Maier's career ran through the strangest court of the age. Trained in medicine at Basel, he arrived in Prague in 1608 and became personal physician and imperial counsellor to Rudolf II, the emperor whose castle housed painters, astronomers and alchemists in adjoining rooms; Rudolf ennobled him as count palatine, and the imperial connection gave the physician the standing to become a maker of books. After Rudolf's decline he travelled, spending years in England, and his later books were issued at Oppenheim and Frankfurt by the publishing house of Theodor de Bry, whose engravers gave them their extraordinary faces.
When the Rosicrucian manifestos set Europe arguing, Maier became the movement's most learned public defender, though he never claimed membership: Silentium post clamores explained the brotherhood's silence toward its thousands of petitioners, and Themis aurea expounded its laws, treating the order as a genuine college of physicians of the cosmos whether or not its address could be found. His own books, Atalanta Fugiens above all, performed the program the manifestos only announced, chemistry, music, classical myth and emblem fused into a single instrument of instruction. He died at Magdeburg in 1622, in the opening ruin of the Thirty Years War, a court intellectual outlived by the war that ended the world his books were written for, and rediscovered whenever alchemy is taken seriously as a culture rather than a delusion.