who claimed unusual powers and insights. Another, this time fictitious, adept was ‘Eirenaeus Philalethes’, whose copious writings were closely read by Newton. It is possible that Newton developed his interest in alchemy while a student at Cambridge in the 1660s under the tutelage of Isaac Barrow, who had an alchemical library. But it is equally likely that it was Robert Boyle’s interest in alchemy and in the origins of colours that stimulated Newton’s interest, as well as making him a convinced mechanical philosopher. Like Boyle, Newton was interested in alchemical reports of transmutations as providing circumstantial evidence for the corpuscular nature of matter. In addition, however, Newton was undoubtedly interested in alchemists’ Neoplatonic claims of secret (or hidden) virtues in the air and of attractions between heavenly and earthly matter, and in the possibility, claimed by many alchemical authorities, that metals grew in the earth by the same laws of growth as vegetables and animals. In April 1669 Newton bought a furnace as well as a copy of the compilation of alchemical tracts, Theatrum Chemicum. Among his many other book purchases was the Secrets Reveal’d of the mysterious Eirenaeus Philalethes, whom we now know to have been one of Boyle’s New England acquaintances, George Starkey. The book, which Newton heavily annotated, aimed to show that alchemy mirrored God’s labours during the creation and it referred to the operations of the Stoics’ animating spirit in Nature.
Starkey laid stress upon the properties of antimony, whose ability to crystallize in the pattern of a star following the reduction of stibnite by iron had first been published by the fictitious monk, ‘Basil Valentine’ in 1604 in The Triumphant Chariot of Antimony, one of the most important alchemical treatises ever published. Valentine, who was supposed to have lived in the early fifteenth century, was the invention of Johann Tholde, a salt boiler from Thuringia. The Triumphant Chariot was concerned with the preparation of antimony elixirs to cure various ailments, including venereal disease. In Secrets Reveal’d, Starkey referred to crystalline antimony (child of Saturn from its resemblance to lead) as a magnet on account of its pattern of rays emanating from, or towards, the centre. Newton appears to have spent much of his time in the laboratory in the 1670s investigating the ‘magnetic’ properties of the star, or regulus, of antimony, probably in the shared belief with Philalethes that it was indeed a Royal Seal, that is, God’s sign or signature of its unique ability to attract the world’s celestial and vivifying spirit.
Very possibly it was Newton’s interest in solving the impossibly difficult problem of how passive, inert corpuscles organized themselves into the living entities of the three kingdoms of Nature that drove him to explore the readily available printed texts and circulating manuscripts of alchemy, including, in particular, the works of Sendivogius and Starkey. As Professor Dobbs has expressed it8: ‘it was the secret of [the] spirit of life that Newton hoped to learn from alchemy’. Newton’s motive, which was probably shared by many other seventeenth-century figures, including Boyle, was quite respectable. Its purpose, ultimately, was theological. A deeper understanding of God could well come from an understanding of the ‘spirit’, be it light, warmth, or a universal ether, which animated all things.
THE DEMISE OF ALCHEMY AND ITS LITERARY TRADITION
Historians of science are the first to stress that any theory, however erroneous in later view, is better than none. Even so, many historians of science have expressed surprise that alchemy lasted so long, though we can easily underestimate the power of humankind’s fear of death and desire for immortality – or of human cupidity. To the extent that it undoubtedly stimulated empirical research, alchemy can be said to have made a positive contribution to the development of chemistry and to the justification of applying scientific knowledge to the relief of humankind’s estate. This is different, however, from saying that alchemy led to chemistry. The language of alchemy soon developed an arcane and secretive technical vocabulary designed to conceal information from the uninitiated. To a large degree this language is incomprehensible to us today, though it is apparent that the readers of Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale’ or the audiences of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist were able to construe it sufficiently to laugh at it.
Warnings against alchemists’ unscrupulousness, which
TABLE 1.2 Chemicals listed in Chaucer’s ‘Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale.’
| Alkali | Litharge |
| Alum | Oil of Tartar |
| Argol | Prepared Salt |
| Armenian bole | Quicklime |
| Arsenic | Quicksilver |
| Ashes | Ratsbane |
| Borax | Sal ammoniac |
| Brimstone | Saltpetre |
| Bull’s gall | Silver |
| Burnt bones | Urine |
| Chalk | Vitriol |
| Clay | Waters albificated |
| Dung | Waters rubificated |
| Egg White | Wort |
| Hair | Yeast |
| Iron scales | |
| Note that alcohol is not cited. | |
| Adapted from W. A. Campbell, ‘The Goldmakers’, Proceedings of the Royal Institution, 60 (1988) 163. |
are found in William Langland’s Piers Plowman, were developed amusingly by Chaucer in the Chanouns Yemannes Tale (c. 1387) in which he exposed some half-dozen ‘tricks’ used to delude the unwary. These included the use of crucibles containing gold in their base camouflaged by charcoal and wax; stirring a pot with a hollow charcoal rod containing a hidden gold charge; stacking the fire with a lump of charcoal containing a gold cavity sealed by wax; and palming a piece of gold concealed in a sleeve. Deception was made the more easy from the fact that only small quantities were needed to excite and delude an investor into parting with his or her money. These methods had hardly changed when Ben Jonson wrote his satirical masterpiece, The Alchemist, in 1610, except that by then the doctrine of multiplication – the claim that gold could be grown and expanded from a seed – had proved an extremely useful way of extracting gold coins from the avaricious.
As their expert use of alchemical language shows, both Chaucer and Jonson clearly knew a good deal about alchemy, as equally clearly did their readers and audiences (see Table 1.2). Chaucer had translated the thirteenth-century French allegorical romance, Roman de la Rose, which seems to have been influenced by alchemical doctrines, while Jonson based his character, Subtle, on the Elizabethan astrologer, Simon Forman, whose diary offers an extraordinary window into the mind of an early seventeenth-century occultist.
By Jonson’s day, the adulteration and counterfeiting of metal had become illegal. As early as 1317, soon after Dante had placed all alchemists into the Inferno, the Avignon Pope John XXII had ordered
