I n t r o d u c t i o n

The art and science of Alchemy has been an integral and inseparable element in the biblical faith which has produced the culture and civilization of the West. It is also called the Q.B.L. as well as Hermetic Philosophy, and the awareness of it - as the art and science of creation - was lost in the Age of Enlightenment and in its renaissance of pagan Grecian thought. But while the Christian church would then lose her very essence and the vigor of her faith, there were the Jews of Eastern Europe, who carried on the alchemical practice in their ghettos - until it all perished in the Holocaust.

As alchemy it gives the purpose and the means for man's sojourn here on the earth. As the Q.B.L., it gives the mode on how it was revealed from God as the eternal source of all knowledge. And "hermetic" is an allusion to Malkizêdeq, the biblical patriarch whom the Greeks had known as Hermes Trismegistos, the Three Times Great Hermes who was the great and ancient master of this heavenly art. It was the prerogative of emperors and kings and in time became known as the Wisdom of Solomon. And no dynasty shall forever prevail who do not have in their possession the command and the practice of the Wisdom of Solomon.

The knowledge of alchemy cannot be gained from books or from "within" (there's no such thing as, "the inner master") or from others, nor can it be obtained by profound study and one's own experience, and there are no secret formulas. But it is given from teacher to pupil in harmony with the divine textbook - the biblical creation account without which there cannot be true physical science.

And the teacher who, in our age of a world view without God, was called to roll back the veil, and disperse the fog, and to restore and make known again these laws of creation and as they have been presented here in the following pages, was Frater Albertus.