China: the golden rod to immortality

India: the way of tantra and mercury

Roman Egypt: the white and the yellow arising from blackness

The Islamic world: balance and magic numbers

Mediaeval Europe: translations, debates and symbols

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: pretension, fraud and redeeming the world

The Rosicrucian episode and its aftermath

Theology wearing a mask of science: the later seventeenth century

Alchemy in an age of self-absorption: the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

A child of earler times: the twentieth century.