The secret tradition in alchemy : its development and records

Preface. 1 Alchemy and supernatural life. 2 Modern views on the hermetic mystery. 3 Further speculations on philosophical gold. 4 Ancient hermetic books and the way of the soul therein. 5 Alchemy in China. 6 The testimony of Byzantine alchemy. 7 Arabian and Syriac alchemy. 8 The early Latin literature. 9 The later chain of Hermes. 10 The myth of Flamel. 11 The chariot of Basil Valentine. 12 Paracelsus. 13 Denys Zachaire and others. 14 Famous English philosophers. 15 Alchemy and exploitation. 16 The new light of alchemy. 17 The Reformation and German alchemy. 18 Thomas Vaughan. 19 The cosmopolite. 20 John Frederick Helvetius. 21 An alchemist of Mitylene. 22 The mystic side of alchemy. Appendices. 1 Animal magnetism in 1850. 2 Kabalistic alchemy. 3 Recent editions of the Suggestive Inquiry. 4 The Mutus Liber and Janitor Pansophus

'So far as the West is concerned, the literature of Alchemy is in the main a Latin literature, and it rose up in Europe about the beginning of the tenth century. It was by no means to be regarded as new, for, setting China aside, we shall see that it had Greek, Arabian and Syriac antecedents which take the subject back some few centuries further, though by no means into proximity with the beginnings of Christianity....' --Preface

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