Jacob Boehme’s Spiritual Alchemy of Rebirth

Abstract This chapter presents the first fully developed spiritual alchemy as encountered in the later works of Jacob Boehme, including his Signatura rerum of 1622. In his earliest work of 1612, Aurora, alchemy did not yet play a role, and rebirth had not yet acquired its distinct shape. That changed as Boehme gained access to networks of correspondents and supporters who introduced him to alchemical terminology and the notion of rebirth as developed by Valentin Weigel and others. In works composed between 1619 and 1622, Boehme frequently used alchemical language to describe rebirth, thus formulating the spiritual alchemy of rebirth. For him the ubiquitous body of Christ was the philosophers’ stone and the subtle body of the new birth at once.