Before chemistry hardened into science and mysticism was pushed into the category of superstition, alchemy was where matter, spirit, medicine, cosmology and image-making all bled into one another.

Alexander Roob’s vast visual compendium gathers that world into more than 500 pages of diagrams, manuscripts, emblems, paintings and symbolic systems drawn from centuries of esoteric thought. Roob follows the visual language: cosmic eggs, serpents, planetary correspondences, the Philosopher’s Stone, Kabbalistic trees, Rosicrucian diagrams, divine geometry, hermaphroditic figures and the recurring attempt to map transformation itself. The book moves from medieval cosmology and Christian mysticism through Renaissance and early modern alchemy, eventually tracing its afterlife into Romanticism and modern art. One of its pleasures is seeing how porous the supposed boundaries between religion, science, philosophy and art once were.

Dense but highly browsable, this is as much an image archive as a history: a book about people trying to draw systems that were meant to explain absolutely everything. Taschen describes it as spanning alchemy, medicine, chemistry, optics, colour theory and esoteric traditions including Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry.

Edition/Condition: Taschen, Cologne, 2021. Bibliotheca Universalis edition. Hardcover. 576 pages, extensively illustrated in colour and black and white. Very light shelf wear; clean and bright internally, binding firm. Near fine condition.