THE ALCHEMIST’S HANDBOOK

Frater would sit me down in his office at Paralab and give me a list of
tasks to accomplish while he was away teaching classes. Sometimes he
was gone for a month or more teaching in Germany, or Australia, or New
Zealand; he touched a lot of people and really set the ball rolling for the
current interest in practical laboratory alchemy as a legitimate field of
research and not just a relic from the past.
When he returned from his travels, I would present my works and
findings to him. On one occasion, I had performed some chromato-
graphic work on samples of the oil from antimony and presented him
with the details. He was very excited and told me to continue collecting
as much analytical data on the materials we were producing as possible, a
charge which I have continued to the present and am currently working
to make available in a series of notebooks.
With the death of Frater Albertus in 1984, the PRS, then Paracelsus
College and recognized by the state of Utah, closed its doors forever.
Paralab limped on for a while longer, but it was a little before its time and
ultimately also closed its doors.
The teachings of Frater Albertus are part of a lineage that traces back
to Rosicrucian sources and much earlier, and this book, The Alchemist’s
Handbook, is still the best introduction to that lineage. I have tried to
keep that tradition alive since 2003 by offering classes each year pat-
terned after those of the PRS. These classes form the curriculum of the
Pacific Northwest School of Alchemy located in the state of Washington.
More information on this can be found at www.spagyricus.com. If you feel
the call of Alchemy and want real information on the subject, this is defi-
nitely the book you will want read, reread, and read again. It may just turn
out to be the book that changes your life.
With love and respect to my teacher Frater Albertus,
Robert Allen Bartlett,
author of Real Alchemy: A Primer of Practical Alchemy

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