Two works carry most of the corpus's fame. The Twelve Keys, first printed in 1599, describes the preparation of the philosophers' stone in twelve allegorical stages, each a short enigmatic text later paired with a striking emblematic engraving; the sequence became one of the most reproduced allegories in all of alchemical literature, endlessly copied, illustrated and commented on. The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony, published in 1604, is by contrast startlingly concrete: a sustained treatise on the preparations of antimony, their manufacture and their medical uses, defending the metal's remedies against the Galenist physicians of the day.
The corpus popularized the doctrine that all substances contain three principles, mercury, sulfur and salt, extending the Paracelsian tria prima, and its practical recipes could often be repeated at the bench, which gave the books unusual staying power as chemistry emerged from chymistry. Isaac Newton, among many others, read and annotated Basilian texts closely. That the author was almost certainly not a medieval monk changes none of this influence, but it matters for how the books are read: they are documents of the decades around 1600, their monastic frame a piece of publishing theater, and the atlas records both the persona and the real, still partly unresolved question of who stood behind it.