Alchemy & Mysticism

Very impressed with all the information given in this

This book is a most excellent read for anyone who has an understanding of Spiritual Alchemy. It is fully illustrated with rare material which is extremely informative. This is a must for anyone who is interested in Spiritual Alchemy. This is so far the very best material on the subject I have seen.

If you love the esoteric symbolism and art associated with alchemy then you are going to love this book. It is beautifully presented with a nice glossy finish to the pages and the colours are excellently reproduced. There are brief bits of text that accompany the drawings/paintings and even though they are brief they can be quite illuminating. This book has had pride of place in my collection and I have dipped into it on many occassions. It can be almost meditative looking at these painings and drawings and can broaden your spiritual understanding. It is a fine collection of alchemical and mystical paintings and drawings and it is unlikely that you will find such a beautifully presented and exhaustively comprehensive collection anywhere else.

This book literally leapt off the shelf at me one day while I was in the bookstore. I wasn't into alchemy or mysticism or anything at the time. I was just perusing the art section, and saw this book and was blown away by it. I bought it without a moment's hesitation and have spend countless hours pouring over it. It's so great to see old art that is not overtly Christian, and which is expressing something besides what we are commonly taught of in our mainstream dominant history. Further down the road, I did in fact get more into alchemy and mysticism and their history, and this book then also served as an excellent guide and visual reference for looking into these mysteries. I couldn't recommend it more highly.

This is a beautiful book, a detailed historical examination of the alchemy trope and its major themes. The emphasis is on the visual arts (great selections here), but literature, philosophy, and comparative religion also get a good shake. I would have liked a more detailed analysis of music and dance, but the book is already huge. The pictures are well-chosen and well-reproduced, and tell a fascinating story of an ideas percolation across Europe, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. The text is also quite a prize; one example of surprising insight: Roob observes that Joyce drew a parallel between Blake's four Zoas and the Gunas of classical Indian thought, while demonstrating through Indian images and Blake's illustrations how Joyce could connect the dots. There's plenty of Blake here and a good squirt of Gurdjieff, too. A thought on the relationship between alchemy and mysticism to get you going: "It is not a question of 'getting there' or 'being there'; the Tantric tradition speaks of being here. It speaks of transmutation and the analogy of alchemistic practice is used a great deal. For exxample, the existence of lead is not rejected but lead is transmuted into gold. You do not have to change its metallic quality at all; you must simply transmute it" (Chogyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, p.219).

This is an extraordinary collection of art - comprehensive and diverse, spanning a significant portion of human history. Brief descriptions and explanatory text are sprinkled about but the greatest pleasure, in my opinion, derives from the gorgeous reproductions of art related to alchemy and mysticism. I actually own two copies of this book. One that I peruse regularly and another that I shall keep as a spare should my first wear out. It is an excellent gift - very uplifting and immensely inspiring.The subject of alchemy has been somewhat cheapened in our time - reduced to a few basic - often misrepresented - ideas and thrown about by simple minds with incoherent ideas. Few people have encountered the breadth of the subject and the contributions it has made to human civilizations. The inspiration it has provided artists and scientists is immense and this book captures quite a bit of this significance. The author neither advocates existing belief in alchemy and mysticism, nor denies it. It is a historical perspective - largely relayed through imagery - celebrating the great beauty of the subject and the complexities it once contained.