Liber Azoth

I. Basic information

Printing History, Manuscripts. First published by Huser in 1590. No manuscripts known. Huser published the Liber Azoth “ex manuscriptis aliorum” (“from manuscripts of other people,” i.e. neither Paracelsus nor Johannes Montanus). There are no further editions of this text in the 16th to 18th century apart from re-editions or translations of Huser’s edition.

Editions. Edited by Huser, 10 (1590): Appendix, 3–66. Edited by Sudhoff in Paracelsus, Sämtliche Werke, I/14: 547–595.

Relationship between different versions. Only one known version.

Structure, genre/form, perspective, style.

Relationship to other texts.

Authenticity, authorship. Sudhoff did not even comment on the authenticity of the text, he included it in his Sämtliche Werke “only not to withhold anything from the reader of this present edition that Huser considered authentic in 1590/91.”

Time of writing. Probably written in the 1580s.

II. Sources

Manuscripts: no manuscripts known

First printed: not printed before Huser (1590).

III. Bibliography

Essential bibliography: Sudhoff, Bibliographia Paracelsica, 406–407; Sudhoff, “Vorwort,” in Paracelsus, Sämtliche Werke, I/14: XXXII–XXXIII; CP 3: 1105–1106.

Further bibliographical references:

Will-Erich Peuckert, “Paracelsische Zauberei,” Nova Acta Paracelsica, 8 (1957), 71–94, on 76.

Peuckert, Gabalia (1967), 131, 463–464.

Peuckert, Das Rosenkreutz (1973), 30, 124, 325.

Pagel, “The Paracelsian Elias Artista,” 8.

Carlos Gilly, “Der Paracelsus-Einblattdruck des Matthis Quad von 1606. Kritische Überlegungen über die sogenannten Rosenkreuzer-Bildnisse des Paracelsus,” in Gilly, Paracelsus in der BPH (1993), 13–27, on 14, 16, 17.

Goldammer, Der göttliche Magier (1991), 87, 106.

Ute Frietsch, Häresie und Wissenschaft. Eine Genealogie der paracelsischen Alchemie (Paderborn, 2013), 355–369.

Didier Kahn, “Quintessence and the Prolongation of Life in the Works of Paracelsus,” Micrologus, 26 (2018), 183–225, on 218.