This new and completely redesigned edition creates a colourful and vibrant guide to the secret art. Klossowski de Rola elucidates the mysterious language and polyvalent symbolism from a variety of perspectives practical, spiritual, elemental and historical and explains how the true alchemist differs from the modern chemist and the false practitioner. Gold is only a by-product and emblem of the Great Work of the alchemist.

The latter part of the book comprises the full text of a seventeenth-century exposition upon an alchemists dream-poem, and five richly illustrated Themes sections, reproducing full sequences of alchemical thought, art and paraphernalia.