Among the many treatises preserved by Benedictus Figulus in his A Golden and Blessed Casket of Nature’s Marvels (1607), none is more central than The Book of the Revelation of Hermes, Interpreted by Theophrastus Paracelsus, Concerning the Supreme Secret of the World. Figulus clearly understood this piece to be the doctrinal heart of his anthology, a text in which the ancient Hermetic authority and the radical reformer Paracelsus were fused into one voice. The resulting work is at once a cosmological meditation, a theological treatise, and an alchemical proclamation. To study it is to glimpse how early modern Hermeticists envisioned the Philosopher’s Stone not merely as a chemical agent, but as a divine essence—what the text itself calls the Spirit of Truth.
The One Thing Beyond the Elements
The Revelation begins with a claim that sets it apart from the endless recipes and cryptic allegories of the alchemical literature. It identifies a single principle, “the One Thing,” which transcends the four elements of classical philosophy. This substance is incorruptible, indestructible, and free from the admixture of heat, cold, dryness, or moisture. It is described not as a material to be found in one place, but as a subtle essence pervading all things. In Hermetic terms, it is the quintessence—the Fifth Essence, or ether—that stands above the mutable world of fire, air, water, and earth.
The text insists that this One Thing is both immanent and transcendent: present in every element and every creature, but never reducible to them. To speak of it in natural language is already to conceal it, and so the treatise resorts to metaphor. It is the “purest and noblest substance of an indestructible body,” and its virtues include prolonging life, healing disease, revealing treasures, and converting metals into gold. The reader is told it is “the Secret of all Secrets, the Last and Highest Thing to be sought under the heavens.”
A Christian Hermetic Theology
What makes this section of the Casket remarkable is the way it blends Hermetic natural philosophy with overt Christian theology. The quintessence is not only a universal spirit but the very breath of God that hovered over the waters in Genesis. It is identified with the Spirit of Truth spoken of in the Gospel of John, and with Raphael, the healing angel. The language is both exalted and sacramental: the essence is “the oil and honey of eternal healing,” “the water of life,” “the lamp that burns forever without diminution.”
In this fusion, alchemy becomes not a mechanical art of metallurgy but a theological vocation. To discover the One Thing is to encounter a spark of the divine; to misuse it is to court damnation. The text is explicit in its warnings: the mysteries must not be revealed to the impure, lest “pearls be cast before swine.” The alchemist is called to moral purity, godliness, and praise of the Creator. The quintessence is no neutral reagent—it is the sacrament of nature, reserved for the worthy.
The Five Manifestations of the Spirit
One of the more striking features of the Revelation is its account of the Spirit’s progressive transformations. The essence first appears in an earthly form, healing wounds and purging impurities. In its second manifestation it is watery, more effective against fevers and poisons. As it grows purer it assumes an aerial and oily form, restoring strength, beauty, and fertility. In its fiery stage it becomes the “elixir of life,” reviving the old and strengthening the dying. Finally, in its glorified form it shines like gold and silver, performing wonders indistinguishable from miracles: reviving dead trees, producing precious stones, and burning in lamps forever.
This fivefold sequence recapitulates the familiar stages of alchemy—nigredo, albedo, citrinitas, rubedo—but recast in theological terms. The Spirit matures as the adept purifies it, moving from corruptibility to incorruptibility, from earth to heaven. The pattern is less a technical recipe than a cosmic drama, in which matter itself is sanctified through successive baptisms of element and fire.
Relation to Paracelsus
Although attributed to Paracelsus, the text has the character of a Hermetic compilation, stitched together with echoes of Avicenna, Morienus, and the Corpus Hermeticum. Yet Figulus insists on Paracelsus’s authority as interpreter of Hermes. This attribution is not accidental. By 1607, Paracelsus’s reputation was contested: orthodox physicians condemned him, while his disciples revered him as a prophet of divine medicine. By placing Hermes’s revelation in Paracelsus’s mouth, Figulus asserts both continuity and legitimacy: the wisdom of antiquity flows seamlessly into the radical reformer, and thus into the Hermetic brotherhood of his own day.
In this way, the Revelation serves as a hinge between past and present. It anchors the new Paracelsian science in the authority of the thrice-great Hermes, while also baptizing Hermetic philosophy into Christian theology. The Stone becomes not only a natural secret but a Christian mystery, with Paracelsus as its herald.
Allegory and Secrecy
The Revelation is not shy about its deliberate obscurity. It catalogs names—Azoth, Sandaraca, Kybrick, Alcohoph—only to caution that these are veils. There is only one spirit, but it is hidden under countless titles. This rhetoric of concealment serves two functions. First, it protects the doctrine from the unworthy, fulfilling the ancient Hermetic injunction to secrecy. Second, it stimulates the reader into allegorical interpretation. To understand the text is already to undergo initiation, to move beyond literalism into the spiritual reading of nature.
Historical Resonance
Placed in the context of early seventeenth-century Europe, the Revelation reflects a moment of intense intellectual ferment. The universities were bastions of Aristotelian scholasticism; Paracelsians and Hermeticists were often dismissed as charlatans. Yet beneath the surface, a current of reform was stirring—medical, religious, and philosophical. The Casket, and especially this Revelation, embodies that undercurrent: a conviction that nature itself bore witness to divine truth, and that by recovering its quintessence, mankind could achieve both physical renewal and spiritual redemption. Within a decade, the Rosicrucian manifestos would proclaim similar themes of hidden wisdom, moral purity, and universal reformation. Figulus’s anthology thus foreshadows the cultural wave that was about to break.
Critical Perspective
For the modern scholar, the Revelation is both frustrating and fascinating. It offers no reproducible laboratory instructions; its “five manifestations” are metaphors, not measurements. Yet it is a window into the way alchemy functioned as a symbolic system, binding together cosmology, medicine, and devotion. It is a text to be read not with crucibles but with the imagination—an attempt to articulate, in a time of crisis, how the divine might still be found in the hidden heart of nature.
In literary terms, the text has a lyrical grandeur. Its praise of the quintessence as “the treasure of treasures, the mystery of mysteries” recalls the ecstatic hymns of the Hermetica. Its warning that “the impure are unworthy of it” echoes the ascetic voice of early Christian mystics. And its vision of lamps that burn forever and trees that revive under its touch points toward the alchemical imagination at its most visionary: not a manual of transmutation, but a poetry of transformation.
Conclusion
The Revelation of Hermes Interpreted by Paracelsus is the doctrinal jewel of Figulus’s Casket. It distills the essence of Hermetic alchemy into a Christian mystery: the search for the One Thing that is at once quintessence, Spirit of Truth, and divine medicine. It situates Paracelsus as heir to Hermes, and the alchemist as heir to both. It is a work of allegory, devotion, and polemic, not of laboratory craft. Yet in its very evasiveness lies its enduring power. It shows us how, on the threshold of modernity, alchemy could serve as theology, how nature could be read as sacrament, and how the quest for the Stone could become a meditation on the Spirit that “fills the earth and broods over the waters.”
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