#000531
Alchemy: The Medieval Alchemists and their Royal Art
Johannes Fabricius
Johannes Fabricius's *Alchemy* is a lavishly illustrated study of the alchemical tradition, presenting more than two hundred rare plates — many in color — alongside an interpretation of what the strange images of the "royal art" actually mean. Working largely in the tradition of C. G. Jung, Fabricius reads alchemy's symbolism of dissolution and union, king and queen, sun and moon, as a map of inner psychological transformation as much as a chemical craft. The reproductions gather in one place a body of alchemical imagery hard to find elsewhere. It speaks to readers interested in Hermetic and esoteric traditions, the history of ideas, and Jungian approaches to symbol and the psyche — with the pictures the real treasure.
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The author
Johannes Fabricius was a Danish scholar who wrote on alchemy and psychology in a broadly Jungian vein, treating alchemical texts as documents of the inner life. His approach places him within the twentieth-century revival of interest in alchemy as psychological and spiritual symbolism rather than proto-chemistry alone.
The book
First published in Copenhagen by Rosenkilde and Bagger in 1976 (and later reissued in paperback), the book is built around its extraordinary trove of alchemical illustrations, which Fabricius arranges and interprets as stages of a symbolic "work."
How to read it
Scholars have been candid that the book's chief value lies in its pictures: reviewers note that despite the "medieval" subtitle, many plates actually come from the 16th and 17th centuries, and that the interpretive text is more Jungian meditation than rigorous history. Read it for the imagery and as a Jungian reading, and turn to academic histories of alchemy for scholarly grounding.
For more context
Compare with Jung's own Psychology and Alchemy and with modern historical studies of the subject.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Johannes Fabricius
- Publisher
- Rosenkilde and Bagger
- Place of publication
- Copenhagen
- Year
- 1976
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Spirituality & Philosophy
- Location
- Colorado