First published in 1655 by the occultist and alchemist Thomas Vaughan, this work was reissued in 1896 by the Rosicrucian Society. Supplemented with detailed annotation by an anonymous member of the Society, the text offers valuable insights into the historiography of hermetic philosophy among Victorian esoteric societies.

This is the final book written by the seventeenth-century occultist and alchemist, Thomas Vaughan (1621-66). Originally published under Vaughan's penname, Eugenius Philalethes, in 1655, the work found a new audience in the Rosicrucian circles of the nineteenth century, when William Wynn Westcott, Supreme Magus of the Society, republished the volume in 1896 with a commentary by an associate, S. S. D. D. 'I have read many Alchemical Treatises', its annotator comments, 'but never one of less use to the practical Alchemist than this.' For its later readers, however, the value of the text lay in its insights into the history of hermetic thought rather than its alchemical advice. An important work of occultist philosophy in both its seventeenth- and nineteenth-century contexts, it purports to reveal nothing less than the origin of all life. The paragraph-by-paragraph commentary in turn demonstrates the history of its reception and interpretation.