Peter J. Forshaw is Universitair Docent (Senior Lecturer) for History of Western Esotericism in the Early Modern Period at the Center for History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents (GHF), University of Amsterdam. He studied Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Indian Philosophy at SOAS, University of London (1982-86), then took an MA in Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, where he completed his doctorate on the interplay of alchemy, magic, and cabala in Heinrich Khunrath's Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae. He serves as editor-in-chief of Aries: The Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism, published by Brill.

Forshaw's primary contribution to Maier scholarship is his identification and analysis of "mytho-alchemy" as a distinct genre of alchemical writing. His essay "Michael Maier and Mythoalchemy," published in the Furnace and Fugue digital edition (University of Virginia Press, 2020), argues that the literary genre of hermetic mythology "worked on the premise that the myths of Egyptian, Greek, and Latin antiquity were repositories of alchemical secrets, coded narratives of natural philosophy." Forshaw traces this tradition from medieval Arabic and Latin precursors through to its flowering in Maier's emblematic oeuvre, identifying the Arcana Arcanissima (1614) — not the visually spectacular Atalanta Fugiens — as the foundational text of Maier's mytho-alchemical project.

In his Infinite Fire webinar for the Ritman Library (2012), Forshaw provides the most accessible scholarly introduction to the AF emblems available, walking through individual engravings while revealing structural features overlooked by other scholars. He demonstrates that Maier organizes each emblem's discourse around the four disciplines of the medieval quadrivium — arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy — systematically mapping every alchemical concept across all four mathematical sciences. He identifies sources not noted by De Jong, including Horapollo's Hieroglyphica as a model for Emblem XXVII's impossibility motif, Ficino's De Vita Libri Tres as a source for Emblem IX's rejuvenation imagery, and Khalid ibn Yazid's Kitab al-Thalath Kalimat for the gestation metaphor in Emblem I.

Forshaw is emphatic on two points that distinguish his reading from both spiritual-alchemical and Jungian interpretations. First, Maier is "not Paracelsian" — the AF works exclusively with the Mercury-Sulphur dyad without the Tria Prima. Second, Maier preferred the term "chemical" over "alchemical" and explicitly described his work as natural rather than supernatural. At the same time, Forshaw acknowledges "parallel processing" in Maier's thought — an awareness that alchemical purification mirrors the sublimation of the gross human being toward refined moral and spiritual states — but insists that the primary register of the text is laboratory chemistry and natural philosophy.

For this site, Forshaw's mytho-alchemical framework provides the interpretive context for every emblem that draws on Greek or Egyptian mythology. His quadrivium analysis reveals an organizational principle that enriches the discourse summaries, and his identification of overlooked sources (Horapollo, Ficino, Khalid ibn Yazid) adds precision to the source analysis on several emblem pages. His published article "Laboratorium, Auditorium, Oratorium" is the key reference for the alchemical-musical dimension of the work.