The Wordless Book

SchwartZ Salant, Encountering Jung on Alchemy, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N], 1995. 

The Wordless Book, in which nevertheless the whole of Hermetic Philosophy is set forth in heiroglyphic figures, sacred to God the merciful, thrice best and greatest, and dedicated to the sons of art only, the name of the author being Altus. 

The last three lines are biblical references in reverse Genesis 28 11, 12 Genesis 27 28, 39 Deuteronomy 33 18, 28. 

McLean, A Commentary On The Mutus Liber, Phanes, Grand Rapids, MI, 1991. 

Burland, The Art of The Alchemists, MacMillan. New York, 1967, pp. 188-198. This book shows all 15 figures in a reasonably large format. 

---

The Wordless Book is unique among the old alchemical works. As its name implies, it is not written in words at all. Instead, its 15 engraved plates contain symbols only—and, unlike most other alchemical texts, it gives the full alchemical process from the start to the end. 

Pseudonym used by the author of Mutus Liber, the influential wordless book pubhshed at La Rochelle in 1677. His identity remains unknown, although Altus is thought to be an anagram of his real name. Likely candidates of the authorship of the Mutus are Jacob Saulat, who had the work pubhshed, or Isaac Baulot, a physician born in 1619. Baulot had connections with La Rochelle, and met the philosopher John Locke. It is possible,... 

It is difficult to pin down the first anti-nuclear cartoon book, but one can make a good case for Laurence Hyde s Southern Cross A Novel of the South Seas (1951). This "wordless novel" consists of 118 wood engravings that lambaste the 1946 US atomic detonation on Bikini Island. A British Quaker living in Canada, Hyde labored for years to produce this poignant book, which depicts a Pacific Eden that American soldiers completely destroy with the simple push of a button. The only survivor in Hyde s tale is a child, whose future remains uncertain. Hyde struggled to find a publisher, however, and Southern Cross always remained a bit of an oddity. 

---