the Dominicans threatened excommunication to any member of the Church who was caught practising the art. Nor were the Jesuits friendly towards alchemy, though there is evidence that it was the spiritual esoteric alchemy that chiefly worried them. Athanasius Kircher (1602–80), for example, defended alchemical experiments, published recipes for chemical medicines and upheld claims for palingenesis (the revival of plants from their ashes), as well as running a ‘pharmaceutical’ laboratory at the Jesuits’ College in Rome. In 1403, the activities of ‘gold-makers’ had evidently become sufficiently serious in England for a statute to be passed forbidding the multiplication of metals. The penalty was death and the confiscation of property. Legislation must have encouraged scepticism and the portrayal of the poverty-striken alchemist as a self-deluded ass or as a knowing and crafty charlatan who eked out a desperate existence by duping the innocent.
Legislation did not, however, mean that royalty and exchequers disbelieved in aurifaction; rather, they sought to control it to their own ends. In 1456 for example, Henry VI of England set up a commission to investigate
FIGURE 1.1 The preparation of the philosopher’s stone.
(After J. Read, Prelude to Chemistry; London: G. Bell, 1936, p. 132.)
the secret of the philosopher’s stone, but learned nothing useful. In Europe, Emperors and Princes regularly offered their patronage – and prisons – to self-proclaimed successful projectionists. The most famous and colourful of these patrons, who included James IV of Scotland, was Rudolf II of Bohemia, who, in his castle in Prague, surrounded himself with a large circle of artists, alchemists and occultists. Among them were the Englishmen John Dee and Edmund Kelly and the Court Physician, Michael Maier (1568–1622), whose Atalanta fugiens (1618) is noted for its curious combination of allegorical woodcuts and musical settings of verses describing the alchemical process. It was Maier, too, who translated Thomas Norton’s fascinating poem, The Ordinall of Alchemy, into Latin verse in 1618.
Such courts, like Alexandria in the second century BC, became melting pots for a growing gulf between exoteric and esoteric alchemy and the growing science of chemistry. Like Heinrich Khunrath (1560–1605), who ‘beheld in his fantasy the whole cosmos as a work of Supernal Alchemy, performed in the crucible of God’, the German shoemaker, Jacob Boehme (1575–1624), enshrined alchemical language and ideas into a theological system. By this time, too, alchemical symbolism had been further advanced by cults of the pansophists, that is by those groups who claimed that a complete understanding, or universal knowledge, could only be obtained through personal illumination. The Rosicrucian Order, founded in Germany at the beginning of the seventeenth century, soon encouraged the publication of a multitude of emblematic texts, all of which became grist to the mill of esoteric alchemy.
Given that by the sixteenth century, if not before, artisans and natural philosophers had sufficient technical knowledge to invalidate the claims of transmutationists, it may be wondered why belief survived. No doubt the divorce between the classes of educated natural philosophers and uneducated artisans (which Boyle tried to close) was partly responsible. There were also the accidents and uncertainties caused by the use of impure and heterogeneous materials that must have often seemingly ‘augmented’ working materials. As one historian has said, ‘fraudulent dexterity, false philosophy, public credulity and Royal rapacity’ all played a part. To these very human factors, however, must be added the fact that, for seventeenth-century natural philosophers, the corpuscular philosophy to which they were committed underwrote the concept of transmutation even more convincingly than the old four-element theory they rejected (chapter 2).
Nevertheless, despite the fact that the mechanical philosophy allowed, in principle, the transmutation of matter, by the mid eighteenth century it had become accepted by nearly all chemists and physicists that alchemy was a pseudo-science and that transmutation was technically impossible. Those few who claimed otherwise, such as James Price (1752–83), a Fellow of the Royal Society, who used his personal fortune in alchemical experiments, found themselves disgraced. Price committed suicide when challenged to repeat his transmutation claims before Sir Joseph Banks and other Fellows of the Society. By then, chemists had come to share Boerhaave’s disbelief in alchemy as expressed in his New Method of Chemistry (1724). Alchemy had become history, and they happily accepted Boerhaave’s allegory of the dying farmer who had told his sons that he had buried treasure in the fields surrounding their home. The sons worked so energetically that they achieved prosperity even though they failed totally to find what they had originally sought.
The absorption of the experimental findings of exoteric alchemy by chemistry left esoteric alchemy to those who continued to believe that there ‘was more to Heaven and earth’ than particles and forces. Incredible stories of transmutations continued to surface periodically during the eighteenth century. Indeed, legends concerning the ‘immortal’ adventurer, the Comte de Saint-Germain, continue into the twentieth century. In Germany, in particular, the Masonic order of Gold- und Rosenkreuz, which was patronized by King Frederick William II of Prussia, combined a mystical form of Christianity with practical work in alchemy based upon the study of collections of alchemical manuscripts. All of this increasingly ran against the rationalism and enlightenment of the age, and we know that at least one member, the naturalist, Georg Forster, left the movement a disillusioned man. Other alchemical echoes were to be heard in the speculative Naturphilosophie that swept through the German universities at the beginning of the nineteenth century and in the modified Paracelsianism of Samuel Hahnemann’s homeopathic system, which he launched in 1810.
Modern alchemical esotericism dates from 1850 when Mary Ann South, whose father had encouraged her interest in the history of religions and in mysticism, published A Suggestive Enquiry into the Hermetic Mystery. This argued that alchemical literature provided the mystic religious contemplative with a direct link to the secret knowledge of ancient mystery religions. After selling only a hundred copies of the book, father and daughter burned the remaining copies. Later, after she had married the Rev. A. T. Atwood, she claimed that the bonfire had taken place to prevent the teachings from falling into the wrong hands. Whatever one makes of this curious affair, her insight that alchemists had been really searching for spiritual enlightenment and not a material stone, supported by the translation of various alchemical texts into English, proved influential on Carl Jung when, in old age, Mrs Atwood republished her study in 1920. It also inspired Eugène Canseliet in France to devote his career to the symbolic interpretation of the statuary and frescoes of Christian churches and chateaux, as a result of the publication in 1928 of Le Mystère des Cathedrals by the mysterious adept ‘Fulcanelli’. The ability of the human mind to read anything into symbols has been mercilessly exposed by Umberto Eco in his novel, Foucault’s Pendulum (1988). In counterbalance, Patrick Harpur’s Mercurius (1990) paints a vividly sympathetic portrait of the esoteric mind.
Ironically, the growth of nineteenth-century chemistry encouraged a revival of alchemical speculation. Dalton’s reintroduction of atomism, the scepticism expressed towards the growing number of chemical elements (chapter 4), the discoveries of spectroscopists and the regularities of the periodic table (chapter 9), all suggested the possibility of transmutation. Although the possibility was given respectability by Rutherford’s and Soddy’s work on radioactivity at the beginning of the twentieth century and physically realized on an atomic scale in the 1930s, it had earlier led in the 1860s to ‘hyperchemistry’. We must not be surprised, therefore, to find gold transmutation stories occurring during even the most positivistic periods of Victorian science. During the 1860s, Chemical News (chapter 12) attributed the high price of bismuth on the metal market to a vogue for transmutation experiments. This was connected to a daring swindle perpetrated on the London stock-market by a Hungarian refugee, Nicholas Papaffy. Papaffy duped large numbers of investors into promoting a method for transforming bismuth and aluminium (then a new and expensive metal) into silver. This followed from a successful public demonstration at a bullion works in the classic tradition of Jonson’s Subtle. Needless to say, after trading
