Difficult Books

At the beginning of the Proteus section on page 37 of Ulysses, James Joyce has his character Stephen Dedalus say, "Signatures of all things I am here to read." It's part of Stephen's stream of consciousness when he is thinking about the nature of reality; in that context, Stephen is announcing his willingness to "read" the signs left in nature and discern their "real" meaning.

Signature of All Things (1621) is the English name of a esoteric treatise by Jakob Böhme (1575-1624), a German Christian mystic. The work's original title was Signatura Rerum. (Jakob Böhme is usually rendered in English as Jacob Boehme.)

"The Doctrine of Signature" was a fairly obscure "scientific" idea before Böhme applied it to theology and popularized it.

Some herbalists of the time believe that when God made the world, he created things with shapes that suggested their purpose (particularly plants with medicinal benefits). For example, "liverwort" was shaped like a liver and as such was good for the liver and "lungwort" looked like and benefited the lungs. Even "wormwood" got its name because it looked like a worm and was believed to an antidote for snake venom; lungwort; bloodroot; toothwort; wormwood, to expel intestinal parasites

Böhme applied this concept to Christianity, saying that when God created the world, he marked aspects of nature with a "signature" (or sign) of their purpose. It was the job of the enlightened initiate to find and interpret these signs and uncover the true meaning of all creation (or something like that).

The Theosophists claim the author as one of their own.

A full-text translation of the work can be found at The Internet Sacred Text Archive.

Full text of Böhme's Clavis (or Key) can be found here.

And other works can be found here.