Alchemy Western European alchemists

Alchemical theories are central to the middle ages and the Renaissance. Chaucer and Shakespeare were heavily steeped in the subject, and it still exerts a fascination today. This is a scholarly and accessible introduction to Western European alchemy, and to the iconography of Alchemical works from antiquity to the rise of chemistry. It includes an illustrated glossary of Alchemical terms and biographies of major alchemists. It is intended for students of medieval and Renaissance art, literature and history art historians and anyone with a general interest in the history and principles of alchemy or medieval culture... 

As you may have guessed, the theme of this issue is sexual alchemy. Despite the acceptance of Eastern sexual alchemy, Western sexual alchemy has always been a little more suspect. Talking openly about this subject in the Middle Ages landed not a few alchemists on the bonfire. Even today, we tend to think of European alchemists as lecherous old men when it came to their sexual cultivations. Once again, clarity comes to the situation when we follow the Hermetic dictum of working on all three levels of reality. The bed becomes an alchemist s laboratory when the "work" is done simultaneously on the bodily, mental, and spiritual levels. In fact, that is about as good a definition of "true love" as I can think of. 

There are only two modem book-length studies of alchemy in Russian they are by the same author and are concerned with alchemy as a cultural phenomenon without reference to alchemy in Russia. Modem general histories of Russian science which include some history of chemistry have for the most part, until recently, avoided alchemy as a pseudo-science , more to be condemned as a western aberration than examined historically. Rainov s standard history of science in Russia up to the seventeenth century has no entry in the index for alchemy at all, although he does not ignore the subject entirely the Academy of Sciences standard history of Russian science denies, probably correctly, that Russian craftsmen ever engaged in alchemy or that there is any evidence for the existence of alchemy in Russia before the fifteenth century and Kuzakov in a recent work correctly notes that some non-alchemical works of what he calls, without further comment, the West European alchemists - Albertus Magnus, Ramon Lull and Michael Scot were known in seventeenth-century Russia but incorrectly states, as we shall see, that not a single alchemical treatise in Russian is known. 

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