Book

The Secret Book of Alchemy (Artephius)

Attributed to Artephius, the elusive medieval alchemist to whom later tradition gave a thousand years of life, the Secret Book is one of the foundational texts of the alchemical canon, here presented in its classic English translation in a compact edition. Its sixteen numbered sections work through the Great Practice in the old metallurgical vocabulary: antimony with its saturnine nature, the argent vive that hides within it, and the dissolving water, the philosophic vinegar, that reduces the perfect body of gold to its first matter without fire. The text moves through putrefaction and the blackening, the whitening of the red laton, the multiplication of the medicine, and the coagulation of the stone, insisting throughout that the operation needs one thing, one vessel and one fire, and that the obscure names the philosophers multiply are veils set to deceive the unwary. Its author speaks in the first person of a work that lengthened his own life, and its sentences preserve the heady grammar of a science that read matter as scripture. For students of the literature, this is the document Newton's contemporaries actually read.

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