Alchemy Rediscovered and Restored

Archibald Cockren was a practising physician who became disenchanted with the reductionist medical interventions of his day and sought a method of treating the whole person. This led him to alchemy, and to experiments in the spagyric art that produced substances of astonishing therapeutic value.

Alchemy Rediscovered and Restored is Cockren’s attempt to make the physical benefits of the art accessible to everyone, stripped of its tortuous and mystifying symbolism. Cockren gives the reader a brief and accurate history of alchemy, along with biographical accounts of some of the major adepts who have figured in its story. The process of extraction of the alchemical ‘seeds’ or vital essences of various metals is revealed, and Cockren describes the medical elixirs that can be obtained, climaxing with the final step in the great arcanum – the discovery of the alkahest or universal solvent of the philosophers, also known as the philosophers’ stone.

This is a book for all those interested in the alchemical process, one that can be read with profit by adept and newcomer alike.

Archibald Cockren (?-1950) was a practising physician who became disenchanted with the reductionist medical interventions of his day and sought a method of treating the whole person. This led him to alchemy, and to experiments in the spagyric art that produced substances of astonishing therapeutic value. Some interesting insights into the experiments he conducted in his lab in London in the 1930s and the efficacy of some of his medicines can be obtained from Jean-Pascal Ruggiu's article Rosicrucian Alchemy and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (1996), p.12.