Voarchadumia: Venetian alchemy and the letters of Enoch

Venice, 1530. From the presses of the city, then the European capital of the book, comes a volume with an enigmatic title: Voarchadumia contra alchimiam. The author is Giovanni Agostino Pantheo, a Venetian priest expert in metals. The book, which presents itself as a critique of vulgar alchemy in the name of a higher art, contains among other things an alphabet the author attributes to the patriarch Enoch. Half a century later, a copy of that work would end up in the library of John Dee.

An art against alchemy

The term Voarchadumia is obscure, and Pantheo himself offers a learned explanation that mixes Chaldean and Hebrew words. By this name he meant an art of purifying and perfecting metals, gold in particular, distinct from the alchemy of charlatans who promised miraculous transformations. The book combines practical knowledge of metallurgy, references to Jewish Kabbalah and speculation on the symbolic value of numbers and letters.

In this sense the Voarchadumia is typical of its time. In the early sixteenth century, following Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Johannes Reuchlin, many Christian scholars took an interest in Kabbalah, convinced that it contained very ancient truths compatible with Christianity. Pantheo applies this interest to the world of metals, seeking in Hebrew letters a key to understanding matter.

The alphabet of Enoch

Among the pages of the work appears an alphabet that Pantheo calls Enochian, that is, attributed to Enoch, the biblical patriarch who according to Genesis walked with God and did not die, but was taken up into heaven. Around this figure a rich apocryphal tradition had grown, attributing to him knowledge of heavenly secrets and the invention of writing. Giving his name to an alphabet meant presenting it as the oldest and most sacred.

The letters of the Voarchadumia do not coincide with those that Dee and Edward Kelley would receive in the 1580s. They are two different systems. It is known, however, that Dee owned and annotated the Voarchadumia, and some scholars have suggested that reading Pantheo contributed to his interest in a language and a script linked to Enoch.

A bridge between two worlds

The Voarchadumia shows how close the relations were, in the Renaissance, between fields we now consider separate. A treatise on metals could contain Kabbalistic reflections, a sacred alphabet and theological considerations. For readers of the time there was no contradiction: nature was a book written by God, and the letters of his writing could be sought as much in sacred texts as in furnaces.

The book enjoyed a certain circulation and was reprinted in Paris during the sixteenth century. Today it is known mainly to historians of alchemy and scholars of John Dee, but it remains an interesting witness to Renaissance Venice, a city of printers, merchants and seekers of secrets. Its plates, with Hebrew letters and exotic characters set beside numerical diagrams, are a small showcase of Venetian printing of the period.

In the story of esoteric alphabets, the Voarchadumia holds a special place. It precedes Dee's Enochian by half a century and shows that the dream of a script of the beginnings, linked to the patriarch who walked with God, was already alive in the workshops and libraries of early sixteenth-century Italy. It is a link in a chain that binds alchemy, Christian Kabbalah and the search for the perfect language.