Looking for a good page turner to sink your teeth into while on holiday? Forget those summer romance novels or whodunnits and go straight to Aurora Consurgens, one of the earliest emblematic alchemical manuscripts.

Meaning “Rising Dawn” in Latin, the Aurora Consurgens dates back to the early 1400s, but no one is quite sure who wrote it. Some claim that it was the philosopher Thomas Aquinas, others attribute the manuscripts to a writer known as “Pseudo-Aquinas”, but what we know for sure is that it’s a commentary on the Latin translation of Silvery Waters by Senior Zadith (Ibn Umayl), and that it contains some highly strange* watercolour images supposed to depict the connection between the human experience and the spirit worlds.

*huge understatement.