Alchemists have always been reticent. In every age, their silence or camouflage in the most erudite symbolism, or simply the exclusive prerogative of closed communities, occupies the greater part of their revelations. Apparently, they cannot speak without adopting a language insiders define as technical; in reality, it is just an esoteric lexicon. Schwaller de Lubitz accused Fulcanelli of speaking like Basilius Valentinus, a fifteenth-century alchemist – among other things, a legendary and difficult-to-identify figure. Canseliet forcefully affirms that in Alchemy there is nothing that should remain hidden and then he writes along his master Fulcanelli’s lines.
However, there has existed, at least since the curiosity for observing nature survived, a category of people who have always openly written what they know or at least have heard. They are the philosophers, the historians like Herodotus or Cicero, the naturalists like Pliny the Elder, the men of letters like Homer, Virgil (even Petronius, perhaps?), up to Arthur Rimbaud, the Renaissance artists, the exhibitionist aristocrats, the physicians like J.J. Becher, the iatrochemists like Glaser or Lancillotti, the masons, the army engineers, mathematicians like Luca Pacioli, farmers, astronomers, geologists like Wallerius, scientists like Boyle, miners, priests, Jesuits like Lana Terzi or Athanasius Kircher, bishops like Isidore of Seville, and the abbesses who had their rooms decorated by Parmigianino. I definitely forgot some categories. In any case, everyone but alchemists.
Without these people’s generous and naive contribution, Alchemy would be without logical explanations, without reason for being, and above all, without those many necessary and revealing details which were not hidden at all but were still part of the common daily knowledge of their era. I am thinking, for example, of the iatrochemists of the Baroque age who dared, knowing they were daring, to clearly reveal proceedings that had everything in common with the first alchemical work. To then also make suggestions for the second one.
Not the alchemists; they were different. Philalete, in his Introitus, wrote: “I put down these lines to make me known to my peers”. And before him, Trevisanus said he wanted to present himself to the world of the wise.
Of course, we all know about the two Hollandus, Orthelius, the Testamentum Fraternitatis, and up to the present day, as far as Alexander von Bernus, Archarion, Roger Caro-Kamala Jnana, the humble Rubellus, the elusive Atoréne, the quite fanatic Solazaref, Manfred Junius the musician, Lucarelli the historian and Pancaldi the spagyric. But these are only outline figures. They are not the “Names”. Okay, let’s not syndicate this now. So why this page? Because I’m more and more baffled to see that the most viewed articles and the most searched names are those surrounded by the aura of mystery.