Title: THE SECRET TRADITION IN ALCHEMY: ITS DEVELOPMENT AND RECORDS
Author: Arthur Edward Waite
Publisher: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd
City: LondonYear: 1926 (First Edition)Binding Style: Hardcover
Pagination: 415Illustrated: No
Book Details + Condition: Scarce first edition from 1926 of AE Waite's THE SECRET TRADITION IN ALCHEMY: ITS DEVELOPMENT AND RECORDS. Purple
cloth boards, gilt title, etc. to spine. A solid, tight, internally clean very good copy: Spine faded as virtually always with this first edition, and some fading/spots to the boards. Boards lightly rubbed, old bookseller sticker on front pastedown, and clean and free of internal writing or marking. Waite's significant study of Spiritualism. R.A.
Gilbert observes that: "The book has been criticized for rejecting a
spiritual interpretation of pre-Renaissance alchemy, but it remains, for all
its shortcomings, the only accessible study of the occult ramifications of
alchemy in the 18th Century and of such odd theorists as Mrs Atwood and General
Hitchcock." Please see below for more information on Waite, his work, and the Contents of this work.
Arthur Edward was a scholarly mystic who wrote
extensively on occult and esoteric matters, and was the co-creator of the
Rider-Waite Tarot deck. He joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1891,
became a Freemason in 1901, and entered the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia in
1902. In this book the author has undertaken to review the long succession of
test from their beginning at Byzantium to determine the warrants of the
interpretation that the experiments conducted by the alchemists were in fact a
series of spiritual investigations veiled in symbols — a Mystic Science of the
Soul. Topics covered:
- Alchemy
and Supernatural Life
- Modern Views on the Hermetic Mystery
- Further Speculation on Philosophical Gold
- Ancient Hermetic Books and the Way of the Soul Therein
- Alchemy in China
- The Testimony of Byzantine Alchemy
- Arabian and Syrian Alchemy
- The Early Latin Literature
- The Later Chain of Hermes
- The Myth of Flamel
- The Chariot of Basil Valentine
- Paracelsus
- Famous English Philosophers
- Alchemy and Exploitation
- The New Light of Alchemy
- The Reformation and German Alchemy
- Thomas Vaughan
- The Cosmopolite
- John Frederick Helvetius
- An Alchemist of Mitylene
- The Mystic Side of Alchemy
And more.
