The Septuagint, sometimes referred to as the Greek Old Testament or The Translation of the Seventy, and often abbreviated as LXX, are the earliest extant Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible from the original Hebrew. The full Greek title derives from the story recorded in the Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates that "the laws of the Jews" were translated into the Greek language at the request of Ptolemy II Philadelphus by seventy-two Hebrew translators—six from each of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.
Basil Valentine is the Anglicised version of the name Basilius Valentinus, ostensibly a 15th-century alchemist, possibly Canon of the Benedictine Priory of Saint Peter in Erfurt, Germany but more likely a pseudonym used by one or several 16th-century German authors.
Middle English Bible translations (1066-1500) covers the age of Middle English, beginning with the Norman conquest and ending about 1500.
Fasciculus Chemicus or Chymical Collections. Expressing the Ingress, Progress, and Egress, of the Secret Hermetick Science out of the choicest and most famous authors is an anthology of alchemical writings compiled by Arthur Dee (1579–1651) in 1629 while resident in Moscow as chief physician to Czar Michael I of Russia.
Pseudo-Geber is the presumed author or group of authors responsible for a corpus of pseudepigraphic alchemical writings dating to the late 13th and early 14th centuries. These writings were falsely attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan, an early alchemist of the Islamic Golden Age.
Michael Sendivogius was a Polish alchemist, philosopher, and medical doctor. A pioneer of chemistry, he developed ways of purification and creation of various acids, metals and other chemical compounds. He discovered that air is not a single substance and contains a life-giving substance—later called oxygen—170 years before Scheele's discovery of the element. He correctly identified this 'food of life' with the gas given off by heating nitre (saltpetre). This substance, the 'central nitre', had a central position in Sendivogius' schema of the universe.
Michael Maier was a German physician and counsellor to Rudolf II Habsburg. He was a learned alchemist, epigramist, and amateur composer.
The Apostolic Constitutions or Constitutions of the Holy Apostles is a Christian collection divided into eight books which is classified among the Church Orders, a genre of early Christian literature, that offered authoritative pseudo-apostolic prescriptions on moral conduct, liturgy and Church organization. The work can be dated from 375 to 380 AD. The provenance is usually regarded as Syria, probably Antioch. The author is unknown, although since James Ussher it has often considered to be the author of the letters of Pseudo-Ignatius, perhaps the 4th-century Eunomian bishop Julian of Cilicia.
Petrus Bonus was a late medieval alchemist. He is best known for his Precious Pearl or Precious New Pearl, an influential alchemical text composed sometime between 1330 and 1339. He was said to have been a physician at Ferrara in Italy, causing him to sometimes be known as Petrus Bonus of Ferrara or as Petrus Bonus the Lombard. An Introduction to the Divine Art is also attributed to him but was printed much later, in 1572.
Musaeum Hermeticum is a compendium of alchemical texts first published in German, in Frankfurt, 1625 by Lucas Jennis. Additional material was added for the 1678 Latin edition, which in turn was reprinted in 1749. Its purpose was apparently to supply in a compact form a representative collection of relatively brief and less ancient alchemical writings; it could be regarded as a supplement to those large storehouses of Hermetic learning such as the Theatrum Chemicum, or Jean-Jacques Manget's Bibliotheca Chemica Curiosa. It seemed to represent a distinctive school in Alchemy, less committed to the past and less obscure than the works of older and more traditional alchemical masters.
Thomas Norton was an English poet and alchemist best known for his 1477 alchemical poem, The Ordinal of Alchemy.
The First Epistle of Clement is a letter addressed to the Christians in the city of Corinth. Based on internal evidence some scholars say the letter was composed some time before AD 70, but the common time given for the epistle's composition is at the end of the reign of Domitian. It ranks with Didache as one of the earliest, if not the earliest, of extant Christian documents outside the traditional New Testament canon. As the name suggests, a Second Epistle of Clement is known, but this is a later work by a different author. Part of the Apostolic Fathers collection, 1 and 2 Clement are not usually considered to be part of the canonical New Testament.
The Statenvertaling or Statenbijbel was the first translation of the Bible from the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek languages into Dutch. It was ordered by the Synod of Dordrecht in 1618, financed by the government of the Protestant Dutch Republic and first published in 1637.
In alchemy, the Magnum Opus or Great Work is a term for the process of working with the prima materia to create the philosopher's stone. It has been used to describe personal and spiritual transmutation in the Hermetic tradition, attached to laboratory processes and chemical color changes, used as a model for the individuation process, and as a device in art and literature. The magnum opus has been carried forward in New Age and neo-Hermetic movements which sometimes attached new symbolism and significance to the processes. The original process philosophy has four stages:
The Ecclesiae Regimen, also Remonstrance, xxxvii Conclusiones Lollardorum, or Thirty Seven Articles against Corruptions in the Church, is a church reformation declaration against the Catholic Church of England in the Late Middle Ages. It had no official title given to it when written and the author(s) did not identify themselves in the original manuscript. This public declaration by the English medieval sect called the Lollards was announced to the English parliament at the end of the manifesto Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards published in 1395.
The Mirror of Alchimy is a short alchemical manual, known in Latin as Speculum Alchemiae. Translated in 1597, it was only the second alchemical text printed in the English language. Long ascribed to Roger Bacon (1214-1294), the work is more likely the product of an anonymous author who wrote between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries.
Atalanta Fugiens or Atalanta Fleeing is an emblem book with an alchemical theme by Michael Maier (1568–1622), published by Johann Theodor de Bry in Oppenheim in 1617. It consists of 50 discourses with illustrations by Matthias Merian, each of which is accompanied by an epigrammatic verse, prose and a musical fugue. It may therefore be considered an early example of multimedia.
The Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine is a widely reproduced alchemical book attributed to Basil Valentine. It was first published in 1599 by Johann Thölde who is likely the book's true author. It is presented as a sequence of alchemical operations encoded allegorically in words, to which images have been added. The first Basil Valentine book to discuss the keys is Ein kurtz summarischer Tractat, von dem grossen Stein der Uralten, 1599.
Ezekiel 37 is the thirty-seventh chapter of the Book of Ezekiel in the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. This book contains the prophecies attributed to the prophet/priest Ezekiel, and is one of the Nevi'im (Prophets). This chapter contains a vision of the resurrection of dry bones, widely known as the Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones, in which Ezekiel at last assures the captives in Babylon that they will return from exile.
