The Hermetic Museum (Vol. 1)

habit of the older masters. For it belonged to a period which had inherited a bitter experience of the failures, impostures, and misery surrounding the Magnum Opus Latin for "The Great Work," the ultimate goal of alchemy: the creation of the Philosopher's Stone or the transformation of the soul. and its mystical quest, which was weary of unequipped experiment, weary of wandering "multipliers," Fraudulent alchemists who claimed they could "multiply" gold or silver to swindle investors. and pretentious "bellows-blowers," A derogatory term (from the French "souffleurs") for those who obsessively worked at the furnace without understanding the spiritual or philosophical principles of the art. while it was just being awakened to the conviction that if Alchemy were true at all, it was not to be learned from books, or, at least, from any books which had hitherto been written on the subject. Running through all the tracts which are comprised in the following volumes, the reader will recognize traces of a central claim in alchemical initiation—that the secrets, whatever they were, must be understood as the property of a college of adepts A secret society of masters who have achieved the Great Work., pretending to have subsisted from time almost immemorial, and revealing themselves to the select and the few, while the literature, large as it is, appears chiefly as an instrument of intercommunication between those who knew. At the same time, it may also be regarded as a sign and omen to the likely seeker, an advertisement that there was a mystery, and that he must go further who would unravel it.

While the treatises now translated are for the most part anonymous, as befits veiled masters, the literary reader will remember that the name of John de Meung Jean de Meun (c. 1240–1305), a French poet famous for completing the "Romance of the Rose," which many alchemists believed contained hidden chemical allegories. connects the allegorical "Romance of the Rose" with the parables of Alchemy; Flamel Nicolas Flamel (c. 1330–1418), a Parisian scribe who became the most famous legendary figure of French alchemy, said to have discovered the secret of eternal life. will be familiar to all Hermetic students as the most celebrated of the French adepts; the saintly name of Basil Valentine A legendary 15th-century monk; his writings are a crucial link between medieval alchemy and the early science of chemistry., investigator of the properties of antimony A metallic element used in the purification of gold; its study led to many early chemical breakthroughs., will not even now be unhonoured by the chemist; Eirenaeus Philalethes The pseudonym (meaning "peaceful lover of truth") of an influential 17th-century alchemist, now widely believed to be the American-born George Starkey., equally revered and unknown by all devout SpagyritesA term coined by Paracelsus to describe alchemists who use the processes of "separating and recombining" to create medicines., is supposed to have been the most lucid