A closer look
If you wanted spiritual enlightenment in the 17th century, you had to decode Michael Maier’s bizarre picture books first. As a prime defender of the mysterious Rosicrucian Brotherhood, Maier published the 'Atalanta Fugiens', an early multimedia project combining fifty cryptic engravings with musical fugues and cryptic poems. By meditating on absurd images—like a toad sucking the juices out of a woman, or a man slashing a golden egg with a sword—initiates would allegedly trigger a psychological alchemy, violently transmuting their coarse leaden minds into philosophical gold.
