A New Light of Alchemy

Edition Statement

This Diotimos edition brings together Michael Sendivogius’s twelve treatises on the philosophers’ stone, their Epilogue, Philosophical Enigma and Parable, the Dialogue of Mercury, the Alchemist and Nature, and the Treatise of Sulphur. Each is newly translated from an early Latin printing. The Latin is printed above the English in aligned passages, with source locators and annotations. The author’s prefatory address and a commendatory poem by Johann Heinrich Alsted are supplied from the 1611 Frankfurt printing. The 1607 Dialogue includes its title and its anonymous friend’s address to the reader; the 1616 Sulphur includes its title, mottos, author’s preface and conclusion.

John French’s 1650 English address To the Reader appears as a historical appendix, with its original wording and a separately labelled modernisation. It records the English reception of this corpus and the larger compilation in which French placed it. French’s nine-book translation of the work attributed to Paracelsus, Of the Nature of Things, and the Dorn-derived dictionary are separate works. Their contents are not silently absorbed into Sendivogius’s text.

The new translation and editorial apparatus were prepared with AI assistance for Diotimos Editions in 2026. Historical source texts are in the public domain. The introduction, essays, glossary, contextual lexicon, reading routes and discussion guide are modern editorial contributions; their interpretations are distinguished from the translated authors’ claims.