Includes bibliographical references (pages 181-196) and index.

China: the golden rod to immortality -- India: the way of tantra and mercury -- Roman Egypt: the white and the yellow arising from blackness -- The Islamic world: balance and magic numbers -- Mediaeval Europe: translations, debates and symbols -- The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: pretension, fraud and redeeming the world -- The Rosicrucian episode and its aftermath -- Theology wearing a mask of science: the later seventeenth century -- Alchemy in an age of self-absorption: the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries -- A child of earlier times: the twentieth century.

In this account religious scientists such as Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle rub shoulders with honest obsessives and conscious frauds in a fast-paced narrative which demonstrates just how mistaken is the generally accepted view of alchemy, and how much more fascinating and engaging is its genuine history.

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