Alchemy
23 Oct 2022 22:20
Origins in Hellenistic Egypt; in China; in India. Biological transformations and shape-changing. And initiation rites (Eliade). "Life" of metals. Popular perceptions of alchemy and alchemists. Role of alchemy in the development of modern science, especially during the scientific revolution.
Like many people, I was taught a "spiritual" interpretation of alchemy, where what the alchemist was really trying to accomplish was not the transformation of outward matter, but the perfection of his own soul, or at least that, while it may have started as a practical undertaking aimed at transforming matter into gold and elixirs, it ended as a spiritual discipline. Accordingly, alchemical writings are to be read as allegories of the inner life, not coded experimental protocols. This theory comes from Jung and Eliade (who allowed for more experimentation than Jung seems to). William Newman, alone and with Lawrence Principe, argues in a number of places that this interpretation is just wrong, and mostly derives from Victorian occultists. That alchemy was just spiritual has never seemed plausible to me, nor I should think to most scientists who've thought about it. That alchemists, at least in early modern Europe, were really doing practical lab work is, for me, proved conclusively by Newman and Principe's ability to extract experimental protocols from alchemical writings, follow them in the lab, and get results which match the alchemists' descriptions. This doesn't show that alchemy was everywhere and always a technological (pseudo-)science, but since early modern Europe is supposed to have been the place and time where its practice was most spiritualized, things look bad for the truth of the Jung-Eliade theory. The paper by Principe and Newman (below) is, I think, a pretty definitive demonstration of these Victorian origins.
- Recommended:
- Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible
- Ko Hung, Alchemy, Medicine, Religion in the China of A.D. 320: The Nei P'ien of Ko Hung (Pao-p'u tzu), trans James R. Ware
- Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. V, sec. 33 (the alchemical section, which is currently at several volumes itself and not, so far as I know, finished)
- William R. Newman
- "Alchemy, Domination, and Gender," pp. 216--226 in Noretta Koertge (ed.), A House Built on Sand
- Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution
- Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature
- William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton (eds.), The Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe
- Lawrence M. Principe and William R. Newman, "Some Problems in the Historiography of Alchemy," in Newman and Grafton
- Arthur Waley, Travels of an Alchemist: the Journey of the Taoist, Ch'ang-Ch'un, from China to the Hindu Kush at the Summons of Chingiz Khan
- To read:
- Lyndy Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery [Reliability unknown to me]
- Bruce T. Moran, Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution
- Mark Morrisson, Modern Alchemy: Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory
- William R. Newman
- Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution
- "Technology and Alchemical Debate in the Late Middle Ages," Isis 80 (1989): 423--445
- The "Summa perfectionis" of pseudo-Geber
- William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chemistry
- Fabrizio Pregadio, Great Clarity: Daoism and Alchemy in Early Medieval China
- Lawrence M. Principe
- "Apparatus and Reproducibility in Alchemy," in Trevor Levere and Frederic L. Holmes (eds.), Instruments and Experimentation in the History of Chemistry, pp. 55-74
- The Secrets of Alchemy [Favorable review by Anthony Grafton in Science]
- Pamela Smith, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire
Last major update 03/11/2003 13:53:49
