compounds title page, where the scribe notes, In the Year of our Lord 1539 was this little book written, all the way up to the Sphere (Anno Domini 1539 scriptus erat libellus iste vsque ad spheram).74 Sure enough, the Sphere has been placed at the end of the tract, under the heading, thys ffygure conteynyth all our secretts both gret & small.75 By the mid-sixteenth century, the Wheel had become a commonplace addition to manuscript Compounds. In 1545, Thomas Knyvet included a handsome version on a fold-out parchment sheet inserted between the Recapitulation and Admonition in his copy; similar in design to Goldes (see Fig. 5).76 The London haberdasher Rychard Walton, whose own copy dates from the 1560s, also seems to follow the Golde model.77 MS Ashmole 1445 includes an even more detailed copy, incorporating four English headings which are not found in the other copies so far mentioned, but which were printed by Ralph Rabbards in 1591.78 Of these copyists, Walton is known to have been a practising alchemist, who also had an interest in collecting alchemical texts, including many of Ripleys works.79 Whether he regarded the Wheel as a source of practical information, a connection to a preferred authority, or an object of antiquarian interest, is unclear in the absence of further cluesprobably, it was a combination of all these. Although there is some evidence
74)Trinity College MS O.2.16, Pt. 3, 82r. 75)Ibid., 127v. 76)Cambridge University Library MS Ff.2.23, 32Ar. 77)Her folowith the fygure contaynyng all the Secretes | of thys tretes bothe great and Small. Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 1479, 31r. 78)These are excerpted from scripture: for instance, he brought water out of ye stone and oule from ye most hard rocke, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 1445, Pt. 1, 30r (cf. Exodus 17:6; Deuteronomy 32:13). 79)On Walton, see Charles Webster, Alchemical and Paracelsian Medicine, in Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Charles Webster (Cambridge, 1979), 301-34; Rampling, The Alchemy of George Ripley, ch. 6.
74
Figure 5:Thomas Knyvets Wheel. Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.2.23, 32Ar. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)
that the Wheel was viewed as having practical relevance, such clues tend not to accompany copies of the figure itself. For instance, the scribe of MS Ashmole 1426 (Pt. V) composed a practical commentary on the Compound in the first third of the sixteenth century, in which the spere of this auctor is singled out for praise. Besides the matter to be used, one must know the correct proportions. The Wheels Latin verses follow, correctly interpreted: This that foloweth declareth bothe the mattre | and the Right proporcyon. Ye most haue of [venus] | .8. mercury: 12 lune .3.
75
[sol] .1.80 A century later, a seventeenth-century reader used a verse from the Wheel to gloss a recipe in the (pseudo) Ripleian Breviation, in MS Sloane 83.81 An even more enticing connection has been proposed by the Thomas Harriot scholar, John Shirley, who argues that the English mathematician used the Wheel as a guide to his meticulous alchemical practice, although this argument rests on a manuscript of uncertain provenance.82 While evidence for practice is slight, the careful transcription of Ripleys difficult figure does indicate a concern with authenticity and antiquity. Thus Thomas Potter, updating his very falsse corrupte copy of the Compound in 1580, was pleased to find in a new exemplar the astronomycall tables also, | that were lackinge in my said firste | copye.83 One of these tables is Ripleys Wheelalthough, unusually, Potter provides all the verses in English. It is even possible to identify Potters exemplar, thanks to a note attached to the figure: Here followeth a figure contayninge all the secrettes | of thys treatyse, greate & small, which treatise begynnethe, fol. i. and | endeth fol. 27.84 These folio numbers correspond to the placing of the Wheel in Knyvets copy, making this the likely exemplar for Potters true copy, which I gott. anno. 1580.85
80)Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 1426, Pt. 5, 9. 81)British Library MS Sloane 83, 2r. On the Breviation, see CRC. 82)Lambeth Palace Library, Sion College MS Arc.L.40.2/E.6, discussed in John W. Shirley, Thomas Harriot: A Biography (Oxford, 1983), 282-87. Shirley reproduces several of the Wheel s verses (although he does not connect these with Ripley or the Compound). His reading is supported by Stephen Clucas, Thomas Harriot and the Field of Knowledge in the English Renaissance, in Thomas Harriot: An Elizabethan Man of Science, ed. Robert Fox (Aldershot, 2000), 93-136, at 126. However, an inscription on the manuscript flyleaf, The gift of Henry Holland, Citizen & Stationer of London, 1644, throws doubt on the Harriot connection, which relies on the manuscript having passed to Harriots literary executor, Nathaniel Torporley, and hence to Sion College. 83)British Library MS Sloane 3580A, 140r. On Potter, see also George R. Keiser, Preserving the Heritage: Middle English Verse Treatises in Early Modern Manuscripts, in Mystical Metal of Gold: Essays on Alchemy and Renaissance Culture, ed. Stanton J. Linden (New York, 2007), 189-214. 84)MS Sloane 3580A, 238. 85)Ibid., 140r. As supporting evidence, Potter mentions finding Ripleys tables in his exemplar. Although Potters codex contains four figures, only one of thesethe secondis Ripleys, as Potter himself knew, noting elsewhere that some verses shoulde be added to | Ripleyes table, which is ye seconde | table here (237r). Potters exemplar
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Part of the interest in these varying copies is the effort entailed in producing them. The difficulty of first draughting the concentric spheres, then compressing various verses and captions into restricted space, has left its mark on many surviving copies. Rychard Walton, who initially left a gap between the Recapitulation and Admonition, eventually relocated his Wheel to a full sheet at the end of the work, leaving a note for any readers who might have expected to find it earlier: The spere | Is at the ende of thys | boke.86 Thomas Knyvet, however, had already commenced filling in the verses when lack of space forced him to abandon his half-drawn Wheel, and start again on a larger sheet, folded and stitched to one of the original pages (see Fig. 6). In Goldes copy, two blank pages are left between the Compound and the Wheel, tantalisingly inscribed, Sequitur Sphera (The sphere follows).87 The awkwardness of copying the large figure is doubtless responsible for the dearth of Wheels in early manuscripts. Although the functionality of the Wheel is impaired by translating its contents into linear form, as in MS Sloane 3170, ease of transcription is greatly improved. An example of compromise is provided in the Wheel in MS Ashmole 1445, where the scribe has recorded the Latin contents of the spheres within the Wheel itself, then devoted the next two pages to comparing two English translations.88 This activity points to some antiquarian interest in collating surviving copies, an interest which underlies Thomas Potters vigilance in updating his own copies of texts. We can guess that Potters satisfaction in obtaining a true copy of Ripleys table was slightly dampened by his later discovery of an even more complete one:
This table is vnperfect & wanteth muche | as I perceyved by a perfect & larger table, which | afterward I gott, conteyninge a great deale | more matter than this which later table I haue | copied out also, and is set at the ende of this booke.89
must therefore have included more than one figure, and Knyvets does, indeed, contain two copies of the Wheel (see Figs. 5 and 6). 86)Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 1479, 29r. 87)Trinity College MS O.2.16, Pt. 3, 126v127r. 88)MS Ashmole 1445, Pt. 1, 30v31r. A note to the four sphere verses on 30vwhich vary considerably from the usual versionsmentions that This 4. speres be after another bocke. 89)MS Sloane 3580A, 238r.
77
Figure 6:Incomplete Wheel. Knyvet has used the empty space to sketch a partial human figure, and added a note about a bay horse with a Blacke eye and hasall eye. Cambridge University Library, MS. Ff.2.23, 32Av. (Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library)
It is likely that this and other copies of the Wheelusually placed in a vulnerable position towards the end of codiceshave become detached. Such losses may explain the Wheels tendency to haunt even those copies where it no longer exists. In MS Ashmole 1485, a wheel-less Compound, we still find a deleted note after the colophon: And within one leafe followenge is his wheele or figure | mentioned before in his
78
Recapitulacion.90 Although the Compound in MS Ashmole 1486 also fails to provide a Wheel for its intended reader, the early sixteenthcentury scribe urges him, in the letter that follows, to Above All thing[s] | haue profounde Regard vnto the Spere of Rypla.91 As these examples reveal, hand-copied Wheels varied in size, accuracy and level of detail. Variations proliferated when the figure was prepared for print publication. The two English editions of the Compound, published in 1591 and 1652, differ markedly, both in textual redaction and the Wheel s design. In 1591, the Compound became the first English alchemical work to be published in English: edited by Ralph Rabbards, a magistrate and former engineer, printed by Thomas Orwin, and dedicated to the Queen, Elizabeth I.92 Rabbards placed the Wheel at the end of the book, after the Compound and Epistle to Edward IV, titled George Ripleys Wheele mentioned in his Worke (Fig. 7).93 The transition into print has resulted in a rather stripped-down version compared to manuscript copies, perhaps reflecting the difficulty of accommodating the complex figure within a single sheet. Rabbards himself seems to have anticipated criticism, and justifies the design in A briefe note to the Readers:
The Wheele that is placed (Gentlemen) last, as the period of this secret Worke may of some be challenged (through the diuersitie of Copies) to differ from the first. But herein I assure you I haue obserued no lesse care than counsaile, and that of knowen Practisers, whose censures (made more certaine by experience) haue determined all doubts, and made me bolde to publish what followeth for the most auncient.94
Comparison with the earliest extant manuscripts suggests that Rabbards confidence in the antiquity of his exemplar was misplaced. His simple woodcut omits the captions from the inner spheres, which are present in all hand-drawn copies of the Wheel from the 1530s and earlier
90)Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 1485, Pt. 3, 46r. 91)Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 1486, Pt. 3, 72v. 92)George Ripley, The Compound of Alchymy ... Divided into twelue gates ... Set foorth by Raph Rabbards Gentleman, studious and expert in archemicall artes, ed. Ralph Rabbards (London, 1591). Rabbards text is reproduced with some spelling emendations in George Ripleys Compound of Alchemy, ed. Linden. 93)Ripley, Compound of Alchymy, M3r. 94)Ibid., *4v.
79
(see Fig. 7). These include the Latin notes containing the correct proportions of Sol, Luna, Venus and Mercuryessential if the figure is to be read in any practical sense. Indeed, the symbol for Venus has been omitted altogether, while the other three are doubled up, each appearing twice. The sense of the Wheel is altered further by a striking addition: the symbols for the seven planets, from Moon to Saturn, have been attached to respective circles, starting from the central hub. Yet the grafting of this conventional cosmological ordering onto the alchemical figure makes nonsense of Ripleys original scheme. The outer ring contains both Saturn and Sol; Jupiter now shares his sphere with Luna; and the double Mercury has intruded into the realm of Mars. Without having access to Rabbards most auncient exemplars, we cannot know whether these changes were accurately reproduced from an unusual manuscript version, reflect Rabbards own amendments, or simply demonstrate the erratic nature of Elizabethan editorial and printing practices. In the absence of further evidence, we might speculate that the adjustment betrays a scribe or printers decision to bring Ripleys erratic orbits in line with the correct astronomical order. The outcome has nevertheless left its mark on several seventeenth-century manuscript copies of Rabbards Wheel. These include a version by Brian Twyne (15811644), archivist of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, which reproduces the full complement of planets (see Fig. 8).95 The fluidity of the print-manuscript relationship and the practical awkwardness of transcribing complex figures coincide in the form of Edinburgh University MS Laing III.164, a sixteenth-century copy of the Compound with a complete Wheel.96 A first attempt has clearly gone awry, and the sheet with the half-finished figure now furnishes the outer leaves of the quire. A later owner has added various amendments to the Wheel and Compound, besides recording some opinions on the interpretation of the Wheel at the end of the work. These focus on the planetary spheres, correctly identifying the necessary proportions to be used. Latin instructions on drawing the Wheel then follow (Rota fabrica), which
95)Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 172: Twyne has added copies of the Wheel, the Epistle to Edward IV, and Rabbards title page to this fifteenth-century Compound. See also Bodleian Library MS Rawl. poet 121 (70r), in the hand of George Lideatt, merchant tailor. 96)CRC 9.6, in CRC, 152.
80
Figure 7:Wheel. George Ripley, The Compovnd of Alchymy (London, 1591), M3r. Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge, Grylls.3.412. (By kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge)
begin with the marking out of a large circle (Describatur circulus grandis).97
97)Edinburgh University MS Laing III.164, 120.
81
Figure 8:Wheel. Oxford, Corpus Christi College Library MS 136. (By kind permission of the President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford)
Intriguingly, the scribe must also have been familiar with Rabbards edition, for the Latin guide has been supplemented with English notes on the reproduction of a Wheel, In forme as in the printed copye. Here, the artist should start by drawing the Sphere of the Moon, as bigg as that which touch the fower inward circles. To delineate the outer limits
82
of the Wheel, one should then make another paper as bigge as the circle of [Saturn], which fix | in the center of the former and fasten at ye crosse. Rather than simply leaving the spheres empty of text, as in the print exemplar, the Latin verses appropriate to Sol, Luna, Venus and Mercury should be added to the fower quarters thereof.98 Guidance is also given on completing the other spheres. If followed, the result would be a curious fusion of scribal and printed sources, in which the omissions of the Rabbardian Wheel are corrected with reference to a manuscript exemplar. Yet, perversely, not all manuscripts reflect this striving for accuracy. Around 1606, the dedicated copyist and compiler of alchemical treatises, Thomas Robson, transcribed two almost identical versions of The philosophers heaven, an anonymised version of the Wheel in which the large, single figure is broken down into smaller circles and disembodied verses. Alternative English translations of the Latin verses are provided, yet the original scale and context of the figure are lost; traces surviving only in such enigmatic headings as The first Cirkell within the great Cirkell.99 In Robsons neat copies, the deconstructed Wheel becomes just another illustrated alchemical treatise. Elsewhere, solitary Wheels began to orbit independently of the Compound, as illustrations in unrelated compendia.100 In at least one instance, an isolated Wheel appears with verses and captions fully Latinizedall the more surprising given that the Liber duodecim portarum (the Latin version of the Compound) seems to have parted company from its figure before arriving in continental Europe.101 By the mid-seventeenth century, the Wheel had acquired a modest life of its own, in which the substance of its verses and proportions became increasingly divorced from practical considerations that made sense only when grounded in its source text. The Wheel s evolution culminates in an otherwise-unidentified
98)Ibid. 99)British Library MS Sloane 1744, 76v; Glasgow University Library, MS Ferguson 133, 14v (dated 1606). 100)Canterbury Cathedral, CCA-LitMs/A/14 (August 1590); Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, MS Anonyma 2, vol. 4 (17th cent.), 269. 101)British Library MS Sloane 1255 (ca. 15871600), 260b. A later copy of the Liber duodecim portarum, in Bodleian Library MS Canon. Misc. 223, does include the Wheel (Rota philosophica, accompanying Latin Compound), 258
83
Figure 9:An Alchymical or Philosophical Heaven, or Wheel. Glasgow University Library, MS Ferguson 238, inner flyleaf. (By kind permission of Glasgow University Library, Special Collections)
engraving of An Alchymical or Philosophical Heaven, or Wheel, found pasted to the flyleaf of Glasgow University Library MS 238 (see Fig. 9).102
102)This has apparently been cut from a work of the English physician and occultist writer Ebenezer Sibly (17511799), which I have yet to identify. The sheet includes the names of Wrighten J.C. and the artist, Sibly. On Sibly, see Allen G. Debus, Scientific Truth and Occult Tradition: The Medical World of Ebenezer Sibly (17511799), Medical History, 26 (1982), 259-78; Debus, A Further Note on Palingenesis: The Account of Ebenezer Sibly in the Illustration of Astrology (1792), Isis, 64 (1973), 226-30.
84
Figure 10:George Ripley, Figure conteyning all the secrets of the Treatise both great & small. Elias Ashmole, ed., Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (London, 1652), 117. (By kind permission of SSPL/Science Museum)
This image presents a late and unattributed version of Ripleys Wheel, from which most alchemical content has been removed. Startlingly, the four elements at the centre of the scheme have been replaced by the sun, from which the planets recede in their correct, post-Copernican
85
order. Rather than celebrating the alchemical quest to achieve heavenly perfection on earth, Ripleys cosmos has been reinvented as an analogue for human capacity, expressed by a new slogan:
Man know thyself is the greatist Wisdom for all Magick is found in Man. Man is the Epitome of the Creation the World in Miniature.103
Conclusions When the Wheel was published for the second time in 1652, by the antiquary, alchemist and founding member of the Royal Society, Elias Ashmole (16171692), it appeared engraved on a fold-out sheet immediately before the Compound in the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (Fig. 10).104 The Theatrum, as the first printed compendia of English alchemical verse, was essentially an antiquarian enterprise, reflecting Ashmoles concern to preserve through his efforts the jewels of Englands alchemical heritage, being almost quite shrouded in the Dust of Antiquity.105 Ashmoles attention to detail reflects his own striving for authenticity, which also led him to commission magnificent engravings from Robert Vaughan, based on a manuscript exemplar, to accompany the first work in the collection, Thomas Nortons Ordinal of Alchemy.106 The simpler geometrical structure of the Wheel was entrusted to John Goddard, and the resulting figure preserves all the material familiar from early manuscript copies, including the fine detail of the inner circles.
103)Flyleaf, Glasgow University Library MS 238. 104)TCB, 117. 105)Ashmole, Prologomena, in TCB, B3v. On Ashmoles antiquarian project in relation to alchemy, see Lauren Kassell, Reading for the Philosophers Stone, in Books and the Sciences in History, ed. Marina Frasca-Spada and Nick Jardine (Cambridge, 2000), 132-50; Bruce Janacek, A Virtuosos History: Antiquarianism and the Transmission of Knowledge in the Alchemical Studies of Elias Ashmole, Journal for the History of Ideas, 69 (2008), 395-417. 106)Elias Ashmole (16171692). His Autobiographical and Historical Notes, his Corres pondence, and Other Contemporary Sources Relating to his Life and Work, ed. Conrad HermannJosten, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1966), V: 585-86; M.K.Corbett, Ashmole and the Pursuit of Alchemy: the Illustrations to the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, 1652, Antiquaries Journal, 63 (1983), 326-36.
86
In cycling back to an earlier stage in the Wheel s evolution, Ashmole and Goddard pursued the pristine knowledge of a revered authority: an attempt that necessarily obscures the intervening efforts of early modern people to read, decode and tinker with their exemplars. The circularity of alchemical production is not expressed merely in the procedures and philosophies that its texts and images evoke. It is manifested by a continual process of recycling and reinterpretation, as successive readers applied their practical knowledge to its puzzles, or employed its conceits to front new treatises for presentation elsewhere. The Wheel illustrates a series of stages in an active process of compilatio and exegesis that, Obrists work aside, remains little studied within the context of alchemical imagery. From the thirteenth century, alchemical authors re-spun earlier material to create colourful analogies and graphical forms. Often preserved only in textual hints and scattered early copies, these have been largely overshadowed by successful adaptations, like the Wheel, which have in consequence been treated in isolation from their medieval context. Fifteenth-century alchemical figures evolved from well-established texts and forms, and evoked a slew of recognisable alchemical, medical and natural philosophical positions, even as their own forms slipped between print and manuscript, picture and prose, illustration and commentary. While aspiring to the immutability of the heavens, the Wheel embodied an earthly astronomy, and hence remained subject to its own terrestrial revolutions.

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J.M.

ISSN 1383-7427 (print version) ISSN 1573-3823 (online version)

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

J.M. Rampling / Early Science and Medicine 18 (2013) 45-86

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