Source books
Books
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26 books of 336 · oldest first
Alchemy 26
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c. 300
Cheirokmeta
Surviving in portions only. It combines practical chemical procedures with visionary, mythic and spiritual interpretations of transformation.
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earliest secure forms medieval, probably Arabic
Emerald Tablet
A very short alchemical text that eventually produces the formula usually paraphrased as 'as above, so below'. Its legendary attribution to ancient Hermes is much older than the...
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1100
Turba Philosophorum
alchemical work
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After 1248; probably completed 1261–1262
De mineralibus
Albertus Magnus studies stones, metals and intermediate substances through Aristotelian natural philosophy while recording alchemical and astrological theories current in the...
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c. 1529–30
Paragranum
Sets out the foundations of medicine: philosophy, astronomy and astrology, alchemy, and virtue.
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c. 1531
Opus Paramirum
Develops his distinctive medical and alchemical understanding of disease.
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1564
Monas Hieroglyphica
His famous enigmatic synthesis of planetary, elemental, alchemical and mathematical symbols into a single glyph.
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first form 1595; expanded 1609, posthumous
Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom
One of the great emblematic books of Christian alchemy, in which the laboratory and the oratory are the same room.
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printed London, 1597
The Mirror of Alchemy
A short English treatise that defines alchemy, gives the theory that every metal is made of quicksilver and sulphur, and describes the colours the work passes through.
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1616
The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz
A bizarre, symbolically dense initiatory-alchemical romance involving a royal wedding, trials, death and regeneration.
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1841
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
1841 collection of historic anecdotes about human follies by Charles Mackay
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1850
A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery
The book that began the modern reading of alchemy as an inner discipline rather than a chemistry. Atwood and her father withdrew and burned most of the edition soon after it...
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1893
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1914; English translation 1917
Problems of Mysticism and its Symbolism
A psychoanalytic reading of an alchemical parable, published as Problems of Mysticism and its Symbolism and later retitled Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts.
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1944; English translation 1953
Psychology and Alchemy
Jung's reading of alchemical imagery as a projection of psychic processes, and the book through which most twentieth-century readers met alchemy at all.
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2001
Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe
The collection containing Principe and Newman's “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy”, the essay that argues the spiritual reading is a Victorian and...
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written 1471; printed 1591
The Compound of Alchymy
A verse treatise that divides the work into twelve gates, one to a chapter, from calcination to projection.
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undated
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written 1520s–1541; collected in English 1894
The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Paracelsus
Waite's two-volume English collection of the Paracelsian corpus, whose appendix on the three prime essences states the doctrine of salt, sulphur and mercury directly.
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