Who is the father? Hermes Trismegistus or Ostanes, as my Byzantine filter bring in front. Mather; Cleopatra with Casiopeea or Marie with Bain Marie?
Or is a story like Prometheus adventure?
Today transmutation is done. Tomorrow ...

Looking through the Rodwell eyes (that's the magic of the books with this subject) from the shoulders of giants (that's the magic of learning) I stick together few pieces of the puzzle using scientific method (that's Bibliography).
Let's have a look over content: - Ancient Science - Origin of Chemistry - Definition of the Name - Definitions of Chemical Science; Early ideas relative to the formation of the World - Thales of Miletus - Later Beliefs in his Doctrine - Anaximenes - Empedokles - Herakleitos - Anaxagoras - Demokritos - The Atomic Theory - Aristotle - The Ethereal Medium - Transmutation of the Elements - The Four-element theory - Mode of interpreting it - Cause of the absence of Natural Science among the Ancients - Practical Chemistry of the Ancients - Metallurgy: Gold, Silver, Elect rum, Copper, Bronze, Tin Iron, Lead, Silver - Colors used for Painting and Dyeing - Glass - Certain Minerals known to the Ancients - Miscellaneous Processes...and this is only the beginning.
Magic is not missing until Chemistry is born. Or is still present?
"The term alchemy itself comes from two roots: al, which is Arabic for “the,” and chemeia It is unclear what chemeia actually means. There were two forms of the term in Greek: chemeia and chymia. The former refers to the process of extracting juice, while the later has to do with deriving metals from ore. For both forms, the transmutative processes comprise the common element, the transformation of a given substance into a higher one. We might, therefore, think of alchemy as the art of transmutation." (Jung and the Alchemical Imagination; Jeffrey Raff)