Reading the Elements and Compounds

Abstract

The title of this book is perhaps metaphorical, but it is not accidental. On the one hand, it alludes to the old tradition of inserting the word “chemistry” or “theatre”, Latin theatrum, into the titles of learned books and treatises, which in fact were not necessarily dealing with either chemistry as such or theatre as art. Thus, chemistry often meant something learned but mysterious at the same time, an art that is not readily available to everyman. The word “theatre”, on the other hand, meant a “survey”, “display”, “presentation” or “specimens”.¹ For instance, from the full title of Elias Ashmole’s Theatrum Chemicum (1652), we learn that the book contains “Poeticall Pieces of our Famous English Philosophers”, who have written the “Hermetique Mysteries” in their “owne Ancient Language”. Indeed, the book contains a number of works by divers authors, dealing with alchemy, which was the science intrinsically connected with hermeticism, secret knowledge, mystery, but was also seen as an art capable of revealing the truth about the world.² In some sense it is similar to how in popular opinion theatre is perceived today, as an art or medium that uses its own “language”,³ that is in some degree hermetic and mysterious and is therefore often difficult to understand, but is also capable of revealing truth about the world. Thus, the appropriateness of the two metaphors to the contents of this book is closer than it might seem.