The Chymical Wedding

History

The Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz was printed at Strasbourg in 1616 for Lazarus Zetzner’s heirs, without an author’s name; Ezechiel Foxcroft’s English, The Hermetick Romance, followed in London in 1690. On the third day a virgin gives her name as a riddle in numbers, and the margin of both prints marks it “Aenigma de Nomine”. In the Getty copy of 1616 a reader wrote ALCHIMIA under the printed note. On the fifth day the narrator copies the copper letters of a door below the castle, and his page-boy then tells him what they say.

How it works

The virgin’s conditions are taken one by one from the German and the English: eight letters adding to 55, the third a third of the fifth, a root that exceeds the third by the first, and the rest. One clause can be read two ways: whether the last and the first together, or the first alone, make the sixth with the second. Every numbering of eight letters from 1 to 26 is searched in both readings, and each solution spelled in alphabets of 23, 24 and 26 letters. The door’s signs are traced from page 95 and read by the key the page-boy’s sentence on page 96 gives, word for word.

How it was checked

The tests confirm that every condition’s words stand in both prints, and that the search finds one numbering in the reading the plural verb supports: 1 11 3 8 9 13 9 1, adding to 55, which spells ALCHINIA in 23 or 24 letters and AKCHIMIA in 26. With the first alone nothing meets every condition; without the sum, ALCHIMIA in 26 letters does, adding to 56. Of the door’s 81 signs, every one is traced and keyed; of the page-boy’s 19 words, five part from the signs.

Limits

Letters lost in the gutter of the 1616 copy are read from the reprint of Regensburg, 1781, and marked. The period’s alphabets are assumed, I with J and U with V, or 23 letters without W. The door’s key is made from the page’s own sentence, so a sign that occurs once has only the reading that sentence gives it.