The Hermetic Museum: Alchemy And Mysticism
by Alexander Roob
(Taschen £12.99)

MAKING sense of the world is hard enough in the 21st century, even with all the available paraphernalia of science, philosophies galore and contending religious beliefs to choose from.

Spare a thought then for the souls of the Middle Ages who had only the most rudimentary empiric tools to satiate their desire to comprehend the terrestrial and celestial universes.

Alchemy And Mysticism is a reprint of the Alexander Roob classic, first published in 1997, whose accessible, almanac style charts that quest.

It’s also a fascinating mine of information, whose erudite text is accompanied by spectacular illustrations. They range from medieval woodcuts, 16th-18th century colour book panels and assorted diagrams to William Blake illustrations.

Marrying the keenly observed structures and motions of the heavens to the earthly domain required colossal acrobatics in logic that were routinely complicated by the ideological scrutiny of the Holy See in Rome.

The search for universal harmony and all-encompassing spirituality — the philosopher’s stone — was to be traced to Adam’s fall “from celestial androgynity,” the divine state of grace that protected against the “devil’s temptations.”

Hence Adam, “a woman and a man at the same time,” had the philosopher’s stone within his grasp until his head was turned by Lucifer, according to the mystic Jacob Bohme. This prompted a separation from his feminine self Sophia — wisdom — and the ensuing “corruption and death.”

Finding the path back to that lost paradise and restoring universal homogeneity has absorbed alchemists and mystics for the best part of the last 2,000 years.

In the 12th century Joachim of Fiore prophesied that “insight would replace literal, textual understanding and the primal language of paradise that named all things according to their true essence would be revealed again,” thus rendering all the mysteries of nature an open book.

The quest of alchemy is pursued impressively by Roob. Often misconceived and ill-informed, it was heroically resourceful in the advent of empiric scientific enquiry in the 17th century and ultimately a pathetically inadequate pursuit by the end of the 19th century. Mystics like Madame Blavatsky were ridiculed by WB Yeats and James Joyce but capable of bewitching Max Beckman, Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian.

And only the most heartless materialist would begrudge the hippies of the 1960s their search for astral bodies and spiritual meaning in a hostile world.

Thus this book is a compendium of a mostly wild goose chase. Yet it distracted many a brilliant mind with the illusion that docility and servility in the face of God’s creationist will was preferable to the acquisition of knowledge that would ultimately lead to questioning his/her existence and, in the process, constitute mankind’s freedom.