When I heard of this book, an interest in the more interesting side of alchemy was stirred. There are plenty book about the history of alchemy, but I was very interested to run into a book that portrays Alchemy as a spiritual path. I found an English translation freely available online. The translation is from the hand of no one less than Pierce Vaughan who apparently translated the French works of the French Martinist Robert Ambelain (1907 – 1997) in the year 2005 and put them online as PDFs at the website AlchemyStudy.com.
The book starts promising. Ambelain starts to explain Alchemy as a coherent structure of symbolism and opens with a dictionary. After a while the book more leans towards being a spiritual guidebook with practices and prayers.
Ambelain proves to have been inspired by interesting fellows such as Jean Baptiste Willermoz (1730-1824) and Martinés de Pasqually (1727-1774).
Like I said, the book starts interestingly, but gets less so along the way. But since the book is free and now available for non-French-reading audiences, it does not hurt to give it a go. There is more too!
Translated and published digitally in 2005 by Piers Vaughan
