The maps from the time of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor situate Prague in the symbolic heart of Europe. Surrounded by artists and scholars, the ruler tried to unite the disintegrating world with the help of alchemy.
In 1583, Rudolf II Habsburg moved the capital of the Holy Roman Empire from the Hofburg in Vienna to Prague’s Hradčany. Despite the plague, the inhabitants of Prague enthusiastically welcomed the retinue of their king. The twenty thousand victims that the plague claimed in that crucial year made up a third of the city’s population. The relocation of the court coincided with the carnival, when the population could indulge all the whims of the body. Eros and Death performed in a joint procession in honor of the new ruler. Is it possible to imagine a better prelude to a reign in which Prague would become a great laboratory for studying the nature of life and searching for the elixir of immortality?
The Capital of Openness
Rudolf first left Vienna at the age of eleven, when his mother sent him to the Spanish court of his uncle Philip II. Descended from the Spanish line of the Habsburgs, Maria wanted her son to learn her native etiquette and receive a Catholic education away from the Protestant influence tolerated at the Viennese court by Emperor Maximilian II. It was only partially successful. During his eight years at the Madrid court, the future ruler acquired stiff manners, but his participation in the auto-da-fé—the execution crowning the inquisitorial trial against the Protestants—discouraged the sensitive young man from the Catholic bigotry. Until the end of his life, he remained indifferent to matters of religion, but he became interested in the teachings of his uncle, an expert in art and philosophy. The prince’s horizons were further broadened by his time spent in Toledo, where the traditions of Arab scholars, Jewish mystics, and Christian alchemists intersected.
On his return to Vienna, the heir to the throne absorbed the intellectual atmosphere at the court of his father, who was a patron of the prominent figures of late humanism. The Frenchman Carolus Clusius and the Italian Pierandrea Matthioli studied botany here, and the eminent English mathematician John Dee, a famous magician and owner of the largest private library of the time, dedicated his work Monas Hieroglyphica to Maximilian II. For the young Rudolf, however, the capital of Austria was associated primarily with political games and dynastic conflicts, which distracted him from his real interests: art and esotericism.
The aging emperor bestowed undivided power onto his eldest son, successively guaranteeing him the crowns of Hungary, Bohemia and the dignity of the king of the Romans. After his father’s death in 1576, Rudolf was elected Holy Roman Emperor. The second son, Ernest, received the title of governor of Lower Austria, Maximilian—Upper Austria, and the other two brothers were left without an assignment, which troubled particularly the ambitious Matthias. Throughout Rudolf’s reign, he was accused of conspiracy, and in the end, he would indeed remove his older brother from the throne. Additional pressure was exerted by the intensifying religious conflicts throughout Europe: some of the princes-electors of Germany professed Protestantism, while in Paris, during the night of St. Bartholomew, the Catholics murdered several thousand Huguenots. As if that were not enough, the conflicted Christian world was constantly threatened by the Ottoman Empire. The Turks, defeated in the naval battle of Lepanto, seemed to be waiting for a pretext for a land invasion. Vienna was on the front line of a potential attack. There were many reasons to take refuge in Prague, to distance himself from the current politics, and to devote himself to investigations of greater metaphysical weight.
The city attracted the emperor with its atmosphere of openness. Prague’s intellectual heyday can be traced back to the time of Charles IV of Luxembourg, who founded the first university in this part of Europe in 1348. The teachings of Jan Hus, the dean of the Faculty of Theology at this university, led to the emergence of new religious movements long before the Reformation. An important role in the capital was played by the Jewish quarter, separated from the Old Town by a wall. During Rudolf’s reign, it became an important center of thought, and Chief Rabbi Yehuda Löw ben Becalel was the greatest Jewish teacher of his time. The urban plan of the New Town erected in the time of Charles contained numerous references to religious symbolism and astronomy. For instance, Jeruzalémská Street was laid out in such a way that the sun would set at its exit during the winter solstice. Prague was like the prima materia, the original building block of the world in which everything is already contained. All Prague needed was a demiurge or an alchemist who would shape a higher form of its being.
Magic Vegetables
Along with Rudolf, a group of eccentric characters appeared in Hradčany, as well as a collection of equally original works of art. The emperor was a maniacal collector; he constantly increased the resources of the Habsburgs, spending exorbitant amounts at the expense of other needs of the state. In the most important cities of Europe, he maintained a network of merchants who purchased the works of his favorite artists: Titian, Dürer, or Bruegel the Elder. Eminent painters such as Pieter Stevens, Hans von Aachen, and Bartholomeus Spranger, among others, stayed at the court. Their style, full of allegory, richness, and strangeness, became known as Rudolfine Mannerism. The most famous of the artists was Giuseppe Arcimboldi from Milan. He created portraits composed of the elements of nature or everyday objects, which, as images of the transformation of individual components into a new bodily being, corresponded with the alchemical idea of transmutation. The most famous painting of this kind by him, Vertumnus, depicts the emperor in the role of a majestic ruler as well as a deity. Vertumnus is the Roman god of change and seasons, symbolically associated with the founder of alchemy, Hermes Trismegistus. The image of the patron was constructed from vegetables, fruits, and flowers in full bloom typical of different seasons. This is an allusion to the alchemical power to improve or accelerate the processes of nature; the creation of gold was considered to come from dynamizing the natural process of maturation of this metal under the ground.
The body as a microcosm reflecting the structure of the macrocosm was the subject of interest and comprehensive research at the imperial court, during things like fashionable anatomical dissection shows, for example. Arcimboldi had the opportunity to inspire an exchange of knowledge with outstanding physicians, botanists, and alchemists staying at the Prague Castle, such as Johann Crato from Wrocław, Flemish physician and botanist Rembert Dodoens, Oswald Crollius, a student of Paracelsus or the Polish scientist Michał Sędziwój. The emperor also hosted the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, distinguished by a gold-plated prosthesis replacing a piece of his nose lost in a duel, and the magician Edward Kelley, who had his ears cut off in England for forgery. One of the ambitions of alchemy was to create a homunculus, a humanoid creature made of inanimate matter. Alchemical ideas were reflected in Arcimboldi’s canvases, and their composition, often composed of incompatible elements, additionally referred to the idea of the Kunstkammer—the cabinet of curiosities.
The exhibition of Rudolf’s collection occupied as many as four rooms, with a total length of 100 meters. Apart from paintings and sculptures, it also housed a collection of exotic natural wonders and all sorts of strange objects, such as sea shells from the Maldives and their imitations made of agate or jasper, turtle shells, an amber skull, ivory game boards, landscapes made of precious stones, a knife swallowed by a voracious peasant, and even a lump of clay from Hebron, from which Yahweh is said to have fashioned Adam. The most important valuables are the agate cup associated with the Grail, into which Joseph of Arimathea was to collect the blood of Christ, as well as the famous twisted narwhal tusk given to Emperor Ferdinand I by Sigismund I the Old. After taking the throne, Rudolf had to give these two treasures to his uncle Ferdinand of Tyrol. The way a collector envies a fellow collector, the emperor envied the Archduke for the famous cabinet of curiosities, but he rejected his offer to borrow the artifacts, as he wanted to own them. He believed that the prosperity of his rule depended on the possession of these two objects. He had to wait until he became the elder of the family to get these treasures back. The items in the collection were attributed magical significance: the narwhal’s tooth was believed to be the horn of a unicorn, and the curved antlers of an antelope were the claws of a griffin. This seemingly chaotic jumble in times of widespread anxiety was supposed to depict the harmony of the world. Let us add to this the menagerie in Jeleni Jar with camels, antelopes, and predators from outside of Europe, a tame lion, and the gardens with plants from all corners of the then-known world, and it becomes clear that the condensation of these specimens in the Prague microcosm was intended to serve a more thorough understanding of the rules governing the whole of creation, and therefore, the better governance of the empire.
The emperor often used the stairs leading from his private chambers to the galleries. He sought not only the pleasure of communing with art but also shelter; he was easily prone to melancholy, which increased his distrust of those around him. He was as easy to bestow highest offices on his subjects as he was to send them to the White Tower, where torture chambers and prison cells awaited them. He tried to fill the sense of emptiness by acquiring objects with magical properties. He inherited his mental instability from his ancestors. On both his father’s and mother’s sides, he was the great-grandson of Queen Joanna the Mad, who was isolated from the world because of her insanity. Moreover, Joanna’s son and Rudolf’s maternal grandfather, the eminent Emperor Charles V, who ruled the empire stretching on both sides of the Atlantic, abdicated because of a nervous breakdown and chose to stay in an Extremadura monastery. In addition to the genetic predispositions, Rudolf’s condition was also worsened by syphilis, a disease that, in its third stage, causes changes in the brain that are devastating to the psyche. The emperor’s obsessions were also fostered by astrological predictions, many of which spoke of the loss of power or death. According to one of them, he was to be deprived of the throne by his successor, which is why the emperor delayed marrying the Spanish Infanta Isabella, who had been promised to him, only to declare after this period that he did not intend to marry at all. The signs of decline written in the stars mobilized the ruler, who wanted to perform momentous deeds worthy of the Caesars or Charlemagne, of whom he felt he was the heir. His ambition reached perhaps even further because the alchemy gave extraterrestrial prerogatives to Prague’s Hermes Trismegistus.
The Philosopher’s Stone
The nickname given to the emperor referred to the syncretic deity worshipped in Hellenistic Egypt. Trismegistus, combining the characteristics of the Greek namesake with the Egyptian Thoth, the patron saint of the arts and sciences, was considered the patron saint of alchemy during the Renaissance in Europe. This was due to the popularity of the treatise Corpus Hermeticum, which the Tuscan Duke Cosimo de’ Medici gave “to the young Marsilio Ficino, who was in charge of the Platonic Academy in Florence restored by the Duke, regarding the treatise to be the work of the ancient Egyptian sage Hermes, which contained the original revelation well before the time of Plato or Moses […]. He even ordered him [Ficino] to stop translating Plato’s writings and prepare a translation of Hermes’ teachings as soon as possible, so that [the Duke] could read them before he died,” writes Polish expert of alchemical literature Prof. Rafał Prinke in Zwodniczy ogród błędów (The Deceptive Garden of Errors). The texts contained in the corpus, most often in the form of dialogues, contained divine knowledge. It was available only to a select few who walked the path of spiritual self-discovery. Hermes Trismegistus himself, as described in The Corpus, obtained gnosis through a journey to heaven, only to pass it on to other initiates upon his return. According to the Hermetic interpretation, after being expelled from Paradise, man has lost his completeness, although the divine element still resides in him. The way to regain “Adam’s knowledge” is to be the path of godliness and self-improvement.
The second important text that influenced the development of the Hermetic tradition was The Emerald Tablet, quoted many times in the writings of alchemists and whose content we know of due to to Arab scholars. They associated the “thrice greatest” Hermes with the prophet Idris or the biblical Enoch. It was authors such as Jabir Ibn Hayyan (known as Geber in Europe) who began to see him as the founder of alchemy. The tablet is said to have been found in a cave in the hands of Hermes Trismegistus, who was buried there, and the line engraved on it: “That which is below is like to that which is above,” is a conviction that the world of man and the world of nature, or the earth’s crust and the celestial spheres, are connected and reflect each other. Ficino supplemented this principle with the possibility of mutual interaction between these dimensions, postulated by Neoplatonism. According to this school of philosophy, of which Hellenistic Alexandria was a strong center, the divine spirit permeating all matter determines the unity of the structure of the whole cosmos. The Italian humanist, Lodovico Lazzarelli incorporated alchemy into Ficino’s syncretic system and in this way, armed the adepts of the “golden art” with potentially almost unlimited power.
Arab scholars, who gained access to ancient texts after the conquest of Alexandria by the Caliphate in the seventh century, also introduced other, more technical aspects to alchemy, largely based on Greek natural philosophy. Geber supplemented the theory of the four elements, known from the thought of Empedocles, which are in different proportions the material of all matter, with the mercury-sulphur principle, according to which every mineral is composed of these two elements. The alchemist’s task was therefore to distinguish between and manipulate the four elements and to attempt to distill the purest form of these two basic elements. Plato’s description of ether as the fifth element in Timaeus was associated by Ficino with the Neoplatonic spirit of the world. This, in turn, opened up the possibility for adepts to isolate in the laboratory the vital principle of the entire cosmos as a physical substance, most often called the philosopher’s stone or elixir. In the pre-Renaissance times of the fusion of ars hermetica with alchemy, the principle was sought after as an essential ingredient in the transmutation of metals. After the Renaissance enrichment with the Hermetic-Neoplatonic worldview, it became the key to the experience of the divine self, omniscience, immortality, or the creation of new life from matter.
The Great Masterpiece
The emperor, an adept of alchemy and an expert in Hermetic writings, was aware of the possibilities offered by the epoch of the intellectual revival and invited humanists and masters of the art of alchemy to Prague’s Hradčany. They were often refugees persecuted at other courts. One of the fathers of modern astronomy, Johannes Kepler, and the philosopher and theologian Giordano Bruno, who postulated the unity of religions and visited Prague two years before his death at the inquisitorial stake on Campo di Fiori, were accused of heresy. Accusations of practicing the occult arts were also made against the English alchemists John Dee and his assistant Edward Kelley, who arrived in Prague around 1585. Whether it was because of his unsuccessful attempts to obtain the philosopher’s stone or suspicions of spying for Elizabeth I, Dee had to leave the court after four years. Edward Kelley, who for a time gained more recognition than his supervisor, remained in Prague. He was to carry out a successful transmutation in the presence of Rudolf, which won him the favor of the monarch and he was even rewarded with the title of nobility and land grants. His career, however, did not last long; after killing the courtier Jiří Hunkler in a duel, the charlatan mage was locked up in the Křivoklát Castle, although it is speculated that the reason for the alchemist’s imprisonment was to protect the secret of transmutation. Soon after the pardon, the unfortunate criminal was again imprisoned in the tower, this time in the Hněvín Castle in the town of Most, from which he tried to escape. While jumping from the tower, he broke his leg and eventually died as a result of his injuries. The alchemists could count on a fast promotion, but the risk of falling was just as great.
Despite this, Prague attracted a whole host of not only adepts of the golden art but also ordinary swindlers hoping to be accepted at the imperial court. The function of the “alchemical examiner” was performed by Tadeáš Hájek, whom the emperor appointed to sift through the candidates. This alchemist and astrologer was also a renowned astronomer and it was he who brought Tycho Brahe and Kepler to Prague. He also supported John Dee, with whom he corresponded on Euclidean geometry. Rejected by Hájek, the amateurs settled in the city and sold their miraculous delicacies to the naïve inhabitants of Prague. This motley group of fortune seekers and common crooks contributed to perpetuating the image of the alchemist as a charlatan. It would long dominate the popular perception of the profession, overshadowing the other aspects of the complex portrait which Tara Nummedal presented in Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire: a laboratory craftsman, a prophet, and a mystic, as well as a scholar and philosopher. This period of esoteric intensification was transformed by the myth-making power of the city into a rich literature full of curiosities and eccentric heroes, such as the alchemist and necromancer Jeroným Scott, perfectly described by the Italian Slavist Angelo Maria Ripellino in his book Magical Prague.
The story of the Golem, whose creation is attributed to Rabbi Yehuda Loew Ben Becalel, fits into this trend. An urban legend, faithful to the atmosphere of place and time, connects a fantastic creature with a Jewish scientist. The historic meeting, in February 1592, between the emperor and the Maharal of Prague, as Rabbi Loew was called, lived to see its fantastic apocrypha. According to one of them, the rabbi, protesting against the edict ordering the expulsion of Jews from Prague, went to the Stone Bridge to stop the emperor’s carriage. The enraged crowd began throwing stones at it and the stones turned into flowers. The echoes of the pogroms can be heard in this story, despite the fact that the period of the rule of tolerant Rudolf was the time of the greatest flowering of Jewish culture in Prague.
For the sake of the peaceful coexistence of his heterogeneous empire, the emperor gathered knowledge and invited eminent scientists, regardless of their religious beliefs. Getting to know the code of nature was to protect its domain, which was threatened by the post-Tridentine Counter-Reformation and the belligerence of Calvinist bigotry. It is also in this context that the great work of alchemy—the search for the philosopher’s stone—can also be considered. Alchemy was a common discourse that had a chance to unite the disintegrating world through spiritual renewal or in the recovery of “Adam’s knowledge.” However, this humanistic project had to buckle under the weight of historical processes represented by warring factions. Struggling with illness, the emperor was losing his authority at court, which was taken advantage of by his brothers, who successively removed him from power. The death of the crownless and lonely Rudolf in January 1612 was preceded by a few years by the second Defenestration of Prague, which gave rise to the Thirty Years’ War. As a result of this cataclysm, the collection was also destroyed and plundered by the Catholic Duke of Bavaria, the Swedish army, or the Habsburg successors, who moved the capital of their empire back to Vienna. The death of the emperor also symbolizes the end of the era in which Hermeticism, as a system of transmitting knowledge separate from religion and science, experienced its greatest flowering. The dawn of the scientific revolution forces Hermeticism to shift to the peripheries of culture.
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