Alchemical Traditions: From Antiquity to the Avant-Garde

SPANNING THE WORLD'S artistic, scientific, and religious traditions, alchemy has embraced and continues to embrace the complete spectrum of existence. From metallurgy to metaphysics, or gold-making to god-making, alchemy pervades the technical and the hieratic arts in order to provide a living phenomenology of the one, single, elusive process that acts through all things. Despite this all-pervasive purview, alchemy continues to be conceived as either proto-chemistry or proto-psychology. The present volume seeks to redress this false dichotomy by exploring alchemy as a quintessentially integral phenomenon. Opening wide the full spectrum of alchemy-from east to west, in history and practice, from antiquity to the avant-garde-the present work seeks to penetrate as deeply as possible, within the bounds of a single volume, into the transfiguring spiritual intensity that underpins the perfection of life, not only from mineral to man, but from humanity to divinity Meticulously curated by Dr. Aaron Cheak, the chapters in this 900-page volume examine the foundations and flowerings of alchemy in Egyptian, Chinese, Hellenic, Islamic, Indo-Tibetan, and European cultural contexts. Particular emphasis has been placed upon the relationship of alchemy to the esoteric currents of Taoism, Theurgy, Gnosticism, Shī'ism, Sufism, Tantra, and Hermeticism. From these perspectives, Alchemical Traditions seeks to liberate alchemy from its persistent materialist misconceptions within academia, and to show that transcendence and concretion, rather than being at variance, mutually inform a single wisdom.