The Mutus Liber, published in 1677 and known as the 'Mute Book' for its sparse text, is an alchemical work attributed to the pseudonym 'Altus'. Its opening plate shows Jacob asleep while angels ascend and descend a heavenly ladder, with one angel sounding a trumpet to wake him—a biblical scene that serves as the entry point to the work's hermetic philosophy and the quest for the Philosopher's Stone.
This image illustrates the opening plate described in the first paragraph, depicting Jacob's dream that introduces the alchemical work's hermetic philosophy.
Beyond the frontispiece, the fourteen plates provide what supporters describe as a practical laboratory manual for the 'humid way' of creating the Philosopher's Stone. The process begins with collecting dew from a cloth left outdoors overnight (plate 4), distilling it and fermenting the coagulated remnants (plates 5‑6), turning the ferment into 'rose' (plate 6), combining distillates to produce chemical precursors such as ammonia and cream of tartar before purification (plate 7), conducting first and second exposures and recompositions (plates 9‑10 and 12‑13), and finally combining saltpeter, ammonium chloride, and coal to yield both a white and a red stone after three days (plate 14); the work also instructs readers to read the enigmatic numbers and letters beneath the title backward for full effect.
This diagram supports the laboratory steps described in the second paragraph, such as dew collection and distillation.
This image corresponds to the discussion of turning ferment into 'rose' and producing chemical precursors in the second paragraph.
This illustration matches the description of plate 14 where saltpeter, ammonium chloride, and coal produce the Philosopher's Stone in the second paragraph.
The Mutus Liber was accompanied by royal letters of patent claiming it had been brought to Louis XIV’s attention by Jacob Saulat—identified by alchemist Eugène Canseliet as an anagram of the author’s pseudonym 'Altus'—which granted copyright protection and required a copy to be deposited in the newly founded Paris public library and the Louvre. This official recognition coexisted with contemporary controversies: as the work circulated, Paris was gripped by the 'Affair of the Poisons', in which aristocrats were accused of using alchemists to make inheritance powders, leading to hundreds of arrests and thirty‑six executions, while the nascent Parisian Academy of Sciences was turning its back on alchemy and relegating it to the realm of magic.
Later readers have found additional layers of meaning in the Mutus Liber. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung reproduced some of its images in his 1944 work Psychology and Alchemy, interpreting the text not as a guide to metallic transmutation but as a metaphor for the transformation of the self, summed up by the motto on plate 14: 'Ora lege lege lege relege labora et invenies' (Pray, read, read, read, reread, work — and you will discover).