Maier was physician to the emperor Rudolf II at Prague, and later attached to the court of Moritz of Hessen-Kassel, and he became the most literate of the defenders of the Rosicrucian furore in the years after the manifestos appeared.
His best-known book is Atalanta Fugiens (1617), and it is formally unlike anything else in the literature: fifty alchemical emblems, each with an engraving, a Latin epigram, a prose discourse, and a three-voice musical fugue printed with it, the voices named for Atalanta fleeing, Hippomenes pursuing, and the golden apple that delays her. It is designed to be looked at, read, and sung, and it is reasonably described as the first multimedia work in European printing.
Maier's wider argument, developed across several books, was that alchemy is ancient, noble, and deliberately concealed in the pagan myths, that the fables of the poets are chemical instruction in disguise. This is a claim about the antiquity of his art rather than a demonstrable history, and it belongs to the same Renaissance impulse that produced the prisca theologia.
Hereward Tilton's study is the necessary corrective to most of what is written about him, and it dismantles a good deal: the romantic picture of Maier as a Rosicrucian initiate travelling on the brotherhood's business, and the reading of his alchemy as wholly spiritual allegory. Maier was a working physician pursuing laboratory chrysopoeia, the making of gold, alongside its spiritual meaning, and he denied belonging to any brotherhood while writing in its defence.