What it is
Alchemy is the art of transmuting substances, above all of perfecting base metals into gold and of preparing medicines that perfect the body. It arose in Greek-speaking Egypt in the first centuries CE, flourished in the Islamic world, entered Latin Europe in the twelfth century, and was practiced in earnest until the eighteenth. Comparable arts developed independently in China and India.
Alchemical books are notoriously obscure. Their authors wrote in cover names and allegory, partly to protect trade secrets and partly because they held that the work of the furnace mirrored the work of creation. Modern historians have shown that many of these riddles describe real laboratory operations, and they use the old word "chymistry" for the period when alchemy and chemistry were not yet two things. Other readers, since the nineteenth century, have read the same texts as maps of inner transformation. Both readings have their literature, and we shelve both.
Where to begin
Read the Emerald Tablet, described in the guide to Hermetic literature. Look through the plates of the Splendor Solis or the Rosarium Philosophorum. Then take E. J. Holmyard's Alchemy for orientation before going further.
Greek alchemy in Egypt
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Physika kai Mystika Attributed to Democritus. Greek. About the first century CE. L 4
The oldest surviving alchemical treatise: recipes for making gold, silver, gems, and purple, joined to the formula that became the motto of the art, that nature delights in nature, nature conquers nature, nature masters nature.
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The Leiden and Stockholm papyri Greek. Egypt, about 300 CE. L 4
Two workshop recipe books for imitating gold, silver, precious stones, and purple dye. There is no mysticism in them at all, which is exactly their value. They show the craft from which alchemy grew.
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The works of Zosimos of Panopolis Greek. About 300 CE. L 4
The first alchemist whose personality survives. His treatises describe apparatus in detail, cite Maria the Jewess as an authority on stills and water baths, and recount dream visions of priests dismembered and transformed upon a bowl-shaped altar.
Arabic alchemy
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The Jabirian corpus Arabic. Attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan. Written between the eighth and tenth centuries. L 4
Hundreds of treatises under one name, setting out the theory that all metals are formed of sulfur and mercury and that their natures can be measured and brought into balance. Jabir was known to the Latins as Geber.
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The Book of Secrets (Kitab al-Asrar) Abu Bakr al-Razi. Arabic. About 900. L 4
A physician's sober manual, classifying substances, apparatus, and operations. In Latin he is Rhazes.
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Turba Philosophorum Latin translation of an Arabic work of about 900. L 4
The "Assembly of the Philosophers": a debate among ancient Greek sages, presided over by Pythagoras, on the principles of the art. One of the most quoted books of Latin alchemy.
Medieval Latin alchemy
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The Book of the Composition of Alchemy Translated from Arabic by Robert of Chester. 1144. L 4
The dialogue of the hermit Morienus and the prince Khalid, and by tradition the first alchemical work to reach Latin readers. The translator remarks in his preface that the Latin world does not yet know what alchemy is.
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Summa Perfectionis Attributed to Geber. Latin. Late thirteenth century. L 4
The clearest and most influential medieval textbook, written under the name of the Arabic master by a Latin author, probably an Italian friar named Paul of Taranto.
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The Book of the Quintessence John of Rupescissa. Latin. About 1351. L 4
Turns alchemy toward medicine: the distilled "fifth essence" of wine and other things as a preservative of the human body. A foundation of later Paracelsian practice.
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Aurora Consurgens Latin. Illustrated manuscripts from the early fifteenth century. Falsely attributed to Thomas Aquinas. L 4
"The Rising Dawn" weaves the Song of Songs and the wisdom books of the Bible into an alchemical hymn. Its illuminated manuscripts contain some of the earliest cycles of alchemical images.
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The Compound of Alchymy and The Ordinal of Alchemy George Ripley, 1471, and Thomas Norton, 1477. English verse. L 4
Two English poems of the fifteenth century, the first dividing the work into twelve gates. Both were printed by Elias Ashmole in his Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum of 1652, the great anthology of English alchemical verse.
The Renaissance and the emblem books
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Splendor Solis German. Earliest manuscript 1532 to 1535. Attributed to Salomon Trismosin. L 4
Twenty-two full-page paintings of astonishing richness, framing a short text on the stages of the work.
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Rosarium Philosophorum Latin. Printed at Frankfurt, 1550. L 4
"The Rosary of the Philosophers": a chain of quotations accompanied by twenty woodcuts of a king and queen who meet, unite, die, and rise as one. The best known of all alchemical picture series.
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The works of Paracelsus Theophrastus von Hohenheim, 1493 to 1541. German and Latin. L 4
The physician and iconoclast who redirected alchemy from gold to medicine and added salt to sulfur and mercury as the three principles of all bodies. His genuine works are tangled with many written in his name.
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The Twelve Keys Attributed to Basil Valentine. German. 1599. L 4
Twelve allegorical chapters, later illustrated with famous engravings, under the name of a fifteenth-century monk who probably never existed.
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Atalanta Fugiens Michael Maier. Latin. Oppenheim, 1617. L 4
Fifty emblems, each with an engraving, an epigram, a prose discourse, and a fugue for three voices. An alchemical book for the eye, the mind, and the ear at once.
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Theatrum Chemicum and Musaeum Hermeticum Latin. 1602 to 1661, and 1625, enlarged 1678. L 4
The two great printed collections, which between them preserve hundreds of treatises. The second was translated into English in 1893 as The Hermetic Museum.
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Mutus Liber La Rochelle, 1677. L 4
"The Wordless Book": fifteen engraved plates and almost no text, showing a man and a woman gathering dew and tending the furnace.
The seventeenth century
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The Sceptical Chymist Robert Boyle. English. 1661. L 4
Often described as the book that ended alchemy. It did not. Boyle attacked the textbook theories of elements and principles while pursuing transmutation himself. Read it as a document of the transition.
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An Open Entrance to the Closed Palace of the King Eirenaeus Philalethes. Latin. 1667. L 4
The most admired alchemical treatise of its century, studied closely by Isaac Newton, who left about a million words of alchemical notes. Its author was George Starkey, a physician educated in colonial New England.
Spiritual and psychological readings
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A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery Mary Anne Atwood. 1850. L 4
Argued that the true subject of alchemy was the transformation of the human soul. Atwood and her father withdrew the book soon after publication and burned most of the copies. Reissued in 1918, it shaped the spiritual reading of alchemy in the English-speaking world.
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Psychology and Alchemy C. G. Jung. German. 1944. L 4
Reads alchemical symbolism as a projection of the psyche's own process of integration, with hundreds of images. A great book about the alchemical imagination. Historians of chemistry caution that it says little about what alchemists did in their laboratories.
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The Forge and the Crucible Mircea Eliade. French. 1956. L 4
Places alchemy within the long religious history of mining, smelting, and smithing in many cultures.
Beyond Europe
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Baopuzi (The Master Who Embraces Simplicity) Ge Hong. Chinese. About 320 CE. L 4
The inner chapters are the classic source for early Chinese alchemy and its goal, an elixir of immortality.
Introductory histories
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Alchemy E. J. Holmyard. 1957. L 4
A clear one-volume history by a chemist who read Arabic. Still a sound first book.
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Prelude to Chemistry John Read. 1936. L 4
An affectionate account of the literature and imagery of alchemy, well illustrated.
Things to watch for
- Cover names. The green lion, the red king, and the philosophical mercury are terms of art, and their meanings shift from author to author.
- Borrowed names. Geber, Ramon Lull, Thomas Aquinas, and Basil Valentine did not write the alchemical works that carry their names. Nicolas Flamel was a real Paris scribe who died in 1418, but his reputation as an alchemist was created two centuries after his death.
- Do not try this. The recipes call for mercury, antimony, arsenic, lead, and strong acids. They are historical records and are dangerous to attempt.
- Pictures without captions. Many modern books reproduce alchemical images cut loose from their texts. Trace an image to the book it came from before interpreting it.
On the shelves
Alchemy is shelved at the South Gate in class L 4, where the Farrow collection forms the core of the collection. Related guides: Hermetic Literature and Astrology.