ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the hermeneutics of occult philosophy and science. It discusses the methodological issues, and the study of alchemy as one among many occult sciences via which considerations of method, as regards the entire corpus of those sciences. The rejection of alchemical rationality stems from an explicit rejection of occult ontology. The nineteenth-century occultists attempted to rescue the alchemists from a reductive science which, in the spirit of its century, had, if not banished the mystery from the universe, then laid siege to it in the church and was not about to credit its survival in alchemy. Alchemy thus reveals itself as a unique phenomenology which can be encountered in the methods via which it brings its world to observability, no less than to accountability, and, via which, after its own lights, it presents itself as a rationally defensible enterprise.
