De Jong's Method

When Helena Maria Elisabeth de Jong submitted her doctoral dissertation at Utrecht in 1969, she set herself a deceptively simple task: to identify the textual sources behind every motto, epigram, and discourse in Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens (1618). No one had attempted this before. The fifty emblems of the Atalanta Fugiens had been admired for their engravings, noted for their musical fugues, and occasionally cited as curiosities of alchemical publishing, but no scholar had systematically asked the question that De Jong placed at the center of her study: where did Maier get his material?

Her approach was source-critical in the tradition of classical philology and art-historical iconology. Trained as an art historian, De Jong recognized from the outset that emblem books demand dual literacy: an art historian who restricts herself to analyzing the images will miss the meaning encoded in the words, just as a literary historian who ignores the images will lose the visual dimension. Yet in practicing this dual attention, she made a discovery that surprised even her. As she wrote in the preface to her monograph, the real problem lay not in the pictures but in the 'Word' — the mottos that served as titles to each emblem plate. Once she began tracing those mottos back to their origins in earlier alchemical compilations, the entire architecture of the Atalanta Fugiens came into focus.

What made De Jong's method unprecedented was not merely the identification of individual sources — earlier commentators had occasionally noted a parallel here or a borrowing there — but the systematic, emblem-by-emblem demonstration that Maier's work was built almost entirely from pre-existing textual material. She distinguished carefully between source identification (this motto comes from this text) and interpretation (this is what it means in context). The former was a matter of philological evidence; the latter required understanding the alchemical tradition from which Maier drew. By separating these two operations, De Jong produced something no previous study of any alchemical emblem book had achieved: a complete map of one author's relationship to his sources.

Her training at Utrecht under the art-historical tradition of iconological analysis — the method pioneered by Erwin Panofsky and practiced by Dutch scholars of emblem literature — equipped her to read the Atalanta Fugiens as both a literary and a pictorial artifact. She understood that Maier's emblems were not illustrations of ideas but composite structures in which motto, image, epigram, and discourse interact. Her 1964 article in the Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art had already demonstrated this method on a single emblem; the 1969 monograph extended it across all fifty emblems and the frontispiece, producing the first and still the only comprehensive commentary on the work.

The Major Source Traditions

De Jong's most striking finding was the dominance of a single anthology: the Artis Auriferae, Quam Chemiam Vocant, Antiquissimi Authores, a two-volume Latin compilation published at Basel in 1572. A remarkable proportion of Maier's mottos can be traced to texts printed in this collection. De Jong concluded that the Artis Auriferae served as Maier's primary reference library — the book he kept open on his desk while composing the Atalanta Fugiens. The Rosarium Philosophorum, the Turba Philosophorum, the Pseudo-Aristotelian Tractatulus, the Visio Arislei, and numerous other texts that Maier cites were all available to him in this single compilation. This discovery transformed the understanding of Maier's working method: he was not a wandering polymath assembling rare manuscripts from scattered libraries, but a careful compiler working systematically through a major printed anthology.

The Turba Philosophorum — the 'Assembly of Philosophers,' an Arabic-Latin compilation that may date to as early as the tenth century — proved to be the single most prolific source for Maier's mottos. De Jong attributed nine emblem mottos directly to the Turba: the philosophical egg (Emblem VIII), the tree and the rejuvenation of the old man (IX), the work of women with white lead (XXII), the symbolism of the coral tree (XXXII), the hermaphrodite who needs fire (XXXIII), the hardening of the stone (XXXV), the completion of the work by sun and shadow (XLV), and the union of woman and serpent in the final emblem (L). But the Turba's influence extended far beyond these nine mottos. Throughout the book, Maier quoted the Turba in his discourses, invoking named speakers — Theophilus, Yximidus, Dardaris, Mosius, Bacasser, Mundus, Agadimon — as authorities for specific alchemical operations. De Jong demonstrated that Maier brought the meaning of the Turba into connection with the Atalanta Fugiens as a whole, using it as a cosmological and alchemical foundation even for emblems whose mottos derived from other sources.

The Rosarium Philosophorum (Rose Garden of the Philosophers) served a different but equally important function. Where the Turba provided cosmological authority, the Rosarium provided structural precedent. Forshaw later confirmed what De Jong's analysis implied: the Rosarium's combination of motto, image, and text was the most likely model for the tripartite emblem format that Maier adopted. De Jong traced numerous mottos and discourse arguments to the Rosarium, and she showed that it served as the mediating text through which Maier accessed biblical wisdom literature and the Aurora Consurgens. The geometric circle-square-triangle formula of Emblem XXI, the sapiential framework of Emblems XXVI and XXVII, and the washing imagery of Emblem XI all flow through the Rosarium into Maier's work.

The Tabula Smaragdina — the Emerald Tablet attributed to the legendary Hermes Trismegistus — provides the doctrinal foundation. Maier deliberately chose this text for the opening of his book: the mottos of both Emblem I and Emblem II derive directly from it. As De Jong observed, the Tabula was one of the most ancient, shortest, and most authoritative works in the history of alchemy, and Maier's decision to begin with it signaled his allegiance to the Hermetic tradition and its principle that earthly processes mirror celestial ones. The famous phrase 'the wind carried it in its belly' became Maier's gateway into the entire work.

Beyond these three pillars, De Jong identified a constellation of secondary sources that Maier wove into his discourses. Senior Zadith's Tabula Chimica supplied the winged-and-wingless bird imagery of Emblem VII. The Pseudo-Aristotelian Tractatulus de Practica Lapidis Philosophici provided mottos for Emblems IV, V, and VI. The anonymous Clangor Buccinae contributed to Emblems VI, XIII, and XV. The Allegoria Merlini fed the king-and-cure narrative of Emblem XLVIII. Arnoldus of Villanova, Raimundus Lullius, George Riplaeus, and Bernhardus Trevisanus each supplied mottos or discourse material for individual emblems. And Ovid's Metamorphoses provided the classical mythological frame — most obviously the Atalanta-Hippomenes narrative of the frontispiece (drawn from Book X, lines 560-704), but also material for Emblems XLI and XLIX.

How Maier Used His Sources

De Jong's analysis revealed Maier not as an original theorist but as a learned compiler and re-interpreter. His genius lay not in inventing new alchemical doctrine but in selecting, arranging, and recontextualizing material from a centuries-old tradition. As De Jong demonstrated, Maier's degree of dependence on his sources 'astonished' her, surpassing her initial expectations. Yet this dependence was not passive copying. Maier selected mottos from disparate sources and wove them into discourses that connected one emblem's meaning to others, creating a network of cross-references that gave the Atalanta Fugiens its distinctive coherence.

The method of weaving was particularly evident in the discourses. A single two-page discourse might cite the Turba for cosmological authority, the Rosarium for alchemical procedure, and Ovid or Hesiod for mythological illustration — all in service of elucidating the emblem's motto. De Jong showed that Maier approached the mythological emblems by borrowing mottos from classical non-alchemical sources (Hesiod for Emblem XII, Strabo for XXIII, Diodorus Siculus for XLIV, Ovid for XLIX) but then grounding his explanations in the Turba and other alchemical authorities. The classical myths were surface; the alchemical tradition was structure.

De Jong also identified a deliberate architectural plan in Maier's arrangement. The Atalanta Fugiens does not narrate a fixed sequence of laboratory operations from prima materia to Philosopher's Stone. Instead, Maier stressed the alchemical and religious ideas of his emblems at three salient points: beginning, middle, and end. The first two emblems quote the Tabula Smaragdina, establishing the Hermetic cosmological framework. The central emblems (XXVI and XXVII) draw on Old Testament sources — Ecclesiasticus, Proverbs, the Song of Songs — accessed partly through the Rosarium Philosophorum, establishing a sapiential and theological center. The final emblem (L) returns to the Turba Philosophorum, closing the circle with the Arabic-Latin alchemical tradition that pervades the entire work. This tripartite structure — Hermetic opening, Biblical center, Turba closing — was one of De Jong's most important discoveries about the book's design.

Maier's reliance on printed anthologies also explains a pattern De Jong observed: the same source tradition could provide mottos for emblems with very different subject matter. The Turba speaks about the philosophical egg in one emblem and the union of woman and serpent in another; the Rosarium provides both the geometric formula of Emblem XXI and the washing imagery of Emblem XI. This is because these compilations were themselves vast and heterogeneous, and Maier quarried them for different purposes at different points in his sequence. The unity of the Atalanta Fugiens lies not in a single narrative thread but in the web of cross-references that Maier spun from his sources.

The Multi-Register Model

Perhaps De Jong's most consequential insight for subsequent scholarship was her demonstration that alchemical terms in the Atalanta Fugiens operate across multiple registers simultaneously. She described Maier's emblems as having a 'polyvalent character, in which alchemical and religious ideas are mixed and the idea of the one field is expressed in an allegorical pun in the other field.' This was not vagueness or confusion on Maier's part; it was the fundamental principle of alchemical communication. When Maier writes about fire, he may simultaneously mean the wood-fire of the alchemist's furnace, the warmth of natural decomposition, the active principle in Nature, and the divine substance from which God created the angels — all attested meanings within the Turba alone.

De Jong showed this polyvalence at work throughout the book. In the commentary on Emblem I, for instance, Maier maps the 'Son of Philosophy' across four distinct domains: in chemistry, it is sulphur carried in mercury; in mathematics, it is the root of the cube; in music, it is the fifth interval; in astronomy, it is the solar center of the planetary system. This fourfold mapping — later recognized by Forshaw as corresponding to the four disciplines of the medieval quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy) — is not an isolated occurrence but a structural principle. The colour symbolism (black, white, red) that recurs across Emblems VI, IX, XI, XXII, XXXII, and XLI carries simultaneous chemical, spiritual, and cosmological meanings. The washing of Laton in Emblem XI is at once a metallurgical operation, a purification of the soul, and a recapitulation of cosmic processes. De Jong's recognition that these registers operate in parallel, not in sequence, transformed the reading of alchemical imagery from a puzzle to be solved into a polyphonic text to be heard on all its levels at once.

The practical consequence of this insight is significant: it means that no single 'decoding' of an alchemical emblem can be correct to the exclusion of others. When De Jong writes that the putrefactio stage is characterized by a black colour, and that this initial stage of the Philosopher's Stone is identified with decay and dissolution, she is describing the chemical register. But the same blackness simultaneously signifies the soul's descent into darkness before illumination (the spiritual register) and the dominion of Saturn as the slowest, heaviest planet (the cosmological register). Maier's sources themselves operated in this polyvalent mode, and De Jong's achievement was to trace that polyvalence back through the textual tradition rather than imposing modern interpretive categories upon it.

What De Jong Did Not Cover

De Jong was forthright about the boundaries of her study. She noted in her preface that she had 'left out the treatment of the problems mainly art-historical, especially the question how intensively Merian was involved in the depiction of Maier's ideas.' The copper engravings by Matthaeus Merian the Elder are among the most celebrated images in alchemical publishing, yet De Jong deliberately limited her analysis to establishing textual parallels rather than conducting a full iconographic study of the plates. She also noted that the musical fugues, while clearly integral to Maier's design, lay 'more in the field of the musicologist.' Subsequent scholars — Joscelyn Godwin, Daniel Wescott, and Donna Bilak with Tara Nummedal — have taken up both of these omitted dimensions, with Wescott analyzing the modal structures of the fugues and Bilak producing the Furnace and Fugue digital edition that finally made the music performable and analyzable.

Later scholarship has also identified sources that De Jong missed. Peter Forshaw, in his 2012 lecture at the Embassy of the Free Mind, pointed to Horapollo's Hieroglyphica as a source for the visual vocabulary of Emblem XXVII (the man without feet outside the Rose Garden), connecting the pseudo-Egyptian hieroglyphic tradition to Maier's imagery. He also identified Marsilio Ficino's De Vita Libri Tres as a source for Emblem IX's apple-and-rejuvenation theme, and the Arabic Kitab al-Thalath Kalimat of Khalid ibn Yazid as a source for the gestation metaphor of Emblem I. Urszula Szulakowska, working from Adam McLean's observation, noted the connection between the Splendor Solis of Salomon Trismosin and certain visual motifs in the Atalanta Fugiens that De Jong had not explored. These additions do not diminish De Jong's achievement; they extend it. Each new source identification follows the method she established: tracing a specific element of Maier's work back to a specific textual or visual antecedent.

It is also worth noting what De Jong chose not to do with her findings. She did not attempt to read the Atalanta Fugiens as a Jungian text, a Rosicrucian manifesto, or a practical laboratory manual. She recognized that Maier stood at the intersection of theology and science, and that his work tried to synthesize old alchemical traditions with a critical, experimental attitude. But she let the sources speak rather than subordinating them to a single interpretive framework. This restraint has given her work a durability that more theoretically ambitious readings have not always achieved.

De Jong's Legacy

More than five decades after its publication, De Jong's monograph remains the foundational study of the Atalanta Fugiens. Sarah Lang, reviewing the Furnace and Fugue digital edition for RIDE in 2022, noted that De Jong's 1969 study remains 'the only substantive scholarly examination' of Maier's text. Every subsequent study of the Atalanta Fugiens — by Tilton, Forshaw, Szulakowska, Godwin, Bilak, or Nummedal — builds on the source identifications she established. When Forshaw identifies new sources De Jong missed, he is extending her method. When Tilton situates Maier within the prisca sapientia tradition, he relies on the textual connections she documented. When Bilak and Nummedal build a digital edition that makes the music playable and the text searchable, the scholarly apparatus they annotate is fundamentally the apparatus De Jong constructed.

This site, AtalantaClaudiens, is itself a testament to De Jong's legacy. The source authorities it catalogs, the emblem-by-emblem commentary it presents, and the cross-references it traces between texts, scholars, and alchemical traditions all flow from the work she began in the 1960s at Utrecht. Her monograph demonstrated that the Atalanta Fugiens was not an eccentric curiosity but a carefully constructed synthesis of the entire Western alchemical tradition, assembled by a learned physician who believed that Hermetic wisdom, classical mythology, and experimental chemistry were three expressions of a single truth. To read any emblem of the Atalanta Fugiens with understanding is to read it through the lens De Jong ground.