Ripley Scroll — Getty Research Institute, 950053

The story

This is the scroll’s opening scene: Hermes Trismegistus — the legendary, likely fictional source to whom alchemists traced their whole discipline — hands George Ripley a book titled "the Book of Seven Seals." It sets up the eight roundels that follow further down the roll, each a glass vessel holding figures who act out a stage of the Work, sulphur and mercury fused and refined in turn; several restage biblical scenes, the Creation of Eve, a version of the Fall, as chemical allegory. Alchemists read the Hermes-and-Ripley handoff as a claim to authority as much as an illustration — this knowledge, it says, descends unbroken from antiquity’s own god of secrets. The Getty acquired this copy through occultist Manly Palmer Hall’s collection of alchemical manuscripts and made it the centerpiece of its 2016 exhibition The Art of Alchemy.