All Alchemists

Alchemists are held apart from the broader company of magicians and diviners because their own discipline is a laboratory practice as much as a spiritual one: transmutation, distillation and the search for the philosopher's stone treated matter and soul as a single working, from the furnaces of Hellenistic Egypt and medieval China through the Renaissance physician-alchemists to Isaac Newton's own biblical chronology and unpublished alchemical notebooks. A figure belongs here for practicing or theorizing the Great Work itself, distinct from the ceremonial magicians, astrologers and card readers who form their own headings.