Review of A Golden and Blessed Casket of Nature’s Marvels
By Benedictus Figulus (1607; Eng. trans. A.E. Waite, 1893)
Benedictus Figulus’s A Golden and Blessed Casket of Nature’s Marvels stands as one of the more ambitious attempts to canonize and defend the Hermetic-Paracelsian worldview on the eve of the Rosicrucian ferment. First printed in 1607 and republished in Arthur Edward Waite’s translation in 1893, the book is less an authored treatise than an anthology carefully curated to buttress a vision of alchemy as divine philosophy, medicine, and Christian vocation. Figulus does not so much invent doctrine as weave together fragments—epigrams, treatises, dialogues, and allegories—by Paracelsus, Alexander von Suchten, and other Hermetic voices, placing them within an overarching polemical and devotional frame.
What emerges is not a handbook of laboratory instruction but a manifesto of fidelity to the “true philosophy” that the universities had, in Figulus’s eyes, betrayed. The opening dedicatory address sets the tone: a denunciation of Aristotelian “vain philosophy,” a rejection of scholastic sophistry, and an exaltation of the Hermetic tradition that Figulus traces back to Adam, Moses, and Hermes Trismegistus. He presents his own life story as proof of this fidelity—his youthful encounter with Paracelsian texts, his years of persecution and poverty, his rededication to the “spagyric” path—and by doing so he casts himself as a martyr-editor, preserving for posterity a wisdom suppressed by both church and academy.
The collection itself is a tapestry of Hermetic themes. The “Book of the Revelation of Hermes” expounds the doctrine of the One Thing: a quintessence beyond the four elements, incorruptible and divine, the very “Spirit of Truth” that preserves health, renews youth, and transforms metals into gold. Von Suchten’s treatises amplify the same idea in medical terms, insisting that the true physician is not Galenist but Hermetic, one who knows the “heat of the Sun and Moon” within the body and can nourish it with the corresponding celestial fire. Figulus supplements these with anonymous verses, enigmas, and admonitions that continually reinforce the moral condition of the alchemist: the Stone cannot be found by the impure, and revelation is reserved for those who live godly lives.
Stylistically, the Casket oscillates between the soaring rhetoric of sermon and the dense allegory of alchemical verse. Its imagery is striking: the living body dissolved by Apollo’s fire, a multicolored bird born from bones and made white before flying into the air, or the quintessence appearing successively as earth, water, air, fire, and finally as a radiant, glorified substance that heals both trees and men. Such figures, drawn from Paracelsian cosmology and biblical typology alike, are not meant to yield laboratory directions but to enkindle a vision of alchemy as both natural science and divine revelation.
Historically, the Casket is important precisely because of this hybrid character. It shows how Paracelsus, who in his own lifetime was dismissed as a heretical vagabond, was elevated by disciples into a prophetic monarch of arts, his suppressed works invoked almost as sacred scripture. Figulus’s editorial labor participates in the same cultural current that produced the Rosicrucian manifestos a decade later: a conviction that the renewal of philosophy, medicine, and even Christianity itself could be achieved by recovering a lost Hermetic gnosis. The anthology thus functions as a rallying text for a counter-university, a fellowship of “sons of the doctrine” who read the world as a book written by God and mistrusted all human schools that ignored it.
For modern readers, the book is frustrating and fascinating in equal measure. Those seeking empirical recipes will find little but allegory and polemic. Yet for anyone studying the spiritualization of alchemy—its migration from furnace to pulpit, from metallurgy to metaphysics—the Casket is invaluable. It captures the moment when alchemy became a theology of nature, when the quintessence was imagined not only as a medicine for the body but as a medium of redemption, and when Christ Himself was proclaimed “Trismegistus Spagyrus.”
If judged by experimental utility, the book disappoints; if judged by imaginative power and historical significance, it is a treasure. Figulus’s anthology is less a casket of practical marvels than a reliquary of visionary fervor. It is, in that sense, a key to understanding how early modern Europe could see in the Philosopher’s Stone not simply a promise of gold, but a mirror of divine truth, and how the language of alchemy helped fuel the mystical, reformist, and apocalyptic impulses of the seventeenth century.