Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

The Counselor of the Golden Age In the early seventeenth century, as the Holy Roman Empire was sliding toward the devastation of the Thirty Years' War, a prominent German jurist and counselor quietly pursued the study of the Hermetic mysteries. Johann Grasshoff (who published under the pseudonyms Johannes de Monte-Snyder and Hasso Herort) was born in Pomerania and served as a legal advisor to the city of Stralsund and the Elector of Cologne. While his public life was dedicated to the administration of law and state affairs, Grasshoff's historical legacy belongs entirely to the Western alchemical tradition, where he is remembered as one of the most brilliant and poetic authors of the late German Renaissance. Grasshoff's seminal treatise, Aureum Seculum Redivivum ( The Golden Age Restored ), published anonymously in Frankfurt in 1621 (and later included in the famous compilation Musaeum Hermeticum ), represents a high point of speculative and mystical alchemy. The text i...