Alchemical Symbolism in the VMS

[Barbrey]

The problem is that almost anything obscure and mysterious can be (and was) interpreted as alchemical: Catholic religion, Greco-Roman mythology, architecture...

Alchemy is the biggest part of the "book of secrets" literature that pretended to reveal amazing occult knowledge. At the time the Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit, Aurora consurgens and VMs were written, most of the popular, much copied books (outside of the small minority of little studied, mostly forgotten texts written by practicing alchemists) were written by hacks who reused previous texts, interpolated bits and pieces found in older manuscripts, made up and rewrote parts without any respect for attribution to the original authors and what they meant. The extent of successive additions and modifications can be seen when comparing manuscripts, making authorship basically meaningless. A short text titled De cellidonia in a 14th century manuscript, De herba incognita in a 15th century manuscript, was later re-purposed as an alchemical text and ended up in a 16th century printed edition as a letter written by Arnaldus de Villa Nova about distilled human blood. Conversely, some alchemical texts mention "herba adrop": the bridges between herbalism and alchemy are numerous, either metaphorical or literal. Under the disguise of herbalism, alchemy and medicine the same basic message was being conveyed: that secret knowledge existed, that could be rediscovered. The more obscure and mysterious the better, because imagination is best stimulated by symbols, enigmas and parables: even the most credulous had trouble believing silly practical recipes found in pseudo-Albertus Magnus Grand Albert, a.k.a. Liber secretorum Alberti Magni de virtutibus herbarum, lapidum et animalium quorundam (The book of secrets of Albert the Great on the virtues of herbs, stones and certain animals). So the VMs can be seen as the ultimate evolution in the "book of secrets" genre, removing the inconvenient revelation of unworkable principles of natural philosophy (theorica) and recipes (practica) altogether, keeping only the distilled essence of mystery.

You are quite right, nablator, and I like that last line!  The images in the book are cryptograms themselves; no wonder so many find either no meaning or all meanings in them. And even if we find something at surface, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t included to hide even more riddles, or possible nonsense.