ROBERT FLUDD was one of the last of the true `Renaissance men` who took all learning as their preserve and tried to encompass the whole of human knowledge. Born in Elizabethan England, he became a convinced occultist while travelling on the Continent, and thereafter followed a career as a Paracelsian physician. His voluminous writings were devoted to defending the philosophy of the alchemists and Rosicrucians, and applying their doctrines to a vast description of man and the universe. Expounding the ideas of cosmic harmony, the multiple levels of existence and the correlations between them, Fludd summarizes esoteric teachings common to all ages and peoples. Far ahead of his time in some respects, he recognized the universality of truth, welcoming it whether it came from Catholic or Protestant sources, from the Hebrew Bible, from Pythagoras, Plato, or Hermes Trismegistus. Fludd had a genius for expressing his philosophy and cosmology in graphic form, and his works were copiously illustrated by some of the best engravers of his day. All of Fludd`s important plates are collected here for the first time, annotated and explained, together with an introduction to his life and thought. JOSCELYN GODWIN is Professor of Music at Colgate University, New York. He is the author of Harmonies of Heaven and Earth; Music, Mysticism, and Magic; The Mystery of the Seven Vowels; and Mystery Religions in the Ancient World. His translations of Splendor Solis and The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz are also published by Phanes Press.