Alan Odin

Founding Editor

Alan Odin is the founding editor of Alchemy Expert and the author of 11 Laws of Inner Alchemy. He writes about the alchemists, the Hermetic tradition, and the ideas that outlived the laboratory. His pieces start from the primary texts and the people who wrote them, then follow the thread to what those ideas still do in a modern life. His books are published by Odin Books.

Stories by Alan Odin

• The Key of Solomon: The Magic Book Europe Kept Copying Europe copied this book of spirit magic by hand for centuries and credited it to King Solomon. Its manuscripts tell a messier story.
• Maria the Jewess and the Bath That Bears Her Name The bain-marie is named for an alchemist of Roman Egypt. She almost certainly did not invent it, and almost nothing she wrote survives.
• Gurdjieff and the Idea That Most People Are Asleep George Gurdjieff taught that ordinary life is a kind of waking sleep. The idea outlived him; his own biography is much harder to pin down.
• Why Witches Ride Broomsticks: The Flying Ointment Theory, Checked Every Halloween the drugged broomstick story returns. The plants were real and dangerous. Most of the rest comes from confessions extracted under torture.
• Zosimos of Panopolis: The First Real Alchemist and His Nightmare Around 300, an Egyptian alchemist described stills, furnaces and a dream of a priest cut apart at an altar. To him, all of it was chemistry.
• Nicolas Flamel: The Scribe Who Became an Alchemist After He Died Nicolas Flamel was a Paris scribe who died in 1418. The book that made him the most famous alchemist in history appeared nearly two centuries later.
• The Alchemist Who Boiled Urine Looking for Gold and Found Phosphorus Around 1669 a Hamburg alchemist distilled stale urine and got a solid that glowed. He was the first named discoverer of an element, and he was never paid in full.
• Paracelsus: The Doctor Who Burned the Textbooks In 1527 a Swiss physician threw medicine's sacred text on a bonfire. Or so the story goes. What he did afterward mattered more.
• Aleister Crowley: How a Brewery Heir Became the "Wickedest Man in the World" Born to brewing money and a strict Christian sect, Crowley spent his fortune on magic and a new religion, until a tabloid called him the wickedest man in the world.
• Where Tarot Actually Came From The cards were a trick-taking game for Italian dukes for three centuries. Then a Paris scholar looked at a pack in 1781 and saw ancient Egypt.
• The I Ching: How a Bronze Age Oracle Became a Book of Philosophy It began as a diviner's handbook of omens and verdicts. Centuries of commentary, and a false attribution to Confucius, made it a cosmos.
• Isaac Newton's Secret Life as an Alchemist A 1936 auction revealed that the author of the Principia wrote about a million words on alchemy. Here is what the manuscripts really show.
• What Is the Philosopher's Stone? It was a powder, a medicine, a symbol of Christ and a crime in England. What alchemists really claimed, and what historians now think they were doing.
• What Aleister Crowley Meant by True Will "Do what thou wilt" was never a license to do as you please. Crowley meant something stricter, and stranger.
• The Kybalion Is Not Ancient: The Real Story of the Seven Principles The famous seven Hermetic principles were published in Chicago in 1908, almost certainly by one prolific New Thought writer.
• Why Carl Jung Spent Thirty Years Studying Alchemy A Chinese manuscript in 1928 sent Jung into the alchemists' books. Historians now say he misread them.
• The Golden Dawn: The Secret Society That Shaped Modern Occultism Founded in 1888 on a coded manuscript and letters from a countess who likely never existed, it rewrote magic anyway.
• Who Was Hermes Trismegistus? A fused Greek and Egyptian god, a pen name in Roman Egypt, and a Renaissance mirage that one scholar dismantled in 1614.
• The Seven Stages of the Great Work Calcination to coagulation is a tidy modern list. The historical record offers four colors, twelve gates and no agreement at all.
• John Dee: The Queen's Astrologer Who Talked to Angels Elizabeth I's mathematician built England's greatest library, then spent years recording messages from angels.
• The Emerald Tablet: A Dozen Lines That Shaped Alchemy Alchemy's most quoted text first appears in Arabic, and its famous line about above and below originally said something else.