Doctrine of Signatures - in Christianity

In Christianity

Christian European metaphysics expanded this philosophy in theology. According to the Christian version, the Creator had so set his mark upon Creation, that by careful observation, one could find all right doctrines represented (see the detailed application to the Passionflower) and even learn the uses of a plant from some aspect of its form or place of growing.

A theological justification was made for this philosophy: "It was reasoned that the Almighty must have set his sign upon the various means of curing disease which he provided."

For the late medieval viewer, the natural world was vibrant with images of the Deity: "as above, so below," a Hermetic principle expressed as the relationship between macrocosm and microcosm; the principle is rendered sicut in terra. Michel Foucault expressed the wider usage of the doctrine of signatures, which rendered allegory more real and more cogent than it appears to a modern eye:

"Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture. It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them." (The Order of Things, p. 17)

Jakob Böhme (1575–1624), a shoemaker of Görlitz, Germany, claimed to have had a profound mystical vision as a young man, in which he saw the relationship between God and man signaled in all things. He wrote Signatura Rerum (1621), translated into English as The Signature of All Things, and the spiritual doctrine was applied to the medicinal uses that plants' forms advertised.