Look at Khunrath's most famous plate and you cannot tell where the church ends and the workshop begins. On one side a man kneels at a draped prayer-tent, hands open before a tabernacle; on the other, across the same tiled floor, a furnace breathes and the glassware waits. Over the room he set two words that refuse to be separated: ora et labora, pray and work. He meant it as one act, not two. The alchemist's bench and the kneeling-bench are the same length of floor, and the knowledge he was after could be reached from neither end alone. So which end were you planning to start from? This is the book where that laboratory-oratory was first engraved and made to stand still long enough to be read.

Before the book is opened, let the terms be plain.

This room keeps no till. I will never sell this edition, gate it, or wrap it in advertisement: it is set down for one reason only, the dissemination of knowledge and the plain love of the game.

Khunrath died in 1605; the expanded Amphitheatrum was printed at Hanau in 1609, public domain by some four centuries. This is a small edition, one person at one bench: an independent reading of the engraving programme, following earlier English work including Patricia Tahil’s translations of the plate inscriptions. Every Latin, German, Hebrew and Greek inscription on the nine great copperplates and the engraved title-page I transcribed verbatim from a plate-complete public-domain copy. Original orthography kept, abbreviations expanded, unreadable spans marked and never guessed. Then I gave each one a literal English translation with a sober scholarly gloss. That work is mine, and I give it away. Read it freely, carry it wherever you like, only never sell it.

Provenance & Thanks

The work: Heinrich Khunrath (1560–1605), Amphitheatrum Sapientiæ Æternæ, Solius Veræ, Christiano-Kabalisticum, Divino-Magicum, nec non Physico-Chymicum, Tertriunum, Catholicon: the theosophic amphitheatre, a Three-in-One of Kabbalah, magic and alchemy. The posthumous expanded edition is the one that carries the nine great double-page copperplate engravings.
The printing: Hanau, 1609: the expanded posthumous edition, with the nine copperplates and the engraved architectural title-page.
The digitisations: The plate-complete exemplar, the nine copperplates plus the engraved title-page/frontispiece, is the Science History Institute Digital Collections copy (work dodh36q), Public Domain Mark 1.0, at full fidelity. The prefatory Isagoge was collated against the Internet Archive 1609 Latin (bub_gb_S-dWEySknaAC), also Public Domain Mark 1.0. This edition rests on that settled ground, and I thank every hand that kept the door open.
This edition: Verbatim transcription of every plate inscription (Latin/German/Hebrew/Greek; orthography kept; abbreviations expanded; uncertainties flagged, never invented), a literal English translation, a per-plate scholarly gloss, and the prefatory Ladder of Seven Grades in faithful translation. The 337-page citation-labyrinth prose is, as in Khunrath scholarship itself, treated as apparatus around the plates and is not wholesale-translated: the plates are the work. Transcription, translation, gloss and interactive setting are my contributions, given freely. This is an edition of the plates and selected prefatory matter, not a complete translation of the book.

To the librarians, scanner-operators, and archivists whose patient, unglamorous work makes a 1609 engraving openable on a screen in the present — this edition bows. You are the reason any of this is possible. Thank you.

Open the Amphitheatre ~6 MB · self-contained · the nine plates + the Ladder of Seven Grades

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