England & the Rhineland, 16th–17th c.

Hermetic Diagrams & Scrolls

Cosmic monochords, self-devouring dragons, and a scroll that ends in confessed failure.

Beyond the picture-cycles, alchemical and Hermetic thought produced diagrams that mapped the whole cosmos onto a single tuned string, and scrolls — the Ripley Scroll survives in over twenty copies — that ran the Great Work out as one continuous roll of parchment. This collection gathers Robert Fludd’s cosmological engravings, the Twelve Keys attributed to Basilius Valentinus, and three separately held copies of the Ripley Scroll, one of which ends, unusually, with its narrator admitting he wasted his time entirely.