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20th April 2000.
For the past week I have been working almost exclusively on making a coloured version of an obscure 17th century alchemical manuscript called the Speculum veritatis. This 'Mirror of truth' is in the library of the Vatican and as far as I know is unique, no other example having been found. The work consists of 12 pen drawings. I find that the exercise of painting these images over an extended period allows me to gain a insight into the symbolism and structure of alchemical iconography that I do not get from merely looking at or contemplating such images. The whole task of making a painted version leads me to discover symbolic elements which are not so readily visible. I especially find the structure of the sequence can become more clear to me when I work with emblems in this way. I also know, from my past experience, that by placing these images on the wall so that I can occasionally glance at them, I somehow absorb the symbolism and this can lead to a gradual deeping of my understanding and insight into the symbolic sequence. Often I find myself rearranging the pattern in they are placed, as the way in which each image reflects or responds to another can reveal aspects of the symbolic sequence. So now I will have to spend a couple more days framing these, and find a space for this fascenating sequence somewhere in my ever shrinking wall space. I currently have well over 300 paintings on display and many more yet to be framed.

15th April 2000.
Yesterday, by happy accident while quickly glancing through Thomas Vaughan's Coelum Terrae, as one does on a quiet Friday morning, I found a little allegory embedded in the text. This immediately attracted me as its imagery seemed very familiar. On looking at Rudrum's edition I was really interested to see that he identified this text as coming from the Georgius Beatus Azoth, Frankfurt, 1613, which is usually attributed to Basil Valentine. Coincidentally, I have been working over the past month on the series of engravings from this book, and have been preparing handcoloured versions. I have been looking for an English translation of this text for some time. None was ever published, but I was hoping that there might be an translation in manuscript. There is no obvious version in the main collections in Britain, but there still may be one wrongly described in the catalogue. The text itself is not especially long so it may be worth my considering translating it from the Latin, though even a short text like this of 5-6000 words would take me some months to translate. If I could afford the time I might then publish this as an edition with my fourteen coloured plates. However, if I am honest with myself, I suspect that this will not get done as I will not be able to allocate enough of my time to work in a concerted way upon this project. After all, I have a substantial backlog of uncompleted projects which I wish I had time to bring to completion.

14th April 2000.
This morning I when I was reading the messages on a e-mail discussion group on alchemy, I was rather dismayed to find someone voicing the view that most of the information about alchemy has died with the alchemists, and that few alchemists even wrote this down. Now to myself, as someone who daily comes into contact with original alchemical material, such an erroneous view is rather dispiriting.
For the past 20 years, at least, I have been trying to get people to look at the vast literature of alchemical books and manuscripts. Very few people seem willing to do any primary research into alchemy, preferring to speculate without any real knowledge of the tradition. This material did not die with the alchemists. It survives in their alchemical diaries and notebooks, their writings on the distillation of herbs, their recipe books, the complex allegories, exquisite emblematic symbolism and intricate statements on the philosophy and methods of alchemy. All these things are there waiting to be read.
I have been investigating these sources for nearly 30 years, and few are interested. People just say "Oh McLean, he's a bookworm, he knows nothing about real alchemy". Well I can say that the answers to all questions on alchemy are found within the literature of alchemy. I cannot understand people turning their backs upon the actual real statements of alchemists, as found in their writings. I can estimate that less that 1% of all alchemical writings have been published in modern editions (throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries). So what treasures must there be to find in the remaining 99% ? Few seem interested in finding out. Here in my home town of Glasgow is the largest collection of alchemical books and manuscripts in the world. Sadly, I only find one or two people a year visiting this collection to do research. If people won't look they won't find. They will waste their energies and life speculating on the basis of inadequate and incomplete information.
It seems to me that people do damage to the alchemical tradition by not recognising the existence of this mass of original material. The answers to alchemical questions can be found in the books and manuscripts of the alchemical tradition. But, apart from a handful of scholars, no one seems willing to spend the time investigating these.
When I set out on my alchemical journey some 30 years ago, I had hoped that I might, in some small way, inspire people to cease speculating and improvising alchemical ideas out of their own imaginations and actually look at the original source material which is held in libraries and special collections. But, sadly, few seem interested in looking for the truth of alchemy, which lies in the writings of the alchemists themselves. People will only find a minute sample of this on the web !!! Merely a few grains of sand. They have to be prepared to do some hard work and undertake real research, to dig out the riches from alchemical books and manuscript.
I do despair sometimes for the future of alchemy. We must not turn our backs on what the real alchemists had to say. It is all there if only we are prepared to spend the time and research effort to uncover it. We surely must begin by realising the depths of our ignorance about alchemy and that we can only rectify this by reading the words of the alchemists. Without a continuing living encounter with the writings of the alchemists, people will just huff and puff and intellectually speculate to little end.

11th April 2000.
Over the past few weeks I have often found myself contemplating the ways in which people today explore the practical side of alchemy. Many people wanting to do practical experiments seem to follow the spagyric method using plant material popularised by Frater Albertus in the late 1970's and 1980's. This method, designed in modern times though claiming some kind of link to Paracelsism, involves preparing medicines using a quite simple and entirely repeatable laboratory procedure. Indeed, it is really just the simple chemistry of fractional distillation familiar to any lab technician working with organic materials. When one looks at the original alchemical texts, recipes and notebooks of 16th and 17th century alchemists, we find little connection to this spagyric technique. Yet people like to work with it. It gives them something. Although the end-products of the Frater Albertus spagyric technique are remedies and preparations that are claimed to cure all sorts of medical conditions, I suspect that few people are actually motivated by wanting to prepare medicines. What seems to drive people is a need to undertake an experiment, to be closely involved in a practical work with matter in which some changes can be observed. Thus it is not so much the end-product that is important but the experience of doing the work. This has always been my own attitude to practical alchemical work. I see this as experiental alchemy, where what is important is experiencing the various processes through which matter changes in chemical work and not the end goal of making a remedy. Some years ago, in the early 80's, I worked with this experiental alchemy in a series of articles in the Hermetic Journal. No one was then interested in my approach, so I gave up writing about this after producing seven articles. It may be that I may try and revive this idea of an experiental alchemy. This would be a series of practical experiments the purpose of which was to give people a direct experience of the various alchemical process which one can read about in alchemical texts - the putrefaction - the reddening - calcination - coagulation/congelation - and so on. Today people have so little connection to these processes, indeed only through intellectual abstractions in their minds which do not necessarily incorporate anything of the actual experience of such alchemical processes. It may be timely to try to devise experiments that allow us to experience these processes. It seems to me that people are often undertaking the Albertus inspired spagyric work, because they want these experiences rather that to make medications. It may be that the Albertus experiments are too limited by having a fixed goal, and that freed from the need to create some kind of medically active end-product, it might be possible to design experiments that bring one into a direct encounter with alchemical processes. Once one knows clearly through experience what a calcination or putrefaction is, one is much more able to understand alchemical texts, and the inner work with symbolism.

9th April 2000.
I have spent some time in the past few days reacquainting myself with early English alchemical poetry, especially those poems that Ashmole collected in his Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum. I have not really focussed myself on these works for quite a few years and it has been a most valuable experience for me to read these again. Works such as John Dastin's Dream, Pearce the Black Monk on the Elixir and The Hunting of the Green Lion are really magnificent allegorical expressions of the alchemical work. One rarely sees these quoted from or commented upon in recent books of alchemy, which is rather sad as these are such important works. Of course, the problem lies in the language. Few people nowadays can read this late 15th/early 16th century English. It is not just a matter of the spelling, but the means of expression and the occasional torturing of the grammar to keep the rhyme. I feel I would like very much to do something to resurrect these old verses and make them somewhat more readable again, so I will try over the coming months to edit these into a more approachable English. The scholars will, naturally, despair that I should hack at and wound this early English verse, but I will do so in order to try to bring these poems to a wider audience. I may incorporate some of these into a study course I am planning on alchemical allegories for next year.

7th April 2000.
I was recently looking at English alchemical verse and remembered an interesting short piece written in the late 16th century or early years of the 17th century by the notorious Simon Forman, physician, astrologer, magician and alchemist. This poem is an alchemical interpretation of Genesis, quite clearly expressed. Looking at it reminded me that a number of alchemical writers had used the Genesis account as a parallel to the alchemical process, indeed seeing God as a kind of divine alchemist. I have made some time from my other work this morning to transcribe the poem and have now placed it onto the web site (forman_chaos.html). Forman is a remarkable individual and though his life and interests in magic and astrology have been quite well researched, his alchemical writings are almost entirely unknown and uninvestigated. It would be interesting to look at other alchemical interpretations of Genesis. Of course, people who love to indulge in wild speculation will immediately want to say that this shows that alchemy had its roots in Genesis, Judaism (or even Kabbalah!), but this merely indicates that alchemists were using the cosmology of their day (the Genesis picture) as a means for envisaging alchemy, in much the same way that some alchemical writers today draw on contemporary cosmology, quantum theory and fundamental physics to picture alchemy.

5th April 2000.
Today, through the generosity of a colleague, I have been lent a copy of a very rare German alchemical journal published in Berlin from 1927 to 1930. I have known of the existence of this for a few years but never had access to a copy here in Britain. The Alchemistische Blaetter 'Alchemical leaves' (or more prosaically perhaps 'alchemical newspaper'), is a truly remarkable production, and was edited by Otto Barth. His opening editorial sets its agenda of pursuing alchemy from all its facets, bringing together both the scholarly, and the more esoteric, mystical and speculative approach. Thus important scholars such as Ernst Darmstaedter and Gersholm Scholem, write alongside the more speculative writers such as Jollivet-Castelot and Ferdinand Maack, and others given to esoteric speculation writing pseudonymously. It includes some transcriptions of alchemical texts, such the 'Twelve keys of Basil Valentine'. It even has an article on the famous alchemical gate the 'Porta Magica' in Rome. This magazine only survived a few years until 1930. With its openness to esoteric and mystical ideas and to Jewish writers, it could surely not have survived much longer. These 'alchemical leaves' show a budding growth of interest in alchemy in Germany, just before such free intellectual and spiritual perception was to be swept away in the chaos of fascism. One is led to wonder what happened to some of the writers in this journal over the following decade. But for me this journal shows us how alchemy is eternally renewable, and that it always seems to find new ways of speaking to different generations and cultures.

4th April 2000.
I have just been re-reading the excellent article by Michela Pereira which was published in the journal Speculum in issue 74 last year. Here Michela Pereira, one of the leading alchemical scholars of our time turns her attention to the early alchemical works written in the vernacular European languages in distinction to those in Latin. She shows that there were surprisingly few works written in the vernacular during the early period of the 15th and 16th centuries. As regards English alchemical works, I was reminded that many of these were in verse. Thus the verses of John Dastin, Ripley, Norton and others. I took a look at a listing of these in an article in Ambix and found that 53 middle English alchemical poems had so far been discovered. By serendipity, one of the most important ways of undertaking research, I came across an article on a 14th century English writer on alchemy, Walter of Odington, a Benedictine monk who may have been at Merton College in Oxford between 1316 and 1330. In his work the Icocedron (written in Latin not English - the title refers the the fact that the work has 20 chapters), Walter of Odington tries to bring a sense of quantity into the elementary qualities. Most people then viewed the world as composed of qualities, such as the four primary elements earth, water, air and fire, but Walter of Odington wants us to see these elemental qualities as having four grades or quantities. Thus heat has four degrees, as does moistness, coldness and dryness. I am not sure if this was the source of the later widespread idea of the four degrees of heat, which we see for example in the famous Mylius engraving. He was probably not the originator of this alchemical idea, but it is nevertheless interesting that this was being written about in the early 14th century.

3rd April 2000.
Having recently read an essay by John Ferguson's in the old Journal of the Alchemical Society, yesterday I decided to take another look at the Marrow of Alchemy that amazing English alchemical poem of the late 17th century which was published under the name of Eirenĉus Philoponus Philaletha. It is rather interesting that the author of this work goes to great lengths to hide and simultaneously show his identity. This is, of course, quite common with alchemical authors. The author of the preface names himself 'Egregius Christo' which is an anagram of 'Georgis Sturcius', close to the supposed author of the book 'George Starkey'. However, he introduces in the preface and in the second book of the first part of the Marrow, another elaborate device for concealing the authorship. Here he suggests that three persons had a hand in writing the text. Philalethes ('lover of truth') the master teacher, Philoponos ('lover of industry, the work'), the actual author of the text, and Starkey himself as editor.

29th March 2000.
I have been given permission to browse the stacks of one of the special alchemical collection to which I have access. This is enabling me to quickly scan through a considerable number of alchemical books looking for illustrations that I have not yet seen. I would very much like to be able to say that I have viewed all the alchemical emblems, woodcuts and engravings, that were ever printed. There may still be a few items for me to discover, but I am already very familiar with all of the main series. What remains are single illustrations, usually engraved frontispieces, in obscure alchemical books. I have found a few of these in the past few days - mostly in relatively late publications from the 18th century. One in particular, comes to mind, a frontispiece from Geheimnisse einiger Philosophen und Adepten 1780. This shows a cross with roses, echoing the well known sevenfold rose of Robert Fludd, and here it has a beehive with an alchemical flask on top. The Fludd engraving had 'Dat rosa mel apibus' - "The rose gives honey to the bee", and this later engraving seems to reflect that, perhaps in a more alchemical way. I will eventually make a coloured version of this emblem and place it in my web site galleries.
I would dearly love to be able to see a substantial number of the illustrative material in alchemical manuscripts, but this is more difficult to achieve, requiring funding I do hot have to travel to libraries all over Europe. I have of course seen a considerable amount of manuscript material over the years, but I am so aware that there is so much material yet to view.

28th March 2000.
A colleague e-mailed me about a book which I have heard of some years ago but never seen. Mercury: A History of Quicksilver by Leonard J. Goldwater,1972,York Press, ISBN 0-912752-01-7. This appears to make a survey of Mercury in history and of course must touch upon alchemy. I will try and find a copy of this.

27th March 2000.
I have today managed to locate a copy of a book for which I have been looking for some time. The particular edition of this work seems to be very rare as it is not in the collections I have readily available to me. I came across this last year when I read William Newman's book Gehenical Fire. The lives of George Starkey. Contained is this book are reproductions (of rather poor quality) of a series of engravings in the Opera Omnia of Philalethes published at Modena in 1695. I had recognised that this series is an engraved version of the 'Speculum veritatis' manuscript in the Vatican (Codex Latinus 7286). This should be quite familiar to many as it is reproduced in Klossowski de Rola's Alchemy volume. I have been trying to find the 1695 edition for some time so I was delighted to locate a copy in the Library of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. This library in London, located next to the new British Library at St Pancras, has an excellent collection of books on the history of medicine and thus it covers alchemy in some detail. It also has a fine collection of alchemical manuscripts which I have looked at many times in the past. Unfortunately it has been quite a few years since I was able to visit this library. Their catalogue is now online.

26th March 2000.
I have been trying to research the illustrations found in the books of the late 18th century mystical writer Karl von Eckartshausen. These engravings seem to be almost the last appearance of hermetic emblems. Unfortunately I do not have access to these books here in Glasgow. I searched online German bookshops to see if there were any recent studies or reprints of these which might include the engravings, but with little success. A quick search of German secondhand dealers for original copies made me realise immediately the rarity of these books - some were on sale for 500DM or so. I would very much like to see all these engravings, and will try to locate some source for these.

25th March 2000.
Today I was delighted to received in the post a little book on alchemy published recently (1995) in Havana, Cuba. This is by Alberto Garcia Fumero De la alquimia a la quimica. It may not be a especially significant work on alchemy, being merely a somewhat humorous survey of alchemy in the history of chemistry, but to me its significance lies in the fact that it was published in Cuba. It demonstrates to me the continuing interest all over the world in alchemy. Early this year I managed to obtain a book on alchemy from Mexico, and I was especially gratified in being able to buy a substantial set of the 'Samizdat' or underground publications on alchemy which were circulating in Czechoslovakia during the 1980's when it was still under communist rule, and the presses were not, in general, free to publish such material. I am always looking out for such obscure items which demonstrate the continuing widespread interest in alchemy.
Yesterday I was surprised to see an illustration based on the 'Cabala mineralis' alchemical manuscript on a poster in my local underground station here in Glasgow. This used one of Vasily Kafanov's paintings and was being used to advertise music by the Smashing Pumpkins. Old foggies like me, of course, have never heard their music, so I searched the internet, found their web site, and downloaded a screen saver promo for their latest album. This has the Vasily Kafanov images. I also was able to listen to some of their music, but my untrained ear could detect few alchemical resonances.

24th March 2000.
Looked at a manuscript version of figures from Orthelius' commentary on Sendivogius. I was particularly interested in seeing the first illustration, as it was unclear exactly what was depicted in the engraved version of this figure. I was able to see that it was a river that was descending from the mountain.
I tried to locate an English translation of the Orthelius without success. I looked at the Latin version in the Theatrum Chemicum. This seemed quite interesting on a cursory glance, but though relatively short - I doubt whether I would have the time to translate it.
I received an e-mail telling me about a novel published in 1831 by William Godwin (1756-1836), St. Leon: a tale of the sixteenth century. It is, apparently, about a man who is given the philosopher's stone and the tragedy that befell him. It may be a source of the ideas for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. There is a copy in Glasgow University Library and I will try and take a look at this on my next visit.