The Mutus Liber (“Mute Book”) is a fifteen-plate alchemical work from 1677, explained by Mathilde Montpetit through its images and their afterlives. Its opening scene is Jacob dreaming of a ladder to heaven; the later plates show a sequence for making the Philosopher’s Stone, with almost no written instructions.
- The pictured “humid way” begins with dew gathered on cloth, then moves through distillation, fermentation, purification, and repeated exposures.
- Its paired figures invited readings as Sun and Moon, sulphur and mercury, or an echo of the legendary alchemists Nicolas and Perrenelle Flamel. The famous book attributed to Nicolas was actually a seventeenth-century fake.
- Royal patent letters appear in the final plate. Alchemy was not yet neatly outside science: Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle also pursued it.
- Carl Jung owned the first-edition copy featured here and later read its transformations as images of psychological change.
The interesting history is not that science defeated a single, stable thing called magic. The lines between experiment, allegory, fraud, and respectable inquiry were contested—and the Mutus Liber passed through all of them.