Progress on Book of the Beginnings vol. ii is still at an absolute crawl, largely because I keep getting distracted. Finished giving a once-over to The Natural Genesis vol. ii; that has now been uploaded, along with a bunch of corrections to the Mead Hermetica and the text sections of Hartmann's butchery of Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians (I no longer have the use of the graphics software I used to re-set and partially colour the plates, so no further improvements there; I did however replace the crappy re-drawings of two emblematic figures from a largely unconnected [1] German alchemical work which Hartmann used as header images for the text sections with better versions from a copy of the Azoth sive Aureliae Occultae Philosphorum on Google Books).
While the "16th century" part of the full title of the Geheime Figuren is questionable, many of the known sources can be dated to the first half of the 17th century, with one of the earliest (the emblematic figure Mons Philosophorum and its accompanying text) appearing in a German alchemical compendium first published in 1604, Alchymia Vera [2]. The figure "Poculum Pansophiæ" appeared in a Rosicrucian work printed in 1618, the Speculum Sophium Rhodostauroticum of "Theophilus Schweighardt." The two alchemical tracts, Tractatus aureus de lapide philosophorum and Aureum Seculum Redivivum were both printed in German in 1625 or earlier, and were translated into Latin and bound up in the collection Musaeum Hermeticum ("Restored and Enlarged" edition 1678, English translation in two vols. 1893, many reprints). The figure accompanying the text of the "Emerald Tablet of Hermes" appeared in the Azoth sive Aureliæ Occultæ Philosophorum, also known as Von den verborgenen Philosophischen Geheimnussen der heimlichen Goldblumen u.s.w., printed in both Latin and German versions at Frankfurt in 1613, although comparing the German texts of the Emerald Tablet in the latter volume and the Geheime Figuren suggests the latter was back-translated from the Latin translation of the German of "Basil Valentine" (which had in turn probably been made from an earlier Latin version). The versified "explanation" of the Emerald Tablet is not identical to that in von den verborgenen u.s.w. or Azoth, unless very loosely paraphrased / back-translated. About half the symbolic diagrams derive from a work which circulated in manuscript in German in the 18th century known as the "D.O.M.A. text," an early copy of which has been dated to "around 1650." [3]
While the "16th century" part of the full title of the Geheime Figuren is questionable, many of the known sources can be dated to the first half of the 17th century, with one of the earliest (the emblematic figure Mons Philosophorum and its accompanying text) appearing in a German alchemical compendium first published in 1604, Alchymia Vera [2]. The figure "Poculum Pansophiæ" appeared in a Rosicrucian work printed in 1618, the Speculum Sophium Rhodostauroticum of "Theophilus Schweighardt." The two alchemical tracts, Tractatus aureus de lapide philosophorum and Aureum Seculum Redivivum were both printed in German in 1625 or earlier, and were translated into Latin and bound up in the collection Musaeum Hermeticum ("Restored and Enlarged" edition 1678, English translation in two vols. 1893, many reprints). The figure accompanying the text of the "Emerald Tablet of Hermes" appeared in the Azoth sive Aureliæ Occultæ Philosophorum, also known as Von den verborgenen Philosophischen Geheimnussen der heimlichen Goldblumen u.s.w., printed in both Latin and German versions at Frankfurt in 1613, although comparing the German texts of the Emerald Tablet in the latter volume and the Geheime Figuren suggests the latter was back-translated from the Latin translation of the German of "Basil Valentine" (which had in turn probably been made from an earlier Latin version). The versified "explanation" of the Emerald Tablet is not identical to that in von den verborgenen u.s.w. or Azoth, unless very loosely paraphrased / back-translated. About half the symbolic diagrams derive from a work which circulated in manuscript in German in the 18th century known as the "D.O.M.A. text," an early copy of which has been dated to "around 1650." [3]
[1] The work in question does, in fact, appear to have been one of the sources of the Geheime Figuren although the material specifically drawn from it, being in the "drittes und letzes Heft" of those copies of the Altona printing that were split into three sections, was omitted in Cosmology. It also contains two emblematic figures which later appeared in Eliphas Levi's Histoire de la Magie and subsequently in the Portal ritual of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as "The Great Hermetic Arcanum" and (slightly modified), the "more ancient form" of Tarot Trump XIV ("Hermetic Magic" in Levi).
[2] Pointed out for example by Christine Eike in a 2018 article about the sources of the Geheime Figuren at pansophers.com. EDIT: Adam McLean previously pointed this out in a discussion in 1999 on the Alchemy website: see discussion archive here (search the page for "Mons Philsophorum"). Since the date of "1604" on the figure also appears on the title page of the book it was printed in, a reference to the myth in the Fama (pub. 1614) is unlikely, nor indeed is it clear that the compiler of the Geheime Figuren took it in such a sense; the various elements composing the figure are part of the stock symbol-set of alchemical emblem-works of the period and have no specific connection to Rosicrucianism.
[3] Rafel T. Prinke, "Lampado Trado"; published in the Hermetic Journal in 1985 and posted on the AlchemyWeb Site.
