Tradition

Image 1: Maier's Symbola (1617). In order to order to defend alchemy against 'vicious and specious arguments', to establish its antiquity, and to outline a core canon of authorities, Michael Maier collected these Symbola aureae mensae duodecim nationum(Symbols of the Golden Table of Twelve Nations), that is to say, testimonies from twelve different alchemists from twelve different countries dating (alledgedly) from remotest antiquity to his own day: Hermes Trismegistus the Egyptian, Mary the Jewess, Democritus the Greek, Morienus the Roman, Avicenna the Arab, Albertus Magnus the German, Arnold of Villanova the Frenchman (he was actually from Valencia, in modern Spain), Thomas Aquinas the Italian, Raymond Lull he Spaniard, Roger Bacon the Englishman, Melchior Cibinensis the Hungarian, and an 'Anonymous Sarmatian' (Michel Sendivogious of Poland). 

A copy of this full book is available on archive.org. High quality reproductions and commentary can be found in Stanislaus Klossowski de Rola, The Golden Game: Alchemical Engravings of the Seventeenth Century (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988), pp. 105-16.

Image 2: Mylius's seals of the philosophers (1618). The following year, Johann Daniel Mylius upstaged Maier by publishing a collection of 160 emblems representing an expanded canon of alchemical authorities (only one page of which is reproduced here). Each emblem consists of a motto illustrated by hermetic symbolism engraved by Matthaeus Merian. Mylius likewise begins his list with Hermes Trismegistus and ends it with himself, First published in the Basilica philosophica within his 3,000 page Opus medico-chymicum of 1618, it was reprinted in the Dyas chimica tripartita of 1625 and by Daniel Stolcius in his Hortulus hermeticus of 1627.

The full series is reproduced with commentary in Klossowski de Rola, The Golden Game, pp. 133, 140-55.

Commentary. Howard Hotson (May 2019)