FICTION : THE ALCHYMIST’S JOURNAL <i> by Evan S. Connell Jr. (North Point Press: $19.95; 214 pp.).</i>

Just as a popular politician can afford to take an unpopular stand or two, so a novelist whose previous books have been highly accessible can try something experimental and count on his readers to follow him into the lab. That’s what Evan Connell has done with “The Alchymist’s Journal,” a radical departure from “Mrs. Bridge” or “Son of the Morning Star.”

Still, those readers who follow are likely to emerge from this book dazed by the vision of bubbling beakers and colored smoke they saw within. The alchemist of the title is Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim (1493-1541), better known as Paracelsus, a rebel against the authority of the ancients and one of the founders of modern pharmacology. To his account are added six other philosophical meditations by apprentices and colleagues, Christians and skeptics. All are written richly and densely, as if translated from 16th-Century documents, with few concessions to the present day and hardly any plot. Helpfully but ominously, North Point Press supplies a 21-page booklet outlining the historical context and defining obscure words.

We tend to think of alchemy as toddler-science that hadn’t reached the age of reason, but it was more than that. Turning lead into gold was a symbol of spiritual regeneration; this mystical tradition survives today in Jungian psychology. Connell reintroduces us to a world view in which matter and spirit, mankind and nature, scholarship and worship, are one. As his Paracelsus says: “It is impossible to contest the power of heavenly light. We are no more devised from insensate clay than is an herb blossoming out of mud. . . . Was not man appointed to explore?”