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From Pat Deveney's database:
Journal of the This was an early semi-scholarly journal devoted to the history of alchemy. The Alchemical Society had been founded in
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| NYPL; University of Chicago, University of Wisconsin; J.R. Ritman Library; Glasgow University; University of Leeds; Yale University; etc. | |
| Journal of the Alchemical Society V1 1913 | |
| Journal of the Alchemical Society V2 1913-1914 | |
| Journal of the Alchemical Society V3 1914-1915 | |
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The Journal of the Alchemical Society is the organ of the British alchemical revival of the early twentieth century, a learned body in the orbit of the chemist H. Stanley Redgrove and the historian of esotericism A. E. Waite. It is, unusually for this archive, exactly what it announces: overwhelmingly about alchemy, and about alchemy read as a hermetic discipline rather than as a failed chemistry. Its articles work through the technical literature — the three colour-stages of the Great Work, beginning with the inky blackness on which the writer notes practically all the alchemists agree — and equally through its philosophy, quoting the Sages on man as a compendium of the whole created nature, the microcosm of Kabbalistic tradition. Running under both is the question the society existed to debate: whether the symbolism of the alchemists encodes a laboratory operation, a spiritual transmutation, or a single process described in two registers. Rosicrucian and astrological material appears where the historical sources put it. This is the scholarly end of the occult revival, closer to a learned society's proceedings than to any magazine of practice. Generated by Claude from the periodical's digitized text; a thematic reading, not a bibliographic description. |
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| Alchemy | Hermeticism and Western Esotericism | Rosicrucianism |
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