FIVE ENGLISH ALCHEMISTS is an introduction to the most significant English exponents of the Alchemical Mysteries of the pre-Enlightenment era. By tradition alchemists down the ages observed a discreet silence about the processes of their art, but these men chose to speak and to pass on to posterity an enduring legacy, for which we owe them a great spiritual debt. It is, however, a veiled and encoded legacy, for even at their clearest these texts are often most obscure - and deliberately so, for the alchemists recognised the need to keep their secrets hidden from the greedy and the casually curious. But in spite of its mystery, perhaps because of it, alchemy has continued to fascinate some of the greatest minds of successive generations and it is yet possible for the dedicated student to penetrate the symbolic veil of the Secret Art and even, perhaps, to attain the tingeing stone of the wise.