Michael Maier’s extraordinary alchemical emblem book, Atalanta fugiens (1617) is best known to historians of science for its fifty exquisite engravings of emblems that visually render the hermetic vocabulary. But the Atalanta’s emblems are also paired with scored music for three voices – Atalanta, Hippomenes, and the Golden Apple, the three alchemical protagonists in Maier’s work who represent the elemental triad of Mercury, Sulphur, and Salt. Maier’s work has yet to be studied in its multimedial totality; moreover, scholarship has not advanced beyond considering the Atalanta as a fantastical allegorical expression of hermetic philosophy. This paper presents evidence demonstrating that the Atalanta fugiens is an allegorically enciphered manual whose synthesis of music, image, and text fully articulates the alchemical system and delineates the laboratory procedures (as well as some of the apparatus) actually used by adepts attempting to produce the philosophers’ stone. It considers the intersection of alchemical theory and the technologies that defined early modern alchemical laboratory operations, as both premise and framework for Maier’s creation of this unique alchemical treatise. From this perspective, the Atalanta fugiens opens up new dimensions to our understanding of pre-modern scientific practice.