This is an enjoyable introduction to the subject, covering in 100 pages the basic ideas and themes of alchemy, its history in the West, Asiatic versions, and the modern revival. The rest of the book comprises miniature biographies, often sketched in only two or three sentences, of the “Golden Chain” of notable alchemists from Hermes Trismegistus, the mythical Egyptian founder of the art, up to Jean Dubois (b.1919), the grandson of the Curies, who themselves were supposedly alchemists.
Included in the mixture are numerous scintillating flecks of surprising information such as that members of the team on the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb consulted alchemical texts; or that the CIA has tried to detain Fulcanelli, the famously elusive 20th-century alchemist, who may be in reality the 600-year-old Nicholas Flamel.
Throughout, the author remains sensitive to the dichotomy between “inner” and “outer” alchemy, i.e. the work as a symbolic representation of an adept’s progress to spiritual purity, and alternatively the sheer physical effort in a laboratory to transmute base metal into gold. Martin points out that today the division is happily resolved, theoretically at least, by the unified worldview implicit in quantum physics.
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