Michael Maier

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.

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.