The Opus Alchemicum Series
Opus Alchemicum is a developing series by Mansoor H. Abidi exploring alchemy as a historical tradition, a symbolic language, and a living process of transformation. The series brings depth psychology into conversation with Hermeticism, philosophy, religious thought, material practice, and the life of the imagination.
Each volume approaches the alchemical work from a different direction. Volume I enters the intimate vessel of creativity, vocation, and psychological transformation. Volume II widens the inquiry toward the religious, philosophical, and cosmological worlds that made alchemy possible. Together, they explore how psyche, matter, image, and the sacred participate in the continuing work of transformation.
OPUS ALCHEMICUM — VOLUME II
Hermeticism and the Alchemical Imagination
From Ancient Cosmology to the Making of a Hermetic Psychology
Mansoor H. Abidi
Hermeticism and the Alchemical Imagination traces the religious, philosophical, and imaginative worlds that made alchemy intelligible as an art of material, spiritual, and psychological transformation. Beginning with the sacred imagination of ancient Egypt and the late-antique figure of Hermes Trismegistus, the book follows a far-reaching movement through Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, Gnostic traditions, Islamic philosophy, mysticism and alchemy, Renaissance thought, and the psychological interpretation of alchemy in the work of C. G. Jung.
At its center is a fundamental question: What understanding of the human being, nature, and the cosmos made alchemy possible? Through encounters with Plotinus, Iamblichus, the Corpus Hermeticum, Ibn ʿArabī, Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, Marsilio Ficino, Henry Corbin, Jung, and others, the book recovers visions of reality in which psyche, imagination, matter, and the sacred remained intimately related.
The historical journey culminates in Mansoor H. Abidi’s contemporary formulation of Hermetic Psychology: an epistemology of mediation grounded in a participatory view of reality. Hermetic Psychology seeks to bring historical, psychological, imaginal, material, philosophical, and metaphysical ways of knowing into disciplined relationship—to distinguish without severing and to unite without confusing.
Forthcoming from Inner Opus Press
OPUS ALCHEMICUM — VOLUME I
The Alchemist Within
Creativity, Vocation, & Transformation
Mansoor H. Abidi
The Alchemist Within invites the reader into the symbolic world of alchemy as a language of psychological, creative, and vocational transformation. Drawing upon depth psychology, alchemical imagery, and the author’s experience working with precious metals and fire assay, the book explores how periods of dissolution, darkness, purification, and renewal may belong to a deeper unfolding of the soul.
Alchemy becomes more than a historical effort to transform base metals into gold. Its furnaces, vessels, substances, colors, and operations disclose a way of understanding the inner work through which a life is tested, refined, and gradually brought into form. The book speaks especially to those standing at a threshold—artists, scholars, seekers, and anyone attempting to discern the deeper shape of a vocation.
Published by Inner Opus Press
