Alchemical Symbolism in the VMS

[Barbrey]

Wow, some of those are incredibly close.

Yes, and Marco also presented You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . Among numerous depictions of plants, there is suddenly an interesting illustration:

162 a bottle illustrating "De Virtutibus Aquae Vitae" ("De la virtude de laqua vitta")

Oh, great catch. I read the Beasley article and he seems to prefer the term “magiferus” herbal to “alchemical” herbal. He has good points, but his examples emphasize the rarity of metal in the recipes. I’m not sure that follows all the way through, but I do wonder sometimes if researchers in their rarified contexts miss the point that alchemy by the late 14th century had mostly changed its goal and many of its processes to plants rather than metals. This all gets complicated by the fact that alchemy’s metaphorical language is often still couched in the search for the “stone” and older metal-based processes instead of aqua vita and medicine. 

One thing that has really aroused my curiosity: I wonder about those cut off roots and whether finding them in an ms is a flag that we’re dealing with spagyric medicine (synonymous with alchemy). This is where each of the three parts of the plant- root, stem, flower-are reduced to ashes separately-operated on before being recombined to bring out their potency. Even when the root is not a cut-off, the VMS botanical system seems to really insist on this separation of root, stem, flower.