Bench and soul

Alchemy is famously double: its operations describe both a laboratory procedure and a spiritual discipline, and the tradition itself often refuses to separate them, so that the calcination of a metal and the mortification of the ego are spoken of in the same words. The atlas describes the operations in both registers, as the tradition understood them.

The entries give each operation its process, its place in the sequence, and its symbolism. The colour stages that mark the work's progress, and the principles the operations act upon, are treated in their own categories under Texts & the Canon and the elements section.