The Figures

Ramon Llull (Raymond Lull)

Ramon Llull (in older English usage, Raymond Lull; in Latin, Raimundus Lullus; in Spanish, Raimundo Lulio) was a philosopher, theologian and missionary, born in Majorca in 1232 (or perhaps 1233), who died in 1316 and wrote more than two hundred works in Catalan, Arabic and Latin (Priani, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). The sources disagree on where and when he died: according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in Majorca, after March 1316; according to the Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana, at sea, between Tunis and Majorca, in March of that year. Between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries, dozens of alchemical treatises also circulated under his name, and together with those attributed to Arnau de Vilanova they were one of the pillars of that tradition (Pereira 2004, p. 464; Gómez, according to Vives’s review, 2018). That second Llull never existed: the treatises were written after his death, and the historical Llull wrote against the transmutation of metals. This profile separates the two, with the primary sources in view, and shows where Hermes comes in: not in Llull’s work, but in that of the anonymous alchemist whom tradition confused with him.

What did Ramon Llull write about alchemy?

Llull knew about alchemy and returned to it several times, almost always to reject it. Michela Pereira, the historian who catalogued the alchemical corpus attributed to Llull, gathered the passages in a 2004 study (pp. 456-459), which is the source of the details in this section:

• In the Liber principiorum medicinae (Començaments de medicina) he maintains that the generation of metals, like that of plants and animals, depends on the motion of the heavens and cannot be reproduced by art. In Pereira’s transcription: “un metall no pots convertir en espècie d’altre metall [...] cor naturalmente generació de metall se fa per digestió en lo cor de la terra”: you cannot turn a metal into the species of another metal [...] because the generation of metal takes place naturally by digestion in the heart of the earth. The form that alchemy imposes on matter, he adds, “és en breu de temps corrompabla”: it decays in a short time (p. 457).
• In the Fèlix o Llibre de meravelles (Felix, or the Book of Wonders), the didactic novel he wrote in Paris between 1287 and 1289, chapters VI.33 and VI.36 return to the generation of metals and conclude that their transformation “no’s pot fer artificialment”, cannot be done by art (pp. 457-458). A moral example follows: the greedy alchemist who promises gold to a powerful man and has to flee when he cannot deliver. According to Arnau Vives’s review (2018) of Francesc J. Gómez’s study, the Fèlix also summarises an example about the frauds of Persian alchemists found in the Book of Unveiled Secrets of al-Jawbari.
• The fullest argument is in the Quaestiones per artem demonstrativam solubiles, in the last question of the section on the Elementative (pp. 458-459). Llull gives four reasons against. The first: just as plants and animals are not transformed by art, “nec alchymista potest transmutare aliam especiem metalli in aliam”, neither can the alchemist turn one species of metal into another. The fourth closes the question: “Ergo alchymia non est in rei veritate”, therefore alchemy does not exist in reality. The Latin is that of the Mainz edition (Opera, vol. IV, 1729), as Pereira quotes it.
• He returns to the alchemists with irony in the Arbre de ciència (Arbor scientiae) and in the chapter “De elementativa” of the Ars generalis ultima, and more neutrally in the Tractatus novus de astronomia; the subject appears from the Liber contemplationis to the Liber de novo modo demonstrandi of 1312 (p. 459).

In the sources consulted for this profile there is a single point of contact with a text bearing the name of Hermes, and it is a polemic. In the third of those reasons, Llull discusses the same examples (the grafting of plants and the spontaneous generation of insects in rotting matter) with which a Latin alchemical treatise, the Liber Hermetis, argued that art can equal or surpass nature. Llull replies that in those cases the craftsman works with nature, whereas the alchemist works against it: “in contrario autem est artificium Alchymistae” (Pereira 2004, p. 459). Pereira points out the shared examples; she does not say that Llull quoted that treatise. Those sources record no quotation of Hermes Trismegistus, of the Corpus Hermeticum or of the Asclepius in Llull’s authentic works. The Corpus, moreover, did not circulate in Latin until the translation by Marsilio Ficino (1463), almost a century and a half after Llull’s death.

What is the Testamentum? A treatise of 1332 that does not carry Llull’s name

The Testamentum is the first alchemical writing attributed to Llull, a long treatise in three books: Theorica, Practica and Liber mercuriorum. It carries two dates: 1332 in the colophon, which places its composition in London, and 1330 in chapter III.33; both its content and the alchemical works it cites broadly confirm them (Pereira 2004, pp. 460 and 462; critical edition by Pereira and Spaggiari, 1999). It was therefore completed sixteen years after Llull’s death, and its author dedicated it to King Edward III of England (Pereira 2004, p. 462).

That author remains unidentified. Pereira calls him the Magister Testamenti: someone with a scholastic and medical training of the kind taught at Montpellier, who uses Lullian-looking combinatory figures, similar to but not identical with those of the Ars (pp. 460-461). The decisive point is that the Testamentum does not attribute itself to Llull: its author makes no effort to hide who he is, though he does not name himself either, and he cites as his own other books that later tradition would also give to Llull (p. 467). There is a Catalan version from before or around 1350, which Pereira considers the work of the same author, as is the verse Cantilena that follows the colophon in all the manuscripts (p. 465). The central idea of the treatise is that alchemy, besides transforming metals, can produce a perfect body, the elixir or “greater stone”, capable of perfecting any matter onto which it is projected (pp. 460-461). It is the doctrine this site sums up in the Great Work.

Where does Hermes appear in the Llull story?

Hermes appears in the Testamentum, not in Llull’s own works: the documented link between this story and the Hermetic tradition runs through the treatise, not through Llull. Pereira counts the Emerald Tablet among the sources of the treatise, together with the De perfecto magisterio attributed to Aristotle and the Tabula chemica of Ibn Umayl, and notes that its author presented himself as a son of Hermes (Pereira 2004, pp. 461-462). The Latin text says so in so many words. In the Cologne printing of 1566 (the copy in the library of the University of Seville; see the table of printings) we have read four passages directly in the scan images, all from the Theorica; the translation is ours:

• Fol. 123v: “Hermes philosophorum, & Alchymistarum pater”, Hermes, father of the philosophers and of the alchemists, who, attentive to the works of nature, taught how to follow and imitate it (image n263).
• Fol. 127r: “Plures enim facti sunt filij Hermetis, & nos similiter”: for many have become sons of Hermes, and we likewise (image n270).
• Fol. 135v, chapter LXXIII (“Quòd medicina debet esse de subtili substantia”): “Ideo tibi dicit philosophus Hermes, quòd separes subtile à spisso, & purum ab impuro”, and so the philosopher Hermes tells you to separate the subtle from the dense and the pure from the impure. The first part of the sentence takes up the seventh clause of the Tablet (subtile a spisso); “purum ab impuro” is not in the Latin version we reproduce (image n287).
• Fol. 141v: “ratio scripta philosophicè per Hermetem, quòd sicut omnes res factæ fuerunt ex vna sola re [...] sic lapis noster natus est”, the reason written philosophically by Hermes: that just as all things were made from one single thing, so our stone was born. It is a paraphrase of the third clause (sicut omnes res fuerunt ab uno [...] sic omnes res natae fuerunt ab hac una re) (image n299).

This Hermes is the father of alchemy, the patron of the ars hermetica: two of the four passages paraphrase the Emerald Tablet, and none quotes the philosophical Greek dialogues of the Corpus Hermeticum, which did not circulate in Latin until 1463. It is the same shift of meaning that explains why the Musaeum Hermeticum of 1625 is an alchemical anthology without a single ancient Hermetic text. Who that Hermes was and how his authority was built is explained in the profile of Hermes Trismegistus.

How was the “alchemist Llull” born?

The “alchemist Llull” appears decades after his death, in the second half of the fourteenth century. If the Testamentum does not present itself as Llull’s work, why was it attributed to him? The first explicit, dated witness to Llull’s fame as an alchemist is from the 1370s and comes from a Catalan alchemist, Guillem Sedacer, who died in 1382 (Pereira 2004, pp. 467-468). In those same years the other great pillar of the corpus was written, the Liber de secretis naturae seu de quinta essentia. Its author, also anonymous, did want readers to believe that all those books, his own included, were by Llull: in the prologue and the epilogue he explains why Llull, who opposed alchemy in his authentic works, would have written an alchemical book (p. 468). The text depends closely on the De consideratione quintae essentiae of John of Rupescissa, written in 1351-1352 (pp. 468-469), and Francesc J. Gómez considers it the first deliberately pseudo-Lullian text, from the second half of the fourteenth century (according to Vives’s review, 2018). The mechanism is an old one: a name with authority lends credit to a new text, as happened with Balinas and with Hermes himself. The same mechanism later made Paracelsus a “German Hermes” and turned Nicolas Flamel, a Paris scrivener, into the alchemist of the philosopher’s stone.

From then on, the name did the work by itself. According to Pereira, the argument of that epilogue, together with the legend that Arnau de Vilanova had converted Llull to alchemy, weighed heavily in persuading the Lullists of the Renaissance, and even, in the eighteenth century, Ivo Salzinger (1669-1728), to accept the alchemical works as authentic (p. 468). The legend has a central episode, Llull’s journey to London, and it took shape late compared with the corpus itself (p. 462). One of its English versions is the “Testament of Cremer”, attributed to an abbot of Westminster who tells how he brought his “Master Raymond” to England and introduced him to “King Edward”, who obtained from the master “a promise of inexhaustible wealth” in return for a crusade; the king did not keep his side of the bargain and the master had to flee (A. E. Waite, The Hermetic Museum, vol. II, 1893). The fact that can be dated is the Testamentum: written in London in 1332 and dedicated to Edward III, sixteen years after Llull’s death.

Which works are Llull’s and which were attributed to him?

The works in which Llull discusses alchemy reject it; the alchemical treatises under his name, from the Testamentum onwards, are by later, anonymous authors. In the table, square brackets give the number of each work in Pereira’s catalogue (section I: the pseudo-Lullian corpus proper). The dates of the authentic works come from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and from MedCat, except that of the Liber de novo modo demonstrandi, which Pereira 2004 gives; the positions on alchemy also come from that study. Edition abbreviations: ORL, Obres de Ramon Llull (Palma); NEORL, Nova Edició de les Obres de Ramon Llull; ROL, Raimundi Lulli Opera Latina; CCCM, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis.

Which manuscripts and printed editions of the Testamentum survive?

Pereira’s catalogue lists 56 manuscripts of the Testamentum and notes that all the printed editions contain only the first two books. The table gathers the manuscripts cited by the studies used here and the printings whose scan we have checked. For the manuscripts we give the shelfmark found in those sources; we have not checked whether a scan exists online.

What is still debated about the pseudo-Llull?

Four questions remain open: who wrote the Testamentum, who copied whom, how many works there are and where the corpus was born.

Who wrote the Testamentum. There are three answers. Pereira, who edited the text, considers it anonymous and calls its author the Magister Testamenti. José Rodríguez Guerrero proposes identifying him with Ramon de Térmens (in Latin, Raymundus de Terminis), a Majorcan documented around 1328, a knight trained in arts or in law and with some knowledge of medicine, active in the Adriatic in the service of Robert of Naples and Philip of Taranto; the name Ramon and the Majorcan origin would have been enough, decades later, for him to be confused with Llull (Azogue 9, 2019-2023). In the introduction to that issue, which Rodríguez Guerrero himself edits, Pereira judges the hypothesis historically plausible. The third answer is the oldest: according to Pereira, Luke Wadding, in his Annales, attributed the pseudo-Lullian alchemical books to Raimon de Tàrrega, a convert who entered the Dominican order; he was born around 1335, so his dates rule out any connection with the writing of the Testamentum, although his relation to the De secretis naturae remains open (Pereira 2004, p. 470).

Who copied whom. As Pereira recalls in the introduction to Azogue 9, Lynn Thorndike saw in the De secretis naturae a reworking of Rupescissa put under Llull’s name, and she accepted that view at the time. Rodríguez Guerrero reverses the relationship, as Salzinger had done in the eighteenth century; according to Pereira, Salzinger called Rupescissa Llull’s optimus commentator (Pereira 2004, p. 469); in the introduction to Azogue 9, Pereira grants that with this analysis Thorndike’s formula is turned around.

How many works there are. The figures do not agree because they do not count the same thing. Gómez speaks of some eighty apocryphal works (according to Vives’s review). Pereira’s catalogue, in its online update of November 1997, numbers 65 works in the corpus proper, 44 attributed to Llull only occasionally in some manuscript, and a third section, running to number 33, of works that the catalogues attributed to him but that should be excluded. Whether you count the second section or not is enough to move the total from 65 to 109, that is, from under a hundred to over a hundred. The 1989 printed edition divides the second and third sections differently, so its figures do not fully match those of the update.

Where the corpus was born. Pereira places the first circulation of the alchemical writings attributed to Llull and to Arnau in Catalonia and southern France (Pereira 2004, p. 464). Rodríguez Guerrero proposes a first pseudo-Lullian core in Valencia, around 1360-1380, in the circle of healers around Berenguer Fluvià, and a later circulation through southern Italy and the Adriatic (Azogue 9).

How was Llull read from Pico to Newton?

Early modern readers knew a Llull who mixed the two: the philosopher of the combinatory Art and the alchemist of the attributed treatises. Anthony Bonner showed, from the bibliography of Lullian printings by Rogent and Duran, that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as many editions of spurious works were published as of authentic ones, or more: between 1521 and 1598, 23 editions of alchemical works appeared against 9 of non-alchemical works (Bonner, Randa 22). In 1598 the publisher Lazarus Zetzner printed in Strasbourg the Llull anthology through which Leibniz came to know him; from 1612 he also published pseudo-Lullian alchemy, and in 1613 the four-volume edition of the Theatrum chemicum, with partial editions of the Testamentum and of the De secretis naturae. Isaac Newton owned eight Lullian volumes, two of authentic works and six of alchemy, and the most used and annotated were the alchemical ones (Bonner, citing J. Harrison, The Library of Isaac Newton, 1978, pp. 183-184). Newton also wrote out his own version of the Emerald Tablet by hand (Keynes MS 28; see the Atlas).

The other reception is that of the combinatory Art. Saverio Campanini has studied the relation between Kabbalah and Lullian combinatorics in Pico della Mirandola (Studia Lulliana 55, 2015). Giordano Bruno devoted three books to explaining Llull’s art, all built on the Ars brevis of 1308, the abridged version of the Ars that was most commented on in the Renaissance (Priani, SEP): De compendiosa architectura et complemento artis Lullii (Paris, 1582), De lampade combinatoria lulliana (1587) and De specierum scrutinio et lampade combinatoria Raymundi Lullii (Prague, 1588), which brings the two earlier ones together (Matteoli). In the twentieth century, Frances Yates devoted a long article (1954) to Llull’s art and a chapter of The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979) entitled “Medieval Christian Cabala: The Art of Ramon Lull”. As her profile on this site explains, later critics faulted Yates, among other things, for stretching “Hermeticism” to cover alchemy and Kabbalah. In Llull’s case it is worth keeping the levels apart: Llull belongs to the history of combinatorics and, through his readers, to that of the Renaissance; the Hermes of the Testamentum belongs to the history of alchemy, since what its author takes up is the Emerald Tablet, not the Greek treatises of the Corpus.

To check an attribution like this one for yourself (who signs it, when the name appears, what the text says about itself), the method is in Provenance.

Key facts

Name	Ramon Llull; in Latin, Raimundus Lullus; in older English, Raymond Lull; in Spanish, Raimundo Lulio
Dates	Majorca, 1232 (perhaps 1233) - 1316: in Majorca, after March (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), or at sea, between Tunis and Majorca, in March (Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana)
Works	More than 200 works in Catalan, Arabic and Latin; best known for the Ars
On alchemy	He rejected it: metals cannot be transmuted by art (Fèlix, VI.33 and VI.36; Quaestiones per artem demonstrativam solubiles)
Attributed alchemical corpus	Pereira’s catalogue (1997 update): 65 works in the corpus proper and 44 occasionally attributed; none can plausibly be attributed to Llull
First treatise of the corpus	Testamentum, London, 1332 (colophon); anonymous author, the “Magister Testamenti”
Hermes in the corpus	The Testamentum calls Hermes “father of the philosophers and of the alchemists” and paraphrases two clauses of the Emerald Tablet

Fair questions

Was Ramon Llull an alchemist?

No. In his authentic works, such as the Fèlix (Paris, 1287-1289) and the Quaestiones per artem demonstrativam solubiles, he holds that art cannot turn one metal into another. The alchemical treatises that circulated under his name (65 in the main section of Michela Pereira’s catalogue) all date from after his death in 1316.

Did Llull write the Testamentum?

No. The Testamentum is dated 1330 and 1332, was written in London and was dedicated to Edward III, when Llull had been dead for years. Its author is anonymous (Michela Pereira calls him the Magister Testamenti) and the text itself does not claim to be by Llull; José Rodríguez Guerrero proposes identifying him with the Majorcan Ramon de Térmens.

What is Ramon Llull’s connection with Hermeticism?

No direct connection is documented: the sources consulted record no quotations of Hermes Trismegistus in his authentic works. Hermes appears in the pseudo-Llull: the author of the Testamentum calls Hermes father of the philosophers and of the alchemists, presents himself as his son and paraphrases the Emerald Tablet. That Hermes is the Hermes of the alchemical tradition: the passages we have read do not quote the treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum, which did not circulate in Latin until 1463.

Did Llull make gold for the King of England?

That is a legend. One of its versions, the Testament of Cremer, tells how a Master Raymond promised King Edward inexhaustible wealth in return for a crusade. The datable fact is the alchemical Testamentum: written in London in 1332 and dedicated to Edward III, sixteen years after Llull’s death.

How many alchemical works are attributed to Llull?

It depends on how you count: about eighty according to Francesc J. Gómez. Michela Pereira’s catalogue (1997 update) numbers 65 works in the corpus proper and 44 attributed only occasionally, 109 in all, plus a third section of works that should be excluded.

Sources & further reading

• Ernesto Priani, “Ramon Llull”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (first published 2017, revised 24 February 2025), plato.stanford.edu/entries/llull.
• “Ramon Llull”, Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana, online edition (in Catalan), enciclopedia.cat.
• Michela Pereira, “Per una història de l’alquímia a la Catalunya medieval”, in J. Vernet and R. Parés (dirs.), La ciència en la història dels Països Catalans, vol. 1 (Valencia: Institut d’Estudis Catalans and Universitat de València, 2004), pp. 455-482; PDF in the Base de Dades Ramon Llull.
• Michela Pereira, The Alchemical Corpus Attributed to Raymond Lull (London: The Warburg Institute, 1989; Warburg Institute Surveys and Texts 18); scan in the Base de Dades Ramon Llull.
• Michela Pereira, “Catalogue of the alchemical works attributed to Raimond Lull”, online update of the 1989 catalogue, Instituto Brasileiro de Filosofia e Ciência Raimundo Lúlio: introduction and entries.
• Michela Pereira and Barbara Spaggiari, Il «Testamentum» alchemico attribuito a Raimondo Lullo. Edizione del testo latino e catalano dal manoscritto Oxford, Corpus Christi College 244 (Tavarnuzze, Florence: SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo, 1999; Millennio medievale 14).
• Raymundi Lulli... Testamentum duobus libris universam artem chymicam complectens; item eiusdem Compendium animae transmutationis artis metallorum (Cologne: Joannes Byrckmann, 1566), copy in the library of the University of Seville, A Res. 25/6/26, Internet Archive; editions of Cologne, 1573 (Internet Archive), and Frankfurt, 1630, Fasciculus aureus (BIU Santé on Internet Archive).
• Jean-Jacques Manget, Bibliotheca chemica curiosa, vol. I (Geneva: Chouët, 1702), Wellcome Collection copy, Internet Archive.
• Arnau Vives, review of Francesc J. Gómez, “L’alquímia en Llull, Llull en l’alquímia”, Studia Lulliana 58 (2018), pp. 223-224, Dipòsit Digital de la UB.
• José Rodríguez Guerrero (dir.), Azogue 9 (2019-2023), special issue on the pseudo-Lullian alchemical corpus, with an introduction by Michela Pereira; ISSN 1575-8184; revistaazogue.com.
• Anthony Bonner, “El lul·lisme alquímic i cabalístic i les edicions de Llàtzer Zetzner”, Randa 22, PDF in the Base de Dades Ramon Llull.
• Stefania Buosi Moncunill, El Testament alquímic pseudolul·lià en un manuscrit inèdit català del segle XVI, còpia autògrafa de Jaume Mas, doctoral thesis, Universitat de Barcelona, 2023, TDX.
• Arthur Edward Waite (ed.), The Hermetic Museum, Restored and Enlarged, vol. II (London, 1893): “The Testament of Cremer”.
• Raimundi Lulli Opera Latina (ROL), in the series Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis (Turnhout: Brepols), series page; Ars generalis ultima, ed. A. Madre, ROL XIV, CCCM 75 (1986).
• Lola Badia (dir.), Xavier Bonillo, Eugènia Gisbert and Montserrat Lluch (eds.), Ramon Llull, Llibre de meravelles, vol. 1, books I-VII (Palma: Patronat Ramon Llull, 2011; NEORL 10), MedCat entry.
• Ramon Llull, Arbre de sciència, ed. Salvador Galmés, 3 vols. (Palma: Comissió Editora Lul·liana, 1917, 1923 and 1926; ORL XI-XIII), MedCat entry.
• Frances A. Yates, “The Art of Ramon Lull: An Approach to It through Lull’s Theory of the Elements”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 17 (1954), pp. 115-173, doi:10.2307/750135; Frances A. Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979), chapter “Medieval Christian Cabala: The Art of Ramon Lull”.
• Saverio Campanini, “Una fonte trascurata sul rapporto tra qabbalah e combinatoria lulliana in Pico della Mirandola: il commento alle preghiere di Yehudah Ibn Malka”, Studia Lulliana 55 (2015), pp. 83-127, IBDigital (UIB).
• Marco Matteoli, “Ars combinatoria and Ars memoriae in Giordano Bruno”, PDF, on Bruno’s three Lullian books (1582, 1587 and 1588).
• Anthony Bonner (dir.), Base de Dades Ramon Llull, Centre de Documentació Ramon Llull, Universitat de Barcelona, ub.edu/llulldb (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence).