[VIA VERITATIS - A sought-after component of the alchemical Basilius-Valentinus corpus?]

In the early modern period, alchemical writings circulating under disguised author identities were part of a shadow economy of pseudepigraphical alchemical knowledge. By the end of the 16th century at the latest, the term Via Veritatis appeared as the title of alchemical, especially transmutatory, writings. For the period up to the 18th century, eighteen different versions were identified, which can be divided into five different text groups in terms of content. While the two older text groups (typus 1 and 2) criticize the state of contemporary alchemy and show the supposedly only true way to transmutation, the other text groups (typus 3 to 5) consist of a large number of systematically structured process instructions. However, a connection to the fictional person of Basilius Valentinus cannot be proven for all texts. The Via Veritatis texts of typus 1 and 2 show no obvious connections to Basilius Valentinus. For texts of typus 3 to 5, however, there appears to be reference to Basilius Valentinus in content and form. Based on the classification system proposed by Lawrence Principe for the corpus of Basilius Valentinus' writings, these can be assigned to sub-corpus C.