Alchemy preparations. 17th-century artwork titled 'The alchemist and his wife in the hermetic laboratory'. Hermeticism is based on worship of the Hellenistic Egyptian god Hermes Trismegistus. Six different stages are shown here, from preparing the treatments, to heating them over a fire. This is a woodcut from 'Mutus Liber' (Silent Book), a book on alchemy that was published in La Rochelle, France, in 1677. The author was the French apothecary Isaac Baulot.