Career
In 1978 he founded the Hermetic Journal which he published until 1992 during which time he also started publishing the Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks, a series of thirty nine editions (to 2011) of key source texts of the hermetic tradition. Located in Glasgow, McLean accessed the wealth of alchemical texts located in The Ferguson Collection in Glasgow University Library, the Young Collection also in Glasgow, and the John Read Collection at University of Street Andrews. From 1990 to 2002 McLean’s work was supported through the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica.
Since the early nineteen-eighties, Adam McLean has been credited as a pioneer in the resurgence of English language alchemical texts, creating a huge expansion in interest at both a scholarly and popular level
John Granger named McLean as one of the three figureheads of modern alchemical influence alongside Carl Jung and Titus Burckhardt.
