Dragon, man and god combined: a winged messenger of alchemy past. My recent encounter with this personification of alchemical principles in a seventeenth-century manuscript (CUL MS Gg.1.8) was certainly unexpected. Described as a ‘small quarto, on paper, written in the XVIIth century’ containing three works on alchemy, the volume seemed innocuous enough. I was forewarned that I should find ‘allegorical illustrations’, among them this ‘adaptation of an ophite [intended to mean gnostic or esoteric] emblem’.[1] But like many deceptively unassuming manuscripts in Cambridge collections, this volume proved much more intriguing
