Five Alchemical Treatises

So you want to become an Alchemist but you don’t know your cinnabar from your crocus of Mars or your Chicken of Hermogenes from your stinking menses. Perhaps you’re sitting around your ad hoc basement laboratory wondering what to do with all of those alembics, cucurbits, retorts and pelicans, or you’re puzzling over how to properly stoke your reverberatory furnace in order to fully calcine your tartar. Maybe you’ve got some Green Lion in the retort and just can’t figure out the next step? Well then, set that aludel down in some fresh horse dung and reach for this superb manual by the top experts in the field. Five Alchemical Treatises includes the works of Paracelsus, Albertus Magnus, Arnauld de Villeneuve, Roger Bacon, and Raymond Lulle, putting all of the heavy hitters of the Spagyric Arts at your fingertips. A. Poisson translated them from the original Latin into French in 1890, and in this brand new English version the modern reader has a rare opportunity to peruse the core teachings of the Masters at leisure. Whether your knowledge of the subject is extensive or you’re just dipping a toe into the vast, weird ocean of this most fascinating branch of the occult sciences, there’s something in the Five Alchemical Treatises to tickle your fancy. If nothing else, these works constitute a kind of baroque prose-poetry which is all the more riveting to read because you know that it meant something to the creators, but we will probably never quite know what. Complete with a glossary and the emerald tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, A. Poisson’s translation, and this current translation of that one, are sure to feed the fires of curiosity - and who knows, perhaps you’ll find that one missing bit of information here which will allow you to complete the Great Work of finding the Stone.