Nicolas Flamel

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Nicolas Flamel was a Parisian manuscript-seller and scrivener, born around 1330 and dead by 1418, who became — long after his lifetime — the most famous of all European alchemists, credited with making the philosophers’ stone and turning base metal into gold. Almost everything that makes his name is legend, and the legend post-dates the man by some two hundred years. The figure attested in the notarial record and the figure who walks through the alchemical tracts are joined by nothing but a name and a city; the second was assembled, generations after the first was buried, out of the materials of a later century. Few reputations in the Western esoteric tradition can be watched forming so precisely in the documentary gap between a death and its retelling.

The man in the dry record

The historical Flamel is well attested, and what attests him has nothing arcane about it. He kept a copyist’s stall in the parish of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, on the right bank near the church that gave the quarter its name, and worked as a sworn public writer — an écrivain juré, one of the licensed scribes who drafted contracts, copied manuscripts, and traded in books in a city where the University of Paris had made literacy into a working trade. The trade was lucrative in its quiet way. A sworn writer stood at the junction of two paying streams — the legal one, where he drafted and authenticated the instruments of property and inheritance, and the bookish one, where he copied, sold, repaired, and dealt in the manuscripts a literate city consumed faster than its scriptoria could produce them. Parchment was costly, a finished codex more so, and the man who controlled the making and the selling of books in a busy parish was well placed to turn margin into rents and rents into stone. Around 1368 he married Perenelle, a widow who brought property of her own into the household — a second fortune folded into the first. Together the couple grew conspicuously wealthy, and conspicuously generous. They paid for chapels and for beds in hospitals; they endowed altars and gave to churches across Paris; they commissioned carved doorways and façades, several of them bearing the couple’s names, their initials, and the pious devices of late-medieval Parisian piety.

The buildings are not entirely gone. The house Flamel raised in 1407 on the rue de Montmorency still stands — the oldest stone house surviving in Paris — its façade carved with musician angels and lettered with an inscription in old French that bound its poor lodgers to say prayers for the dead in exchange for their free rooms. The sculpted arch he commissioned for the charnel-house of the Cimetière des Saints-Innocents, dense with religious figures, became the very object the later legend would seize upon. His will survives in the French national archives, an unglamorous instrument of bequests and pious foundations. So does the tombstone he had cut for himself — carved with Christ flanked by Saints Peter and Paul, his own name beneath — which passed from Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie into the collection of the Musée de Cluny, the museum of the French Middle Ages, where it can still be read.

Across the whole of this record there is not one word about alchemy. No contract, no donation, no clause of the will, no line of the tombstone, names the art or hints at transmutation. The fortune the documents record is exactly the fortune a successful trade in manuscripts and Paris real estate would produce in a literate, cash-poor, parchment-hungry city. Flamel the scrivener was rich because books and ground rents made men rich, and devout because devotion was how the medieval rich disposed of their wealth. The dry record gives a prosperous guildsman with a charitable habit and a taste for stone. It gives no adept.

It is worth dwelling on the carvings, because they are where the two Flamels later meet. The arch at the Saints-Innocents was, by the conventions of its moment, an entirely legible object: a charnel-house monument crowded with the standard figures of late-medieval death-piety — Christ, apostles, the resurrection of the dead, the donors kneeling with their devices. Such programs were commissioned in their hundreds across fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe; a rich man bought himself a sculpted reminder of judgment and a perpetual prompt to the living to pray for his soul. The figures on Flamel’s arch said what such figures always said. The same is true of the rue de Montmorency house, whose inscription is a plain bargain — free lodging for the poor, in exchange for daily prayers for the dead — set in stone beneath ranks of musician angels. Read in their century, these are works of conventional devotion, not the slightest bit strange. Their strangeness was supplied later, by readers who already knew, or wished to know, that the man who paid for them had made gold.

The book that made the alchemist

The alchemical Flamel is a creation of the early seventeenth century, and his birth can be dated almost as precisely as the scrivener’s death. In 1612 a French volume, Le Livre des figures hiéroglyphiques, appeared in print — folded into a collection titled Trois traitez de la philosophie naturelle, issued at Paris by Pierre Arnauld, sieur de la Chevallerie. It was offered as Flamel’s own account, written in the first person, of how a poor Paris scribe had become master of the greatest secret in nature.

The story it tells is a small masterpiece of alchemical narrative. Flamel, it runs, came into possession of a strange gilded book — the Book of Abraham the Jew, a work of leaves not of paper but of bark, covered with figures he could not read and a sequence of painted images promising the transmutation of metals. For years he labored over it in vain. At last, carrying copies of the figures, he made a pilgrimage to Spain, to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela, and there fell in with a learned Jewish convert — the legend later names him Maître Canches — who recognized the images at once and began to unlock them, only to die on the journey back. Returning to Paris with the key, Flamel and Perenelle accomplished the Great Work, achieved the philosophers’ stone, and projected it upon mercury to make first silver and then gold. The fortune, the chapels, the carved arch in the cemetery: all of it, the book explains, is the visible proceeds of a hidden success. The figures Flamel had set into the Innocents arch were not piety but cipher — an encrypted record of the operation, painted in plain sight.

The book is a fabrication. Its language, its sources, and its conceptual frame all belong to its own century rather than to Flamel’s. It speaks the vocabulary of post-Paracelsian chymistry and seventeenth-century Hermetic philosophy, not that of a fourteenth-century guild scribe; its theory of the stone, its reading of the cemetery carvings, its very idea that a tradesman’s charitable buildings might be decoded as a transmutation diary, are the preoccupations of the era that Rosicrucian manifestos and the new alchemical print culture had just made current. The legendary “Abraham the Jew” who supplies the secret is a fiction of the tale, not a historical author and not the biblical patriarch whose name it borrows. The framing — ancient wisdom hidden in a mysterious foreign manuscript, recovered through pilgrimage and a dying sage — is a stock device of the genre, deployed here with unusual skill. What gives the tale its hold is not the secret itself, which is told in the standard veiled language of the art and reveals nothing, but the architecture of its proof: a named man, a named city, a named cemetery, datable buildings one could go and stand before. The fiction grounds itself in fact at every turn, and that is its method. The Innocents arch was real; the conversion of its piety into cipher is the single imaginative act on which everything else rests.

Nor did the manufacture stop with one book. Further alchemical tracts were fathered on Flamel in the same fashion: a verse Sommaire philosophique, which reached English readers as “Flamel’s Summary of Philosophy”; the Désir désiré or Bréviaire; the Livre des laveures. By 1624 an English version of the Figures had appeared in London, Nicholas Flammel, His Exposition of the Hieroglyphicall Figures, rendered “out of the French and Latine copies” by one Eirenaeus Orandus — a name that is itself a Latin motto in disguise. The corpus accreted across the great printing-house compendia that fixed the alchemical canon: Flamel takes his place among the seventy-odd authors printed in full in Jean-Jacques Manget’s Bibliotheca Chemica Curiosa (Geneva, 1702), the largest Latin alchemical anthology ever assembled, beside the genuinely ancient and the wholly invented without distinction. Modern scholarship reads the whole Flamel corpus as posthumous attribution. Nigel Wilkins, working from the will, the surviving façades, and the donation records, reconstructed in 1993 the ordinary man beneath the adept and traced the seam where the legend was stitched onto him; the case is a textbook instance of the alchemical pseudepigraphon, the false ascription that Robert Halleux had earlier shown to be one of the constitutive habits of the Latin tradition itself, where treatises routinely traveled under the names of Geber, Arnaldus, Lull, and Hermes centuries after those names could have signed anything.

Why the legend was useful

The fit was a useful one, and that usefulness explains the choice of Flamel over any other dead Parisian. Alchemy preferred its authorities veiled and ancient, its secrets handed down rather than discovered, its adepts anonymous or pseudonymous; but the art also needed, against the standing charge that the work could not actually be done, at least one figure of whom it could be said that he had plainly done it. A real, datable, documented man — and a rich one, whose wealth and whose buildings stood in the streets of Paris for anyone to see — made an ideal vessel for that claim. The proof was public and apparently incontrovertible: the houses were there, the carvings were there, the fortune was a matter of record. One had only to read them backwards. The charitable foundations a pious bookseller had paid for out of trade and rents were re-described as the overflow of a man who could make gold at will, and the religious figures on the Innocents arch became an alchemist’s deliberate cipher. Nothing had to be invented except the cause; the effects were genuine, and that borrowed genuineness is what gave the legend its peculiar force.

From the same impulse grew the strand that would prove most durable. If Flamel had truly held the stone, he had held also its second gift — for the philosophers’ stone was held to confer not only gold but the prolongation of life, even bodily immortality. His and Perenelle’s deaths were therefore quietly doubted. A persistent tradition held that the couple had faked their ends, staged their funerals, and slipped away to live on elsewhere; the disturbed or empty tomb was cited as evidence rather than refutation. The traveler Paul Lucas, recounting his early-eighteenth-century journeys through the Levant, reported a philosopher in Asia Minor who assured him that Flamel was no fable and no corpse but a living man, encountered in the East only a few years before. The sightings multiplied down the centuries, settling Flamel among that small company of figures the occult imagination refuses to let die. By the time the Rosicrucian current and the natural-philosophical fascination with Hermetic wisdom had run their course through the seventeenth century — the age of Robert Fludd and of Elias Ashmole, who gathered the English alchemical inheritance into print — Flamel stood, in the popular mind, for the magus who had succeeded where the rest only theorized: the plain man of the Middle Ages who had quietly cracked the secret of the world.

The texts and the scholarship

The Flamel corpus survives in a layered bibliography that can be read almost as a core-sample of how an alchemical reputation is deposited. At its base is the 1612 editio princeps of the legend, Le Livre des figures hiéroglyphiques, printed within Pierre Arnauld de la Chevallerie’s Trois traitez de la philosophie naturelle (Paris, 1612). The first English carrier followed in 1624, Nicholas Flammel, His Exposition of the Hieroglyphicall Figures, “done into English out of the French and Latine copies” by Eirenaeus Orandus (London: T.S. for Thomas Walkley) — a digitized copy of which is held by the Stiftung der Werke von C.G. Jung. The Latin tradition gathered the corpus into the great printing-house compendia that fixed the Western canon: Flamel appears among the authors printed in full in Jean-Jacques Manget’s Bibliotheca Chemica Curiosa (Geneva, 1702), the largest Latin alchemical anthology ever assembled, and the verse Sommaire philosophique reaches English print as “Flamel’s Summary of Philosophy” in the Aurifontina Chymica (London, 1680). The Hermetic-museum tradition that carried such texts into modern English is hosted in A. E. Waite’s Hermetic Museum (1893) and his edition of the Turba Philosophorum (1896), the standard public-domain doorways into the Latin compendia.

The modern critical scholarship has worked steadily in the opposite direction, prying the man back out of the corpus. The decisive study is Nigel Wilkins, Nicolas Flamel: des livres et de l’or (Paris: Imago, 1993), a medievalist’s reconstruction built directly on the surviving will in the French national archives, the donation records, and the carved rue de Montmorency façade; Wilkins restores the copyist-bookseller and shows the alchemical biography to be a seventeenth-century overlay. Claude Gagnon’s Nicolas Flamel sous investigation, with its annotated edition of the Livre des figures hiéroglyphiques (BnF), supplies the close textual case against the book’s authenticity. The larger frame is set by the general historiography of the Latin alchemical tradition — Robert Halleux’s Les Textes alchimiques (1979) on the pseudepigraphic habit, and Lawrence Principe’s The Secrets of Alchemy (2013) on the early-modern reinvention of the medieval inheritance — within which the Flamel attribution is one well-lit specimen of a pervasive practice.

The mechanism in the textual record

What makes Flamel valuable to the study of the tradition is precisely the cleanness of the case. The pseudepigraphic mechanism — the attaching of a later text to an earlier name to borrow its authority — is everywhere in alchemy, but it is usually invisible, because the “earlier name” is itself legendary: no one can measure the distance between the historical Geber and the Latin Summa that bears his name, because the historical Geber is already a haze. With Flamel the two ends are both fixed. The man is documented to the year, in instruments that have no esoteric content whatever; the legend is documented to the year, in a book whose century betrays it. The seam between them is open to inspection. One can read the will and read the Figures and see exactly what was added, and when, and to what end.

This is why the scholarship insists on holding the two apart without dissolving either. The latin-medieval-alchemy of Flamel’s actual lifetime — translated from Arabic sources, organized around the promise of metallic transmutation, carried in the manuscripts a Paris scribe might well have copied for a paying customer — was a living art he could in principle have touched. But touching it as a copyist and practicing it as an adept are different acts, and only the second was ever claimed for him, and only after he could no longer answer. The seventeenth century did not lie about Flamel so much as complete him, filling the silence of a prosperous, devout, undocumented inner life with the one explanation that made his stone façades legible as something more than charity.

The man left books and buildings; the legend left the gold.

→ In the library: Waite — The Hermetic Museum (1893) · Waite — The Turba Philosophorum (1896)

→ Related: Hermes Trismegistus · Middle Ages · Alchemy · Latin Medieval Alchemy · Renaissance Natural Philosophy · Robert Fludd · Elias Ashmole · Paracelsus · Rosicrucianism · Immortality · Occultism · Magic