The Rosarium Philosophorum is a compilation of quotations from earlier alchemical authorities, and by itself the text would be one anthology among many. What made it central is the sequence of twenty woodcuts printed with the 1550 edition.
The woodcuts tell a continuous story. A king and a queen meet, clothed; they undress; they enter a bath; they are joined in a coniunctio; they die and lie as a single hermaphrodite body in a tomb; a soul departs upward; dew falls; the soul returns; and the figure rises transformed. The sequence is explicitly a marriage, a death and a resurrection, and its erotic content is unmistakable and unembarrassed.
That series became, in the twentieth century, the most analysed set of images in alchemy, because C. G. Jung built his Psychology of the Transference on it, taking the woodcuts one by one as a map of what happens between analyst and patient. Whatever one makes of the reading, it moved these images out of the history of chemistry and into psychology, and most readers now meet them through Jung.
The atlas records both the sixteenth century object and its modern reception, and treats the psychological reading as a modern interpretation rather than as the work's meaning.