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To the medieval alchemists, the world was seen as animation of Spirit and all things possessed Spirit. All objects were seen as possessing spirit and soul qualities. There was a deep interconnectedness between all things. The material imagination contained in celestial bodies and substances, like the Moon and water, was a basis for fully participating with nature. As the Microcosm reflects the macrososm, everything has an intimate relationship with its phenomenal presence, its movements and rhythms. To modern man's perceptions of alchemy, the alchemists' primary matter was not in heaven but could be found in the affairs of the ordinary, mundane world. This prima materia has, as the alchemist's say, a 'thousand names' and is ubiquitous, indicating that anything was suitable matter to be worked on and transformed.

The Swiss psychologist, Dr Carl Jung, began studying alchemy when aged 53. He soon realised that the alchemist was really working symbolically on the transformation of his own psyche. He found in alchemy's bizarre fantasies and afflicted imagery. He found a metaphor for individuation and an ideal portrait of soul-work. Its symbolisms and operations, he saw a projection onto matter of archetypes and psychological processes which occur in the collective unconscious. This is also true of the alchemist's perceptions of reality.

Believing that an individual's psychological state can be assessed alchemically, Jung took the four basic substances found in alchemy (sulphur, salt, lead, and mercury) as metaphors for the way the personality operates in life. The work of individuation, as the differentiation of self, is then to enact lengthy operations on these substances, as if doing alchemy on ourselves. This resulted in Jung's alchemical model of personality as being a development of his better known psychological typology theory. Jung was also able to elucidate the stages of alchemy and relate them to his own insights into the individuation process. This, too, was the alchemist's intent.

The True Alchemists must evolve spiritually before they can perform any materialistic transformations, otherwise they would soon meet their doom.

Alchemy is a very serious art.

Alchemy is also a science, a Science of Soul, which gives one a better understanding of God, Nature, and Man. Alchemy is not merely an intellectual activity, but rather is a spiritual science, because that which belongs to the spirit can only be spiritually known. Alchemy is also a science dealing with material things, for spirit and matter are only two opposite manifestations or poles of the eternal One.

Alchemy is also an art which requires an artist to exercise it. This divine science and art can be practiced only by those who have the proper intent and who are in possession of the Divine Power. External manipulations required for the production of certain alchemical preparations may be taught to anybody capable of reasoning. However, the results that such a person would accomplish would be without life, for only he in whom the true life has awakened, is able awaken that life from its sleep in matter and cause visible forms to grow from the primordial Chaos of nature.

Chapter 1

Of the generation of metals in the bowels of the earth.

Chapter 2

Of Nature and art.

Chapter 3

Refutes an opinion of some in this art, and the philosophical art is laid down in a very few words.

Chapter 4

Delivers why the Philosophers have sought for this art ,not moved them to it, and this question is resolved: why the spirit in metals cannot propagate its like, since the spirit of everything is the author of generation.

Chapter 5

Treats of what the philosophers stone is, and discourses first of its first part.

Chapter 6

Treats of the second part of the stone, where the spirit is compared to the most glorious virgin Saint Mary.

Chapter 7

Determines why the philosophers have hidden this knowledge: where the praise of the art is set down, and he inveighs against Zoilus the Carper as the philosophers.

Chapter 8 and 9

Treats of the first essence of all things: and it is here discussed what Nature is, what the soul the middle nature, what the soul of the world, where that very great error is confuted of philosophers asserting the world to be an animal, and it is disputed that there is only a human soul; by a participation or likeness of which, there seems to be a brutal soul. And that the sun is the eye of the world and the heart of heaven.

Chapter 10

What the Philosophers, and what sort of Nature they would have: where the spirit is said to be the ethereal chariot of the soul.

Chapter 11

Teaches that solution is necessary, by which the generative spirit is brought out of the body.

Chapter 12

Disputes of hidden things in the art, and about threefold separation.

Chapter 13

Treats of the praxis of the stone, of its first solution, and separation: where the arcanum of Nature, otherwise most abstruse, is laid open to a son of wisdom, in which Lucifer falls out of heaven.

Chapter 14

Disputes about the second part of the praxis, where there is a more secret dispute about the fire and the colours: and these questions are resolved: Whether heaven ought to descend to the earth: Or the earth ascend into heaven: Or whether both ought to remain beneath heaven? Where the spirit is compared to an angel, who seems to descend with a human soul into a body.

Chapter 15

Explains this proposition: In the shade of the sun is the heat of the moon; and in the heat of the moon is the cold of the sun. Likewise how it is known in the moon, the sun ought to shine. What the shade of the sun and the moon is, and that it is necessary that the sun and the moon and likewise heaven and earth be joined, and makes mention of the citrine Aurora.

Chapter 16

Of the augmentation it self of the stone, both of the ancients and the modern Philosophers: and it is concluded that there is but one day and one night. Again seven days from the seven lords of the world.

Chapter 17

Explains certain obscure proportions laid down in the books of this science.

Chapter 18

Shows that the stone can cure all sicknesses: since all Nature is in the sun, and the sun in Nature, and especially in the stone.

Chapter 19

Repeats the Philosophical praxis, where the divine skill of the stone is often times all of it set down in short sentences.

Chapter 20

Lays down the Questions put by Illardus the Necromancer to the devil, concerning the stone of the Philosophers.