Kabbalah in the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica

Kabbalah and Alchemy

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Gershom Scholem in his essay ‘Alchemie und Kabbala’, published in Eranos Jahrbuch (46) 1977, pp. 1–96, demonstrated that there was no genuine Hebrew alchemical-kabbalistic tradition in the Renaissance: before the seventeenth century, Jewish Kabbalists were hardly interested in the pursuit of alchemy (Hayyim Vital in Safed being one of the exceptions, and then only briefly); nor did the alchemical symbolism of gold as the purest metal find any correlative in kabbalistic symbolism. (Although there were Jewish alchemists; they are the subject of Raphael Patai’s The Jewish alchemists. A history and source book. Princeton 1994; Patai also notes that ‘kabbalistic alchemy’ developed amongst Christian, not Jewish, alchemists as a result of the ‘opening up of the hidden mysteries of the Kabbalah to the Christian scholarly world’, p. 155).
Marked interest in the Kabbalah from an alchemical point of view is especially evident in mystical-alchemical (Rosicrucian) circles from the early seventeenth century onwards, whereby Kabbalah and magic came to be associated with the practice of alchemy, and even considered prerequisite for the Hermetic Art. This association was mainly brought about by Pico della Mirandola’s interpretation of magic and Kabbalah; Agrippa in the sixteenth century would subsequently identify Kabbalah largely with the practice of magic. Some of the 17th–century works associating Kabbalah and alchemy as mentioned by Scholem now follow:

Heinrich Khunrath, De igne magorum. Strasbourg, Lazarus Zetzner, 1608
Khunrath’s understanding of the Kabbalah in this work and in his magnum opus, Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae, was largely derived from Pistorius’ compendium Artis cabalisticae. Khunrath noted that ‘Kabala, Magia und Alchymia sollen und müssen mit einander verbunden und angewendet werden’: Kabbalah, magic and alchemy should and must be related to each other and applied together.
Franciscus Kieser, Cabala chymica. Mühlhausen, Johann and Martin Spies, 1606
Franciscus Kieser, a follower of Paracelsus, published a Paracelsist compendium in which he asserted that the highest secrets could not be attained without thorough experience of magic and Kabbalah: all those who had been in possession of the Philosophers’ Stone had been magi and kabbalists, as could easily be proved.
Nicolas Flamel, Le Livre des figures hieroglyphiques in Trois traitez de la philosophie naturelle (ed. P. Arnauld), Paris, Guillaume Marette, 1612
When in Paris in 1357 the alchemist Nicolas Flamel acquired a papyrus allegedly containing the secret of alchemy, he was only able to decipher it with the help of a Jewish physician in 1378, who disclosed to him the meaning of the work, which had been written by ‘Abraham le Juif’ for his people. In his edition of the Figures hieroglyphiques, editor Pierre Arnauld had Flamel claim that a true understanding of alchemy was impossible without having first progressed in the ‘Cabale traditive’, and after diligent study of the books of the Hebrews.
Thomas Vaughan, Magia adamica. London, Humphrey Blunden, 1650
The English Rosicrucian Thomas Vaughan (1622–1666) elaborately recounted the myth of Flamel and the Book of Abraham the Jew in his Magia adamica: or the antiquity of magic. Vaughan claimed in Magia adamica that ‘Magic is nothing else but the Wisdom of the Creator revealed and planted in the Creature’ (p. 1).
Stephan Michelspacher, Cabala, Spiegel der Kunst und Natur in Alchymia. Augsburg, David Frank, 1616
This alchemical work, which was often reprinted, bears the stamp of Agrippa’s view of the Kabbalah and magic. The explanation in the first table teaches that ‘Kabbalah and alchemy offer the highest medicine, and also the Philosophers’ Stone’, but the allegedly alchemical-kabbalistic tables in this work are completely unrelated to the Jewish Kabbalah.

Robert Fludd, Philosophia Moysaica. Gouda, Pieter Rammazeyn, 1638
Various of Fludd’s works equate kabbalistic and alchemical symbolism. In Philosophia Moysaica Fludd (1574–1637) re-interprets the kabbalistic symbolism of the two appearances of the letter as the alchemical transmutation of the dark prima materia into the luminous Philosophers’ Stone.