elixir to achieve its reputed effects. Alchemy as a subjunctive science expresses conditional truths.
The fact that religious and scientific thought are deeply imbricated with one another in discussions of the elixir points to something deeper than a mere overlay of religious language onto alchemical theory. While it is possible to disentangle the alchemical praxis (the production of a chemical compound) from religious aspirations, the character of the substances created—the nature of the elixir of life—is deeply influenced by theological and ritual assumptions that are too tightly entangled in the science to be unwound. Moreover, there is a real danger of fundamentally misunderstanding the historical actors and their ideas if we attempt to remove the scientific marrow and examine it separately from its context.18
Medieval distinctions in genre have little to do with separating “science” from “religion,” in any case. Both terms—religion and science—are in fact anachronisms when applied to the Middle Ages. The basic meaning of scientia was knowledge, but the actors in this study better understood scientia a field of knowledge that was systematically organized and intelligible via the application of reason. Hence, theology and ethics were scientiae just as was optics or (another difficult term to translate) astronomia. Likewise religio meant something like an obligation to worship. The term “religious” in the Middle Ages tended to refer not to people of a spiritual frame of mind, but to men and women who lived under a religious rule—a designation that included a wide range of categories to be sure, but also one that limited the religious to a place within the hierarchy of the Christian Church. Much as we read “science” back into the Middle Ages, often by substituting the term for what medievals called natural philosophy, likewise we read “religion” back into the Middle Ages for a wide variety of texts and behaviors. My goal is not to muddy the waters here by claiming that modern terminology is of no value, but simply to recognize that modern terms generate modern assumptions about division of knowledge that do not necessarily hold true when applied to medieval Europe.
Science is, to adapt a theory from Dipesh Chakrabarty, a colonizing and totalizing discipline.19 Historians now recognize that the development of science, in the modern sense, was hardly a necessary series of events and, moreover, that it developed in fits and starts quite different from the clear narrative of progress proposed by scholars less than a century ago. Yet, for all of our recognition of proto-scientific practices that include nonscientific qualities, the logic of science nevertheless dictates that we make this very distinction, that the practice of alchemy can include both scientific and nonscientific aspects. To put it another way, the existence of science today presupposes a past where its antecedents existed. This may seem something of a tautology, but the critical issue at stake here is that such an observation implies a kind of division in the practice of alchemy that would not have been recognizable to its adherents. Science per se never existed—nor does it now—as anything more than a discourse. Discourses are powerful things, to be sure, but they are always contested, and, just as importantly, they emerge in the context of specific individuals, each of whom is positioned within a correspondingly specific cultural and historical matrix and freighted by individual experiences. By retrojecting the discourse of science into the past we draw distinctions that are useful to understanding the genealogy of the present, but tend to obfuscate in trying to recreate historical thought worlds.
Something similar could be said about casting modern definitions of religion into history. During the Enlightenment and well into the twentieth century, a number of scholars understood religion to have developed on a teleological path (usually toward Protestant Christianity or atheism). While this view is rather muted today, religion is even more likely than science to be essentialized. The movement to study lived religion has done much to capture the richness of religious practice, but Christianity is still used as something of a monolithic term. It is not a given that Christians of the thirteenth or the fourteenth century are intrinsically recognizable to Christians of the twenty-first, or that outside observers would classify them as a group. The survival of a tradition is not enough on its own to presume its intelligibility. Likewise, we need not expect uniformity when it comes to religious practice or belief. The obsession of the clerical class to regulate religious behavior in the later Middle Ages is proof enough that the ideal of uniformity remained an ideal only. Medieval alchemical texts also show, rather less ostentatiously, their own divergence on questions of religion. Even after what William Newman has termed the “religious turn”—an efflorescence of religious language in alchemical texts—in the early fourteenth century, great numbers of what we might call naturalist texts continued to be produced.20 These texts might make no mention of God at all, or, at most, frame the alchemical pursuit within a universe created and governed by God, who acted more or less as simply a guarantor and source of natural laws. While this is sufficient, I think, to qualify as a religious idea, it is qualitatively different from characterizing alchemy as divinely revealed knowledge.
One of the problems posed by religious language is that it has led to some confusion as to the principal aim of the alchemist. The history of religion has a particularly troubled historiography on this score, rather in contrast with the work of historians of science in recent decades, who have demonstrated quite convincingly that alchemy focused on the manipulation of matter.21 In the 2004 Encyclopedia of Religion under the heading “alchemy,” the reader will find the statement by Mircea Eliade for the 1987 edition that “alchemy was not scientific, but spiritual.”22 Eliade was far from the first to make this claim, preceded in the twentieth century by psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who posited that the coded language of alchemy symbolized an untranslatable psychic or mystical journey. Eliade, in his work The Forge and the Crucible, expressed the idea that alchemy was a spiritual process aimed not at the transformation of matter, but at that of the soul. Eliade concentrated on the experience of alchemical creation, equating it with a mystical, even gnostic, religiosity that was consciously ahistorical and impenetrable.23 In addition to mischaracterizing the physical manipulation of matter as superfluous—transmuting physical substances was always at the heart of alchemy, even if the compound itself had soteriological implications—Eliade also narrowed the sense of religion to a kind of irrational mystical experience. Irrationality is not in and of itself the problem. Historians have had some success when it comes to dealing with the putatively irrational. Emotions, sexuality, mysticism, and madness have all been brought into the domain of historical study, even if debates about conclusions and methodology remain. Instead, when alchemy is characterized as a form of esoteric mysticism that denies the importance of or seeks to transcend the material world, the picture of how religion and religious persons intersected with alchemy becomes drastically skewed. This essentialized view of religion omits theology, ritual, scripture, and, for good measure, historical context. If religious experience is limited to an ephemeral, intangible, incommunicable experience with “real” presence, there remains no space for the materiality of alchemy to influence religious thought or behavior and vice versa. Therefore, this study works with religion as a cultural and historical category rather than an exogenous definition of what “real” religion is. In so doing, the connections between alchemy and religion come into sharper focus.
Materiality, of course, is not the only connection to be made between alchemy and religion. By the turn of the fourteenth century, many alchemical writers specifically framed their works with Christian ideas about the nature of God and the universe to make it easier, both morally and metaphorically, to grasp its essential principles. A good example of this phenomenon comes from the fourteenth-century Codicil, which compares the process of alchemical transmutation to the role of Christ in salvation: “Just as Christ assumed human form to liberate mankind from the transgression of Adam and its imprisonment by sin, so is it in our art. What is foully stained by one thing is cleansed by its opposite from that wicked taint … so approaching the limit of perfection, it becomes more perfect.”24 Barbara Obrist has argued that allegory, metaphor, and analogy served a rhetorical function. Rather than being a means of concealing knowledge, the florid imagery, allegory, metaphor, and specifically Christian themes helped render alchemical precepts understandable to a new audience. For a number of authors of this period, however, alchemy was not simply described in Christian nomenclature, but was fused to Christian conceptions
