Thirteen Books of the Great Work: Complete Foundational Texts of Alchemy, Hermeticism and the Esoteric Tradition

Thirteen books. Complete. In the order they were made.

Eighteen centuries of the hermetic tradition, printed entire in one volume: from a Greek verse fragment that survives only because other people quoted it while arguing, to a London handbook of seventy-eight tarot cards.

Not selections. Not summaries. Not photographs of somebody else's copy. Every text is set fresh in type, with nothing smoothed, modernised or corrected — and where two old versions disagree, both readings are printed and the disagreement is left standing.

The thirteen: The Chaldean Oracles · The Corpus Hermeticum · The Sepher Yetzirah · The Emerald Tablet · Fama Fraternitatis · Confessio Fraternitatis · The Chymical Wedding · Atalanta Fugiens · Mutus Liber · Transcendental Magic · The Kybalion · The Pictorial Key to the Tarot · Symbols of the Great Work.

They are in date order, so the borrowings are visible. You can watch one book take an image from another two centuries earlier and not say where it came from.

And a thirteenth book, written for this edition. Every text here uses the marks of the art and not one of them explains them, because they were written for readers who already knew — and those readers are four hundred years dead. So the last book supplies what the other twelve assumed: ninety-eight entries, each mark drawn to the form the record best attests, with its sources, its uses and its limits.

At the back: a symbol key on grids · tables of correspondence · a lexicon of every term, with the disagreements recorded · sources and provenance for every text and plate · a concordance index · the twelve operations compared across all thirteen books.

777 pages · 98 symbols · 18 centuries · 13 book · 7 languages