Alchemy & Transformation

Alchemy promised to turn base metal into gold, and it described the work in images of death and rebirth. The art took shape in Hellenistic Egypt, where Zosimos of Panopolis wrote of killing and resurrecting metals to ennoble them into gold. Arabic-speaking scholars took it up after translating the Greek works in the 9th century, Latin translations carried it into Europe in the 12th, and Paracelsus turned it towards medicine in the 16th. In the 1920s Carl Jung read its strange images as a record of the psyche.

Alchemy’s lasting achievement is its symbolism: its images of dissolving and remaking have outlived every furnace.

The shelf holds alchemical texts in translation, histories of chemistry and the Hermetic arts, studies of alchemical imagery and emblem books, and Jungian readings of the tradition. When Isaac Newton’s private papers were auctioned at Sotheby’s in London in July 1936, John Maynard Keynes began buying up his alchemical manuscripts, which run to more than a million words.