FIRE AND GOLD

William R. Newman, Newton the Alchemist: Science, Enigma, and the Quest for Nature’s 'Secret Fire', Princeton University Press, 2019.

As most readers of this site will know, Isaac Newton was obsessed with alchemy. He devoted thirty years of his life to it and left over a million words – notebooks, commentaries on alchemical texts and unpublished treatises – on his quest for the philosophers’ stone (and the ‘philosophical wine’, which also had the power of transmutation but which you don’t hear so much about it, even though it sounds a lot more interesting).

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ALCHEMY BY THE BOOK

Theodore Ziolkowski. The Alchemist in Literature. Oxford University Press, 2019.

What, no Colin Wilson? I searched in vain for him skulking round the index to The Alchemist in Literature. Not to be found. I shall presently return to this missing author. In his chapter titled 'Popularizations, or Projectio' the very found author Theodore Ziolkowski states: “In some cases, finally the term 'alchemist' is used only metaphorically in fictions that have nothing whatsoever to do with alchemy.”

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SECRETS OF THE STONE

Sean Martin. Alchemy and Alchemists. Pocket Essentials, 2015.

This paperback book of 160 pages is a recently published addition to Pocket Essentials, a range of books produced in the same format on a wide range of diverse subjects. At first glance, to produce a pocket-sized guide to a subject as complex and mysterious as alchemy might seem to be an extremely difficult if not impossible task.
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PRACTICAL ALCHEMY

Cathy Cobb, Monty L Fetterolf and Harold Goldwhite. The Chemistry of Alchemy: From Dragon’s Blood to Donkey Dung, How Chemistry Was Forged. Prometheus Books, 2014.

Most students of alchemy, even those that read the mineral texts, will ultimately pursue the path of spiritual or ‘soul’ alchemy through meditation and breathing and suchlike. Some brave alchemists will seek to help the spiritual process by taking alchemical draughts and will buy distillation equipment and venture into spagyrics or plant alchemy (for example HERE) to prepare tinctures and plant ‘stones’ from herbs with a planetary or medicinal reputation.
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SEEING THE LIGHT

Paul Kléber Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts: The Occult in the Age of Enlightenment, Yale University Press, 2013.

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John V. Fleming, The Dark Side of the Enlightenment: Wizards, Alchemists and Spiritual Seekers in the Age of Reason, W.W. Norton & Co., 2013

Since the 1970s there has been a gradual, if grudging, acknowledgement by academic historians that occult ideas and beliefs played a much more influential role in the Renaissance than previous generations would admit. Now, the same seems to be happening for the era to which the Renaissance gave way, the Enlightenment or Age of Reason.
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ART OF ALCHEMY

Stanislas Klossowski de Rola. The Arcane Doctrine Of Alchemy. Thames and Hudson, 2013.

The French alchemist Stanislas Klossowski de Rola is a delightful enigma. From being an aristocratic hippy-socialite and reefer-smoking roué of the 60s (friend of the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Paul Simon), he is now considered to be a serious scholar of alchemical engravings.
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SECRETS OF ALCHEMY

Lawrence M Principe. The Secrets Of Alchemy. University of Chicago Press, 2013.

This is a book that every general student of Alchemy, and particularly those interested in the Western (including the Arabic) history of Alchemy, should own for it is, by far, the best book on the history of Alchemy ever yet written. No other book compares to it. The author, a scholar and a chemist, has been a student of the subject for 35 years and he has distilled his learning into this work.
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THE CHEMICAL CHOIR

Peter Maxwell-Stuart. The Chemical Choir: A History of Alchemy. Continuum, 2012 (Repr.)

Peter Maxwell-Stuart has been steadily writing good, readable, academic studies on the subject of magic and magicians since 2004 and his titles include Witch Hunters (2004), Wizards (2005) and Ghosts: A History (2007). The current book for review is a new edition of the title which was first published in 2008, but is worthy of review still.

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JOHN DEE - CONJURING AT COURT

Glyn Parry. The Arch-Conjurer of England: John Dee. Yale University Press, 2012.

Glyn Parry's new life of John Dee overturns many of the conventionally held views about this unique character. Living just across the road from the site of his house, laboratory and library in Mortlake my image of him was always as a white-bearded sage, living in a then-remote country village
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ALCHEMY: WORDS AND MEANINGS

Jordan Stratford. A Dictionary of Western Alchemy. Quest Books, 2011.

This is a useful book up to a point. It brings together a range of chemical symbols and offers a summary of the most important processes of laboratory alchemy and throws in a brief biography of a couple of dozen alchemists of note.
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