The Book with Almost No Words

The Mutus Liber ("Silent Book") is a remarkable alchemical work consisting almost entirely of fifteen symbolic engravings and virtually no text, depicting a man and a woman performing the labours of the Great Work under the guidance of gods and angels. First published at La Rochelle in 1677, it appeared under the name Altus, a pseudonym generally decoded as Jacob Saulat, sieur des Marez. Its images famously encode a process built around the gathering of celestial dew on cloths stretched in a field, read by some as a literal chemical operation and by others as an allegory, through the stages of the work to the final production of the stone. The point of its silence is deliberate: it presents the operation as something to be understood by the initiated eye rather than read, throwing the whole burden of meaning onto the reader's interpretation, which is exactly why it has attracted such varied readings from the seventeenth century down to Jungian and modern esoteric commentators.