A horizontal woodcut ornament with a central floral motif flanked by scrolling vines and leaves.

Editor’s Preface.

Heinrich Khunrath, who in his writings calls himself Doctor of both medicines and lover of divine wisdom, but who is counted by others among the Leipzig professors, as G. Arnold found in a chemical manuscript (see his History of Churches and Heretics), lived around the year 1575, thus around the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century. He was, says Fictuld in his Probierstein Touchstone, a highly learned and God-fearing man, who had great gifts and insights into theology, theosophy, and hermetic philosophy, such that already in the 23rd year of his age he was devoted to alchemy, and as he recounts of himself in the preface of his Confession and elsewhere, he had reached his end goal, namely the great secret of the Universal. He has, Fictuld continues, written so clearly about alchemy that it would not have been possible more clearly-