In the late sixteenth century, while Europe burned with religious war and princes searched desperately for gold, the English alchemist Edward Kelly wrote a series of extraordinary letters to the Archbishop of Treves. Part practical handbook, part spiritual confession, they reveal a startlingly honest account of the 'Great Work' — the making of the philosopher's stone — as both a laboratory operation and an inward transformation. This edition renders Kelly's Elizabethan prose into clear, present-day English for the first time, while preserving the strangeness and wonder of the original. Readers will encounter the one matter of the sages, the three principles, the stages of blackening, whitening, and reddening, and Kelly's fierce warnings to those who seek the art for greed alone. His letters remain medicine for our own age of hurry and appetite. Faithful to the meaning and spirit of the classic, this is an inviting gateway to one of alchemy's most vivid voices. Part of The World Scriptures Library.