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.