Alchemy & Mysticism by Alexander Roob: An Honest Review

🕑 14 min read

What This Book Is

Taschen published Alchemie und Mystik: Das hermetische Museum in German in 1996, and it has appeared since in English as Alchemy and Mysticism in several formats. It runs to 576 pages and it is illustrated throughout.

The structure is thematic. Chapters open with a short introduction by Alexander Roob, and the body of each is a run of plates with captions, punctuated by quotations from the alchemists themselves. Most topics receive between six and ten images. Where a subject carries more weight, a page or two of continuous text appears.

The historical arc runs from the medieval cosmogram, through Christian mystical illustration, into the alchemical corpus proper, then onward to Kabbalistic, Rosicrucian and Masonic imagery, early scientific illustration in medicine, chemistry, optics and colour theory, and finally into Romantic art. That last move is the book's most distinctive editorial claim, and it is a real argument: the visual language of hermeticism did not stop at the end of the seventeenth century, it went into the Romantics.

Which Edition to Buy

This is the practical question and most reviews skip it.

The book exists in a large-format edition, in a mid-size edition, and in the compact Bibliotheca Universalis hardcover, which is the one most commonly sold now and the one carrying the lowest price. The page count and the content are essentially the same across them. The reproduction size is not.

Alchemical plates are dense. A single engraving from Khunrath or Fludd can carry forty distinct elements, each of which is doing work. Printed at compact-edition size, a good deal of that becomes texture rather than information. You can see that a figure is holding something. You cannot always see what.

What Is Actually Inside

The organising division is the ancient one between macrocosm and microcosm, the universe and the human being understood as versions of each other. Nearly every image in the book is doing something with that correspondence.

You get the cosmological diagrams: spheres, ladders, chains of being, the Ptolemaic universe rendered as a devotional object. You get the operative sequence of alchemy, the stages of the work with their colour changes, from blackening through whitening to reddening, illustrated repeatedly by different hands across four centuries. You get the recurring figures: the king and queen, the hermaphrodite, the green lion, the pelican, the ouroboros, the dragon, the tree, the vessel, the sun and moon in conjunction.

Then the material widens. Boehme's diagrams of the divine nature. Fludd's cosmologies with their monochord tuning the universe. Khunrath's laboratory-oratory, where the apparatus and the prayer desk share a room. Kabbalistic tree diagrams. Rosicrucian emblem plates. Early anatomical and optical illustration, placed deliberately beside the hermetic material to show how little separated them at the time.

The Romantic section at the end includes Blake, and the juxtaposition earns its place. Blake's visual grammar becomes considerably less eccentric when you have just spent four hundred pages in the tradition he was working from.

The Plates You Will Recognise

If you have read anything in this field, you will meet old acquaintances, and the book is at its most useful as a way of finally seeing complete what you have previously met in fragments.

The Rosarium Philosophorum woodcuts are here, the twenty-image sequence of the alchemical marriage that Jung used as the spine of his work on transference. Splendor Solis, the most sumptuous of all illuminated alchemical manuscripts, supplies several of the book's most striking pages. Mutus Liber, the silent book that transmits an entire operation in fifteen wordless plates, appears in extract. So does Atalanta Fugiens, Michael Maier's emblem book with its fifty engravings, epigrams and musical fugues.

Seeing these together does something that reading about them separately does not. Motifs migrate. A device appearing in a fifteenth century manuscript turns up re-engraved in a seventeenth century printed book and again in a Romantic painting, and the migration is visible in a way no amount of description conveys. That is the argument the book makes without stating it, and it is the strongest thing in the volume.

The Sequence the Plates Keep Repeating

One structure recurs so often across the book that it is worth naming, because once you have it the plates start to organise themselves.

The work proceeds through colour changes. The nigredo, the blackening, is putrefaction and dissolution, and it is illustrated by death: a corpse, a coffin, a crow, a black sun. The albedo, the whitening, is purification, and it arrives with the moon, the white queen, the swan, the washing of the body. The rubedo, the reddening, is the completion, and it brings the sun, the king, the phoenix, the red stone. Some authors insert a fourth stage of iridescence, the peacock's tail, between the first and second.

Almost every illustrated alchemical sequence in this book is a version of that progression, drawn by different hands with different emphases. Once you recognise it, you can pick up any plate in the volume and locate roughly where in the work it sits, which is the single most useful orientation the material offers.

The stages also explain the recurring violence. Beheadings, dismemberments, drownings and burials appear constantly in these images, and they are not morbid decoration. They depict the first stage, in which something has to be broken down before anything can be made from it. Readers who find the imagery disturbing are reading it correctly.

What the Images Meant to the People Who Drew Them

There is an argument running through the modern study of this material that changes how the plates should be read, and the book does not stage it.

For most of the twentieth century the received view separated alchemy from chemistry: alchemy was spiritual or psychological, chemistry was the real science that replaced it. Jung's work rests on that division, treating the imagery as projections of unconscious content onto matter.

Historians of science including Lawrence Principe and William Newman have made a strong case that the division is a later invention. Their work shows that many alchemical texts describe specific laboratory procedures in coded language, and that when the codes are decrypted the operations can be performed and produce the described results. Principe's reconstruction of the silver tree, a branching crystalline growth produced from mercury and silver, is the best known demonstration: a phenomenon that reads as pure symbolism in the texts turns out to be something you can make on a bench.

This matters for anyone looking at these plates. An image showing a tree growing inside a sealed flask may be an emblem of spiritual growth, and it may also be a reasonably accurate picture of something the artist had watched happen in glass. The tradition did not experience those as alternatives, and the modern instinct to pick one is an artefact of a split that the alchemists themselves did not make.

Where the Book Falls Short

Three failures, none fatal, all worth knowing before you buy.

The captions are too thin for the images. A plate that encodes a full operation gets two or three lines. Attributions are generally present and the level of sourcing detail varies. If you intend to cite an image, trace it back to the original manuscript or printed edition rather than relying on the caption.

There is no path through it. The book assumes you already know what the nigredo is and why the crow appears at that stage. A newcomer gets an overwhelming quantity of striking pictures and very little idea of what to do next. Roob's prose is also allusive rather than expository, which suits the subject and does not help a beginner.

The apparatus is minimal. For a reference volume of this size, the ability to find things again matters, and the finding aids are weaker than the content deserves. You will end up making your own notes about where things are.

The Problem With Image Anthologies

There is a deeper issue, and it applies to every book of this kind rather than to this one specifically.

Alchemical images were built to carry several meanings simultaneously. A single plate can encode a laboratory procedure, a stage of interior work, an astrological correspondence, a scriptural allusion and a piece of deliberate misdirection to protect the operation from the uninitiated. The tradition regarded that density as the point. The images were never meant to be read the way a diagram is read.

An anthology gives you the surface of all of it and the operative context of none of it. The risk is a specific kind of false fluency: a reader who has spent time with six hundred plates begins to feel that they can read alchemical imagery, when what they have actually acquired is recognition. Knowing that the green lion devouring the sun is a recurring motif is not the same as knowing what it meant to the person who drew it, and the second question has answers that differ by author, by century and by whether the writer was working in a laboratory.

Our guide to alchemy symbols covers the standard vocabulary, and the philosopher's stone takes the central object in detail. Those give you the keys this book assumes you already have.

The Artist Who Made It

Alexander Roob is a German painter and a professor of fine art. He is not a historian of science and the book was not produced inside an academic apparatus.

This shows in both directions. The selection is made by someone looking at these as pictures, attentive to composition, to how a plate is put together, to visual rhyme across centuries. A historian would likely have organised by chronology and provenance and produced something more reliable and much less interesting to look through. The arrangement here follows resonance, and the result is that the book reads like a well-hung exhibition.

The cost is exactly what you would predict. Where a plate raises a contested historical question, the book generally does not tell you that it is contested. Where a caption offers an interpretation, it usually presents it as the meaning rather than as one reading. For a picture book this is a venial sin. For anyone building an argument on the material it is a reason to check.

What to Read Alongside

For the psychological reading: Jung's Alchemical Studies and Mysterium Coniunctionis. He is the reason most modern readers care about these images at all, and his interpretation is a twentieth century framework applied to material that had its own purposes. Hold it as one reading.

For the individual works: our dedicated guides to the Turba Philosophorum and the illustrated books listed above. One manuscript studied properly is worth more than a thousand plates skimmed.

For the intellectual history: Frances Yates on the Rosicrucian Enlightenment, which places the imagery inside the political and scientific world that produced it.

For the texts: our comparison of Hermetica translations, since the philosophical corpus underneath this visual tradition is available and most readers of the pictures have never gone to it.

Who Should Buy It

Buy it if you make things. Artists, illustrators, designers, tattooists and writers get more out of this book than scholars do, and that is not a criticism of either group.

Buy it if you read Jung and want to see the material he was actually looking at.

Buy it if you want to find out what exists. The book's best function is orientation: it shows you the whole field so you can choose what to study properly.

Do not buy it as your first book on alchemy. Do not buy it expecting explanations. And do not buy the compact edition if your eyes need the detail, because the price difference will feel small next to the frustration.

Frequently Asked Questions