Gerhard Dorn

The details of Gerhard Dorn's early life, along with those of many other 16th century personalities, are lost to history.

He used John Dee's personal glyph from his 1564 book, the Monas Hieroglyphica, on the title page of his Chymisticum artificium.

He depreciated practical laboratory work in favor of theoretical study of the human mind, considering the prevailing education of his day too scholastic.

What was needed, he asserted, was a mystical and spiritual "philosophy of love"—his radical theology claimed that it was God, not man who was in need of Redemption and he defined the alchemical opus as a labor which redeemed not man but God, a proposal which came perilously close to being heretical in the eyes of Christian orthodoxy.

As Monika Wikman summarized in her book Pregnant Darkness, "Alchemists such as Gerhard Dorn, in his work 'The Speculative Philosophy,' referred to this next alchemical stage [inner healing] as Unus Mundus, where splits are healed, duality ceases, and the individual, the vir unus, unites with the world soul.