1IntroductIon

n old man sits alone in a dimly lit room. His tattered chair creaks. A fire crackles in the small furnace by his feet. The sun’s rays are just beginning to creep onto his desk

through an open window. He has been awake all night. The man stares intently at the vial over the stove and mutters softly to himself. “The queen is called the daughter of the water-bearer.” He says, “She ariseth out of his loins...”1 As he stares at the flask something mysterious begins to happen. A seed at the bottom begins to spark and glow. The surrounding liquid begins to flash with color, first silver, now gold. The man can hardly bear to rip his eyes away, but he does so just long enough to page through an ancient and sooty tome by his desk. Dust flies as he races to find the correct entry. “Philalethes sayeth…” He gasps at what he finds. “There was a most radiant twinkling Spark, which sent forth its Beams even to the very surface of the Water, and appeared as if were a Lamp burning, and yet no way distinguishable from the Water, for the Bearer, the Pitcher, and the Water in it were one…”2 As he reads the seed begins to grow. Slowly, like the branches of a tree, the seed sprouts and expands outwards. Soon the entire flask is filled and glowing with the light of the dawn. What could this mean? The man is exhausted. He sits down and closes his eyes for a moment. But when he opens them again, the light from the vial has begun to fade. Soon it is as grey and lifeless as it was before. What did he just witness? Did it even happen, or was it just a dream?

1 This quote was inspired by Newton’s Praxis. The literal quote is: “This preparation Philaletha hints by calling the Queen the daughter of the Waterbearer arising out of his loins, and says that she is contained invisibly in the water of his silver colored pitcher and arose out of the water in which, saith he, was seen a lamp burning, or a twinkling spark which sent forth its beams from the center. And that, by a strange metamorphosis done by a magical virtue of nature, after this rise she was naked, that is, divested of impurities, beautiful, and though a body, yet she was all spirit and yet able to endure without hurt the greatest fires that can be made. And in this state it is properly of matter in which vulgar chymists do not work.” The full citation is: Newton, Isaac. Praxis. 1696. MS MS 420. The Babson College Grace K. Babson Collection of the Works of Sir Isaac Newton, Huntington Library, San Marino, California, USA. p.32 This quote was inspired by an alchemical tract by Eirenaeus Philalathes, a.k.a George Starkey. The literal quote is: “Then I viewed his Pitcher well, and I found that his Pitcher was clear as pure Silver; and what was strange, the Bearer, and the Pitcher, and the Water in it were one; and in the midst of the Water, as it were in the very centre, there was a most radiant twinkling Spark, which sent forth its Beams even to the very surface of the Water, and appeared as it were a Lamp burning, and yet no way distinguishable from the Water.” Newton was quoting this work directly in the footnote above. The full citation is: Starkey, George. An Exposition upon Sir George Ripley’s Epistle to King Edward IV. London: Printed for William Cooper. 1677.

Figure 1: The Chemist, 19th century, Edward Allen Schmidt, German, 7 in x 9 in.

A robed alchemist is seated in his laboratory performing an experiment. The equipment on his lab bench includes an adjustable clamp stand and an alcohol burner, contemporary to the 19th century. FA 2000.001.246

2hat meaning, if any, does the preceding image contain? Would that meaning be historical? Scientific? Religious? Alchemy holds a unique place in the narrative of the history and philosophy of science because, more than any other tradition, it has been mythologized. The archetype of the alchemist, the wise sorcerer pondering the mysteries of the universe, has influenced our society in a way that is independent of, and yet intimately connected

with, the scientific advances upon which our modern society is based. Of course, the implicit assump-tion in that past statement is that alchemy and modern science have some sort of inherent difference that keeps them opposed. One of the main goals of this paper is to question that assumption.

It goes without saying that the scene of the alchemist I contrived above is flawed, anachronistic, or even downright false. So why did I choose to open with it? The image of the alchemist holds

a strange allure for me. It hints at ancient wisdom, along with the quest for the unknown. If anything differentiates alchemy from modern science, or even from contemporaneous natural philosophy, it is that alchemical lore is rife with imagery. One cannot page through an alchemical treatise without encountering images of dragons eating their own tails, ætherial spirits, or the death and rebirth of hermaphroditic royalty. As fantastical as the narrative above was, it contains too many elements of truth to be completely discounted. Such men, men so consumed by their pursuit that they would stay up nights tending a forge and staring into vials, did exist; Sir Isaac Newton was one of them. In a letter describing Newton shortly after his death, Humphrey Newton recalled,

“He very rarely went to Bed, till 2 or 3 of the clock, sometimes not till 5 or 6, lying about 4 or 5 hours, especially at spring & ffall of the Leaf, at which Times he us’d to imploy about 6 weeks in his Elaboratory, the ffire scarcely going out either Night or Day, he siting up one Night, as I did another till he had finished his Chymical Experiments, in the Performances of which he was the most accurate, strict, exact: What his Aim might be, I was not able to penetrate into, but his Paine, his Diligence at those sett times, made me think, he aim’d at somthing beyond the Reach of humane Art & Industry.”

Even in Newton’s own time, his contemporaries were

mythologizing his character and his craft. This wasn’t simply natural philosophy; it was Chymistry, a practice ‘aim’d at somthing beyond the Reach of humane Art and Industry.’ The elaborate imagery associated with the practice reflects its lofty goals. While alchemical images certainly relate directly to real chemical products, their vibrancy lends them multiple layers of meaning far beyond that original scope. The images I used in the narrative above are only a most limited sampling of the rich and vibrant alchemical environ-ment. Their presence is striking. In alchemy we find a scientific meth-odology that is capable of poetic expression. Nowhere else in history can this be found; although my hope

for the future is that our science will again be open to the use of metaphor. Most scholars in the past three hundred years have not been able to penetrate these images, which has resulted in widely differing and

Figure 2, Aurora Consurgens, Demon and Ouroboros in a Flask.

The Aurora Consurgens is an illuminated manuscript of the 15th century now housed in the Zürich Zentralbibliothek (MS. Rhenoviensis 172). It contains a medieval alchemical treatise, in the past sometimes attributed to Thomas Aquinas, now to a writer called the “Pseudo-Aqui-nas.” This illustration shows a classic depiction of the Ouroboros; the Dragon and the Raven in the flask consume each other’s tails. In this image the Ouroboros is linked to the alchemical step of putrefaction. When exposed to heat, the matter in the flask must consume itself, die, and become black. When the matter putrefies, the soul leaves the flask, and the matter is ready to accept a new spark of life from the alchemist. The transmutation is completed when the matter is reborn in a more perfect state.

3contradictory interpretations of what alchemy actually was. Some maintain the images were carefully calculated decknamen, or code words, intended to both reveal and conceal chemical practices and theories. Others beleive that the images were produced during hallucinatory or dreamlike states, and that they pertain more to the spiritual development of the alchemist than they do to material properties. Both inter-pretations will be explored more fully later in this paper, and I do not believe that they are mutually exclusive. Alchemy was an incredibly diverse practice spanning many centuries. Its symbolism changed and evolved over time and the images almost definitely had a personal meaning for each of its practitioners.

The focus of this paper will be on the alchemy of Isaac Newton, and

discerning what the imagery meant to him is central to its focus. But Newton died almost three hundred years ago, and reconstructing the intricacy of his thoughts from a few alchemical manu-scripts is next to impossible. It would be unduly prideful for me to claim to know what was going on inside the head of a man who, as Humphrey Newton put it, “Comprehends as much as all mankind besides.” If anyone understood the importance of good evidence, it was Newton, and there simply is not enough evidence to make many statements about what Newton thought about the nature of alchemy or its imagery. The statements that I do make about Newton’s alchemy, or what he thought about it, will be as objective as they can, and I will provide extensive evidence to support my

claims. But, in order to do so, my claims must be very narrow. I have no desire to limit myself to a narrow, objective, evidential view. To do so would be to remove any higher meaning from my work. In order to make broad statements, I must move into the realm of opinion. I will be very clear when I make these shifts.

This essay will be about the evolution of human thought, and in that vast realm of human thoughts lay my thoughts. My work is personal; it is about my relationship with science, religion, and

Figure 3, Splendor Solis Plate 4Splendor Solis is one of the most well know alchemical manuscripts due to its extensive illustrations. The earliest version, written in Central German, is dated 1532–1535. This image contains the King and the Queen, which correspond to Gold and the Sun, and Silver and the Moon, respectively. The flames underneath the king are linked to the masculine indicate the start of the alchemical process. The queen stands upon the earth, linking matter with the feminine. The royal robes are colored in inverse patterns, vindicating that the king and queen might one day be unified. The inscription roughly translates to, “The part includes the whole.”

4magic, and how that relates to the greater world. As I have already done, I plan on using the first person extensively. I see alchemy as a practice that is concerned with both subjective and objective truths, and I want my paper to reflect that concern. Where objectivity is required, it will be presented, but I hold my own subjective opinions with equal esteem. One of the major points I want to make is that, as counterintuitive as it sounds, our science could benefit greatly from an increased awareness of our own subjectivity. Since it can never be completely eliminated, I think it is necessary that we openly incorporate our subjectivity into all the work that we do. This is why I find alchemical imagery so compelling. The images are by their very nature subjective. They impact each observer differently and contain multiple levels of meaning. There is no objectivly correct way to interpret a metaphor. Such ambiguity is the anathema of modern science because it makes communication difficult, and so it was abandoned. But consider for a moment that there might be ideas and phenomena in the natural world that can only be comprehended through metaphor. At some level, all language, even math, is metaphor,

and I believe that if our scientific language embraced the use of metaphoric imagery while maintaining its rigor, we could create models of reality with vast richness and more meaning than anything we have accomplished thus far. So you see, I’m thinking about Newton’s alchemy, but really I’m using Newton’s alchemy as a jumping off point to explore the way in which we think about reality. Before I can make such broad statments about science and reality, exactly what alchemy is needs to be explicated. To that end, I will begin with a historiography…

Figure 4, Splendor Solis Plate 13

The Splendor Solis contains 22 illustrations, each corresponding to one of the 22 major arcana in a classic Tarot deck. The card plate 13 corresponds to is Death. In addition, there are 7 plates (12-18) which feature large vials whose contents are in various stages of transmutation. The 7 flasks correspond to the 7 celestial bodies. Similar to figure 2, and in line with the tarot card Death, plate 13 corresponds to the stage of putrefaction. Here we see three crows in another form of the ouroboros. The matter is breaking into its component parts (colors) so that it can be reborn in a more perfect form.

Figure 5, Death

Rider Waite Tarot Deck

The Rider Waite Tarot deck was formulated by famous occultist Arthur E Waite and illustrated by Pamela Coleman Smith in 1909.

5HIstorIograpHy

will start explaining some general alchemical theory by chronologically describing the work of some of the major alchemists whose works were found in Newton’s library. From there I will summarize the evolution of alchemical interpretations during the past 300 years, after alchemy ceased to be an area of serious academic study. Throughout, I will give my own thoughts on how alchemy should be interpreted.

The first alchemist (supposedly) was named Hermes Trismegestus ‘Hermes Thrice Greatest.’ The earliest appearance of the name dates back to just before the time of Christ. It is extremely doubtful

that an alchemist by the name of Hermes Trismegestus ever actually lived. More likely, Hermes Trismegestus is a synthesis of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth, both of whom were gods of writing and magic in their respective traditions. Both gods were psychopomps, guiding souls to the afterlife1. Alchemy’s focus on death and rebirth, as well as its long literary tradition, makes Trismegestus a natural choice as a sort of patron saint. Trismegestus is a proto Christ figure. He is a god, but he is also a man; a real alchemist who experimented on matter. That duality is central to alchemical theory; recognizing opposites and then unifying them was of primary importance. Hermes’s relationship between humanity and the divine is paralleled by the theoretical relationship between matter and spirit. There is something corporeal, material and manlike about him, as well as something ætherial, spiritual and divine. He personifies duality. It is worth emphasizing at this point that Trismegistus’s identity is decidedly mythological. We see nothing comparable to him in modern science. Characters like Newton or Einstein are often elevated to a superhuman status (recall Humphreys quote), but Hermes Trismegistus has a decidedly Herculean nature that makes him fit more easily into the category of religious figures than the category of famous scientists. I find alchemy so special because it gives me a venue to talk about both categories in the same breath. I think it is worth pondering for a moment what our science would look like if we had mythological figures more consciously incorpo-rated into the cannon.

The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegestus is what brings

Hermes his fame. It is akin to the Ten Commandments in terms of its symbolism and purpose in alchemical craft. The tablet sets out some of the basic principles of Alchemy: the doctrine of unification of opposites, the promise of transmutation, and the anthropomorphisation of the elements and celestial bodies. In the early 1680’s, around the same time as he was writing the Principia, Newton translated The Emerald Tablet into English. The translation is reproduced in full on the next page.

1 “Hermes Trismegistus.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia is often looked down upon in scholarly work but I think it is an incred-ibly useful and reliable source of introductory information. I see Wikipedia as the collected knowledge of all of humanity.

Figure 6, Hermes Trismegestus and Mercury’s Caducean Rod, 1617This image of Hermes Trismegestus was origionally found in Symbola Aureae Mensae Duo-decim Nationum written by alchemist Michael Maier. The book was present in Newton’s library. The rod Hermes holds is a version of Murcury’s Caducean Rod (the names Hermes and Mercury were used synonomously) . Note the similarity of the Sun and Moon symbol-ism to Plate 4 Splendor Solis (Figure 3)

Mercury’s Caducean Rod Sketch by Newton in Praxis

6Tabula Smaragdina

Hermetis TrismegistriPhilosophorum patris

Tis true without lying, certain & most true.That which is below is like that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below to

do the miracles of one only thing.And as all things have been & arose from one by the mediation of one: so all things have their birth

from this one thing by adaptation.The Sun is its father, the moon its mother, the wind hath carried it in its belly, the earth is its nurse. The father of all perfection in the whole world is here. Its force or power is entire if it be

converted into earth.Separate thou the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross sweetly with great indoustry. It ascends from the earth to the heaven & again it descends to the earth & receives the force of things

superior & inferior.By this means you shall have the glory of the whole world & thereby all obscurity shall fly

from you.Its force is above all force. For it vanquishes every subtile thing & penetrates every solid

thing.So was the world created.

From this are & do come admirable adaptations whereof the means (or process) is here in this.

Hence I am called Hermes Trismegist, having the three parts of the philosophy of the whole

worldThat which I have said of the operation of the

Sun is accomplished & ended. See the French Bibliotheque. Theatrum Chemicum vol. 6. p.715. & vol 1 p 362 et p 8 et

p 166 & p 685 et vol 4 p 4972

At first glance the meaning of the tablet is far from clear. Just what exactly was the writer’s original intention? The origin of the text is quite obscure, and it is difficult to imagine that the tablet is

referring to a chymistry remotely similar to what Newton was doing. And yet Newton translated not only the tablet, but also an extensive commentary on it. Clearly the document was important to him. To find meaning in the tablet, the most important thing to notice about the text is the motif of presenting pairs of opposites. A fairly comprehensive list would be: ‘true without lying’, ‘above & below’, ‘sun & moon’, ‘father & mother’, ‘earth & fire’, ‘subtle & gross’, ‘heaven & earth’, ‘ascends & descends’ and ‘superior & inferior.’ Along with these pairs of opposites comes the constant suggestion that they can be unified. Perhaps the entire tablet could be summed up by the second line, “That which is below is like that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing.” Alchemy is not alone in its emphasis on the unification of opposites. Its philosophical import 2 Newton, Isaac. Hermes. 1680-1684. MS 28. Kings College, Cambridge.

Figure 7, Table of Alchemical Symbols

(Above) This Table, copied directly from The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy by Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, shows some of the common symbols found in `vNewton’s alchemical manuscripts, as well as their various meanings. The symbols were used in many contexts, sometimes meaning the metal, sometimes meaning a planet, and sometimes meaning a God. Those groups of nouns were not nearly as differentiated for the alchemists as they are for us. It was not uncommon to see the name Aries used to indicate Mars, i.e. Iron. Diana was frequently a pseudonym for Silver. The celestial analog for Antimony was Earth. The symbol for Antimony, a globe surmounted by a cross, emphasizes the relationship between alchemy and Christ. (Below) These alchemical symbols indicate the four Aristotelian elements: Air, Earth, Fire and Water. Note their similarity to each other and how they combine to create æther.

7has long been recognized in many eastern religious traditions. The Hindu god Siva, lord of creation and destruction, is a prime example. In the west, unification of opposites was central to first Neoplatonic and later Gnostic philosophies, from which Hermeticism is largely based. Likely the most famous philosopher to employ imagery the unification of above and below was Frederic Nietzsche. For my purposes, I think the best way to explain the implications of the unification of opposites is through the Gnostic concept of the Pleroma.3

leroma is a filler word for the wordless state or place than can be reached when all the opposites are unified. It is beyond everything, underneath nothing, past

God and greater than infinity. Essential to under-standing the concept is the idea that we can only perceive reality by breaking it up into pairs of opposites which are arguably artificial. For example, you can only know that something is hot by comparing it to something that is less hot than it, i.e. something cold. We create the concept of temperature by sorting our experiences into one of the two categories. With enough experiences we can create a temperature spectrum, but at its highest resolution that spectrum will always be based on a binary distinction between ‘hotter’ and ‘colder.’ In other words, the idea of hot cannot exist without the idea of cold. Acknowledging that opposite concepts are inexorably linked produces a paradox. If one cannot exist without the other, they must be the same thing, like a lichen which is neither an algae nor a fungus, but both. All of the pairs of opposites you could ever imagine existed in a strange state of indescribable symbiosis before they were broken apart by thought. The Pleroma is what exists or does not exist (both words are unsatisfactory) before any pairs of opposites are differentiated from each other. By differentiating the pairs of opposites in our minds, we bring them into reality. Hot comes with cold. Zen Buddhism is famous for expressing similar concepts with bizarre koans, but the idea is not just rooted in religious philosophies. Opposites are reflected in or biology. Our sensory neurons function as difference detectors, either firing or not firing in response to some measured value of the external environment. But what exactly our neurons respond to is metaphysi-cally arbitrary. While there are evolutionary reasons why our eyes should respond to light between 400 nm and 700 nm wavelengths, there is nothing in the ‘essence’ of electromagnetic radiation in that spectrum that should cause it to be perceived as light, while longer wavelengths are perceived as heat. It is difficult, arguably impossible, to think of a method of perception that does not rely on arbitrary differentiation as its method of defining reality. And yet this reliance on differentiation ushers in a host of philosophical dilemmas. For example, it is hard to uphold ideas of an absolute or objective morality from this perspective. Good and evil become subjective ideological constructs that exist only to the extent that they are differentiated from each other. From this mindset, any attempt to strive for ‘the good’ will always be haunted by the shadow of evil lurking in the void that your good actions create. 3 Much of my discussion of the Pleroma stems from Carl Jung's use of it in The Red Book, specifically in The Seven Sermons of the Dead. The Red Book is a series of dreams and hallucinations Jung recorded between 1914 and 1917, his analysis of which form the basis of his psychological theories. Much of the imagery of The Red Book is alchemical in nature. Jung, C. G., and Sonu Shamdasani. The Red Book: Liber Novus. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2009. Print. p. 348-351

Figure 8, Table of Alchemical SymbolsThis Table is also copied directly from The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy by Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs. Note how compounds like Salt, Tartar or Vitriol do not have a unique modern chemical identity. Chymical compounds in the early modern period were not organized as rigorously as they are today, and identification often had to do with physical properties rather than atom ones.

8

Let’s tie this back in with The Emerald Tablet. The alchemists firmly recognized that perception was linked to pairs of opposites and their writings reflect that. Alchemical theories of matter functioned

by describing material properties in terms of opposed qualities. Perfection could only be attained when those qualities were in balance. It bears repeating, “That which is below is like that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing.” God is the manifes-tation of the unified opposites, the one only thing that can perform miracles. The Philosopher’s Stone is much more than a magical substance that can turn Lead into Gold; it is divinity materialized and matter perfected. It can only be produced when all of the various properties of matter are in complete balance. The idea of transmutation stems from the belief that seemingly opposite materials are, at their root, the same thing. Our modern science is reductionistic, it tends to break things down into their simplest form to discover their properties. In contrast, alchemy was holistic, and held the view that ultimately, everything was unified. Now yet again I’ve created an artificial dichotomy between reduc-tionist and holistic practices, and between modern science and alchemy. Such distinctions do not necessarily need to be made, and Hermes Trismegestus would probably say that both qualities ‘arose from the mediation of the one.’ But it is useful nonetheless to appreciate these subtle differences in world view. As we will see later, the holistic nature of alchemy had a huge effect on what kinds of statements alchemists could make about reality.

lchemy has a rich history between Hermes Trismegestus and Newton, most of which I cannot cover here. There are fantastical names like Zozimos of Panopolis (~300 A.D) and Mary the Jewess (there is a long history of the relationship between alchemy and Jewish mysticism called cabala), but the next name that I would like to focus on is Nicholas Flamel (1330-1418),

made famous by J.K. Rowling in her Harry Potter series. Like Trismegestus before him, Flamel blurs the line between man and myth. While Flamel was certainly a real person, most of the history attributed to him was published over 200 years after his death, in 1624, in a book called Exposition of the Hiero-glyphical Figures.4 In the Exposition, Flamel claims to have purchased a mysterious book full of Hebrew symbols and hieroglyphics from an unknown source. Over time, Flamel and his wife decoded the

4 Nicolas Flamel. Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation,

Figure 9, Newton’s copy of a diagram of the Philosophers Stone, Babson MS 420

Note the various alchemical symbols arranged in a geometric pattern. See Figure 7 above for symbolic meanings. The text around the central circle reads Prima Materia. Prima Materia, first matter, or philosophic mercury, was a hypothetical universal men-strum from which all matter could grow. Matter and spirit were conceived of as distinct entities that could be separated from one another. Philosophical Mercury was created by removing the soul of a lesser metal (usually silver or vulgar mercury). Once formed, the Philosophical Mercury could be easily transmuted into Gold by adding the proper spirit. This is a brief theoretical explanation of the events that occurred in the introduction, a more detailed one will be found later in the text.

9symbols and determined the proper procedure for producing the Philosophers Stone. The Philoso-phers Stone granted the Flamels immortality, which conveniently explains why the Exposition was published in the seventeenth century instead of the fourteenth. This obviously fictitious story offers me the opportunity to explain another important aspect of alchemical lore: the idea of Prisca Sapientia.

Prisca Sapientia, or first wisdom, was an idea held by most academics in the early modern period. I see Prisca Sapientia sort of like the premise of Star Wars: ‘A long time ago in a galaxy far far away,

the ancients knew much much more than we do now’. In less anachronistic language, Prisca Sapientia is an extension of the biblical myth of the fall. It is the idea that the God imparted truth to Adam and Eve that was lost when they were expelled from Eden. Even after the fall, Adam and Eve had true religion and true natural philosophy, but this ancient wisdom was lost and degraded through the generations. It could be argued that figures such as Noah or Moses, or even Flamel, possessed Prisca Sapientia, but the 17th century Church and natural philosophers certainly did not. For this reason, academics were constantly referring to the wisdom of the ancients to give themselves credibility. Many times in my research I encountered long lists of authors (usually starting with Pythagoras or Euclid) and claims about what those authors thought. Newton employed such a list in A Treatise of the System

Figure 10, “Grand Rosicrucian Alchemical Formula.” Emblem from Museum Hermeticum Reformatum et Amplificatum, 1678.The Museum Hermeticum Refromatum et Amplificatum is a collection of alchemical writings from the most famous alchemical authors of the day. It contains Nicholas Flamel, The book of Lambspring, Michael Maier, Michael Sendivigious, George Ripley, Erienaeus Philalethes, among others. Note the alchemical symbols and vast array of opposites. The emblem is divided in half, with Man, Day, Sun, Fire, Phoenix, Iron and Mars on the left and Woman, Night, Moon, Water, Aquila, Copper and Venus on the right. Many more pairs of opposites are present. Note also that the symbol for Gold is at the center of the image inside the central tree, and the symbol for Philosophical Mercury (the symbols for mercury and gold combined) is in the center of the mandala in the clouds. Between them a crow transforms into a phoenix. At center bottom day and night combine in the alchemist and two opposed lions merge with one head. Philosophical Mercury drips from their jaws.

10of the World to contend that all the ancients believed in the heliocentric Copernican system.5 With the doctrine of Prisca Sapientia we see a sharp contrast between early modern academic thought and current academic thought. In academia today, we are constantly improving upon old ideas. With each generation our technology becomes more efficient, our history more nuanced. Old systems, like Newtonian mechanics, are subsumed by new systems, like relativity. This was not thought to be the case in the early modern period. The natural philosophy of Trismegistus was considered more complete than that of Descartes as a matter of course. The only problem was that the knowledge had been lost, or was encoded in inaccessible ways, like the hieroglyphics of Abraham the Mage.6 This was the motivation for a seventeenth century author to fabricate the 200 year old identity of Flamel. An alchemist from 1400 had much more authority than one from 1600. In this way, alchemy is more akin to religious scriptural traditions like the Hebrew cabala than it is to modern science. All manuscripts, as well as commentaries on those manuscripts, are considered valid parts of the cannon.7 From a modern perspective Prisca Sapientia may seem like absurdity, especially if your first introduction to the idea was through the story of Nicholas Flamel. But it is an idea that needs to be taken seriously if alchemy is to be properly understood. Consider for a moment that to study alchemy today, or history of science at all, is to believe in some form of Prisca Sapientia. For why else would we devote so much time reconstructing the thoughts of dead men if we did not believe there would be some value in what we found?

he next alchemist I want to focus on, Paracelsus (1493-1541), finally crosses the barrier from fictional to real person. His real name was Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim,

but like many alchemists he published under a pseudonym.8 Alchemy can be broken into many sub categories. For example Chrysopoeia is the study of gold making. Paracelsus is credited with estab-

5 Newton, Isaac. A Treatise of the System of the World. London: Printed for Fayram, 1728. Print. p.1-4. He cites the ancient philosophers: ‘The Ancients,’ Philolaus, Aristarchus of Samos, Plato, ‘The Pythagoreans,’ Anaximander, Numa Pompilius, ‘The Egyptians,’ Anaxagoras, Democritus, Eudoxus, Calippus, Aristotle, ‘The Chaldeans,’ as well as the contemporary philosophers Kepler, Descartes, Borelli and Hook. 6 Vickers, Brian. “The ‘New Historiography’ and the Limits of Alchemy.” Annals of Science 65.1 (2008): 127-56. p.133. Vickers writes, “Alchemy could only metamorphose into chemistry when some practitioners ceased to rely on this textual morass and formulated new, independent theories of substances and processes to be investigated by laboratory practice. Their practical operations had undoubtedly benefited from the technological developments made since the Arabic Middle Ages, but alchemy is, and always was, an art which depends in large part on the interpretation of texts.”7 Idem p.132. Vickers writes, “One of the major difficulties in studying alchemy, as I have observed elsewhere, is its cumula-tive nature, the fact that alchemists copied and recopied ancient texts, created bewildering variations in terminology, and used allegorical or deliberately obscure accounts of substances and processes. It is important to recognize that alchemy, in this respect like astrology and magic, was a textually cumulative discipline. No text was ever thrown away, since none was ever superseded. Potentially, any work produced in Hellenistic Egypt, Medieval Islam, or Renaissance Europe, could divulge the arcanum arcanorum.”8 “Paracelsus.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation

Figure 11, OuroborosThis is a classic version of the ouroboros where the winged and wingless dragons consume each other. Note the alchemical symbols in the center, as well as the pairs of opposites around the outside of the dragons and inside the Star of David, which in a merger of cabalistic and alchemistic lore sym-bolizes æther and quintessence, all the opposite elements unified.

11lishing, or at least strongly influencing, the study of Iatrochemistry, `or medical alchemy. Paracelsus proposed the idea that there are certain material substances (what we would now call drugs) that can affect human health in specific ways. In a parallel vein, Paracelsus frequently emphasized that alchemical theory linked transmutations of materials to transmutations of the human soul. (Figure 12) Lawrence Principe writes of Paracelsus,

“Paracelsus intensified such linkages and devised a world-system populated with a vast number of supernatural beings and elemental spirits and where natural and sympathetic magic played a central role in an organic cosmos. The material tria prima of Mercury, Sulphur, and Salt was linked in a web of correspondences that included the Triune Godhead and the threefold nature of man: spirit, soul, and body.”9

Tria Prima theory had its origins in Islamic alchemy, and held the view that all the diversity

of matter arose from three fundamental properties: Mercury, Sulphur and Salt. Similar ideas were held

in the west since the time of Aristotle: The Aristote-lian four elements of Earth, Water, Air and Fire were said to be what all matter is made up of. Paracelsus is often cited as the first to merge the two theories together.Sulphur and Mercury were often singled

out in chrysopoeian contexts.10 Gold was a mixture of Sulphur and Mercury in perfect proportions. Iron was said to have excess Sulphur, which was why it was so brittle, while Mercury was said to have excess Mercury, which was why it was so volatile. That last phrase may be a bit confusing. The Tria Prima were not elements or compounds per say, but more like properties. Vulgar, elemental Mercury had very strong Mercurial properties, but it was not the same as the essence of Mercury, because it still had some Sulphur in it. The most pristine essence of Mercury was a theoretical compound called Philosoph-ical Mercury, and the alchemists were constantly trying to make it. Preparing Philosophical mercury was not as simple as purifying vulgar Mercury. There were myriads of methods of varying complexi-ties for preparing Philosophical Mercury, and Newton tried more than one.11 One of the most iconic attempts was by Herman Boerhaave in 1718 where he heated Mercury continuously at a temperature above 100oF for 15 years and 6 months.12 Philosophical Mercury was purported to have truly magical

9 Principe, Lawrence M., and Robert Boyle. The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ., 1998. Print. p.18910 For example, Newton writes in one tract, “A double mercury is the sole first and proximate matter of all metals, and these two mercuries are the masculine and feminine semens, sulfur and mercury, fixed and volatile, the serpents around the cadu-ceus, the Dragons of Flammel. Nothing is produced from the masculine of feminine semen alone. For generation and for the first matter the two must be joined.” Newton, Isaac. Sententiæ Luciferæ Et Conclusiones Notabiles. 1696-98. MS Keynes MS 56. King’s College,

Cambridge. Translation found in Westfall, Never at Rest p.299 See figure 1111 For a very thorough explication of Newton’s attempts at creating Philosophical Mercury see Dobbs, Betty Jo Teeter. The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy: Or “The Hunting of the Greene Lyon.” Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. Print.12 Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy. p.86. Boerhaave is typically considered more of a chemist than and alchemist, but ex-amples like his Philosophical Mercury experiments show the fuzziness of these definitions before the mid eighteenth century.

Figure 12, Paracelsus, Portrait by Quentin Massys, 1528Paracelsus wrote in Paragranum, “The purpose of alchemy is not, as it is said, to made gold and silver, but in this instance to make arcana and direct them against diseases...For all these things conform to the instruc-tion and test of nature. Hence nature and man, in heath and sickness, need to be joined together, and to be brought into mutual agreement.”

12properties. It went by many names: “the ☿ of ☿”, “Our Mercury”, “The water that does not wet one’s hands.”13 The most evocative name I have found for Philosophical Mercury is the “true metaline menstrum.”14 In the vast array of symbolic alchemical associations (Figure 10), Mercury was decidedly female. Philosophical Mercury was the womb out of which all life could grow. All matter was at its root the same stuff, and that same stuff was Philosophical Mercury, Prima Materia, first matter, the universal menstrum. All of the various forms of things in the world were caused by different spirits forming the Prima Materia into diverse arrangements. And so matter and spirit were separate, but they were also firmly linked. Matter and spirit coexisted together, and they had to be separated in order for transmutation to occur. Heat was a key player in separating spirit from matter. A gentle heat would spark the spirit to grow, whereas the intense heat of the alchemical furnace would cause death and putrefaction. The heat would cause the spirit to leave the matter, whereby the vulgar Mercury would become Philosophical Mercury. Next, a male seed or spark, sometimes associated with Sulphur or Fire, but usually associated with Gold, would be added to the Philosophical Mercury, where it would take life and grow. In this way the dead matter was reborn in a new, perfect form; the Philosophers Stone. The Philosophers Stone was for much more than making Gold; it linked the corporeal world with the divine. This interaction between matter and spirit was the key to life. Metals were alive. For transmutation to occur the metals had to die and then were reborn, transformed. These transmutations were thought to occur with or without the help of the alchemist. Alchemists were just capable of speeding up the process. Independent of human intervention, metals were thought to grow in the ground like trees15 (Figure 13), and what element they ended up becoming was a matter of time and balance of properties. So, to summarize, matter was made of opposed qualities, which are ultimately personified as body and spirit, but any number of qualities were fit into the binary cosmology. Gold and Philosophical Mercury

13 Idem p. 8414 Ibid 15 Michael Sendivigious wrote in A New Light of Alchemy, “Are not metals of as much esteem with god as trees?” Gold was the most mature metal, and all the other metals were in various stages of growth and maturation. The connection between metals and trees sees to stem from the root-like ramification of metal veins in mines, but there is laboratory evidence as well that will be discussed later in the paper.

Figure 13, Splendor Solis Plate 6 The creation of the Philosophers Stone was often likened to the growth of a tree. In this image the stone is symbolized by a tree with golden roots growing through the crown. Two men in inversly colored robes look upon the tree. One holds a dead branch, the other a living sprig.

13were both considered to be exemplars of unified opposites, but they too formed a pair of opposites and when they were brought together they produced the Philosophers Stone. The Philosophers Stone, as its name suggests, has philosophical (spiritual) as well as material (stone-like) properties. Its material purposes were to turn Lead into Gold, or provide eternal life, but spiritually it was a manifestation of the Pleroma. It was God, or Christ. It was perfection.

In describing Paracelsus’s Tria Prima theory, I have been fairly ahistorical in my approach. Likely some of the aspects of Philosophical Mercury or the Philosophers Stone would be more correctly

attributed to later alchemists such as Michael Maier, Jan Baptist van Helmont, George Ripley, or Michael Sendivigious. There are also other alchemical theories that do not fall in line with Paracel-sus’s thinking. But my goal here has not been to point out subtle differences between the various alchemists, or to describe the evolution of alchemical theory over time, but rather to give you a sense of the alchemical theory Newton was exposed to. I want to explore the work of the next alchemist I cover, George Starkey, in some depth, and a general sense of alchemical theory is required in order to understand it. eorge Starkey was born in Bermuda in 1628. He attended Harvard College, and in 1650 he emigrated to London, likely in order to increase his access to alchemical resources and knowledgeable adepti.16 Starkey published chymical works under his given name, but also under the pseudonym Eiranaeus Philalethes, ‘a peaceful lover of truth.’ The rhetorical styles of Starkey and Philalethes differ greatly. Starkey’s tracts are direct, and refer mostly to chemical materials, procedures and observations. Philalethes refers to those

same materials, procedures and observa-tions, but he does so through extensive use of imagery and metaphor. Philalethes achieved great renown in London alchemical circles, and it seems most of the alchemists that

Starkey was in contact with were unaware of his dual identity, even when he wrote introductions to Phila-lethes’s manuscripts and was responsible for much of their distribution. Starkey was in frequent contact with Robert Boyle and taught him much of the laboratory practice Boyle became famous for.17 Towards the end of the 1650’s Philalethes’s fame declined. Starkey was incarcerated multiple times in a debtors prison for debts he accrued furnishing his laboratory (chemistry was then, as it is now, an expensive hobby). In 1665 he died of the plague. Newton and Starkey were contem-poraries; both were in close communication with Robert Boyle, although at different times. Philalethes was the most modern alchemist that Newton read, and of all the alchemists found in Newton’s library, the alchemical theories of Eiranaeus Philalethes were most closely tied to Newton’s. Newton’s tract Praxis relies heavily on many of Philalethes’s works, notably An Exposition upon Sir George Ripley’s Epistle to King Edward IV. Prisca Sapientia is heavily employed in that work. An Exposition is a commentary upon an earlier tract by George Ripley, although much of the theory and procedure described in it are Philalethes’s own. I am going to analyze portions of An Exposition, both because it will provide much insight into Newton’s work, but also because it will serve as an excellent introduction to the work of William Newman and Lawrence Principe. These modern historians of science are Starkey’s chief biographers and I will be relying on them for my own analysis of Starkey’s work. Principe and Newman have put forth a new historiography of alchemy that is radically different from most of the prior interpretations of alchemy

16 “George Starkey.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 31 May 2012.17 Newman, William R., and Lawrence M. Principe. Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2002. Print. p.12

Figure 14, First Edition Philalethes text, 1678 Ripley Reviv’d, Or, An Exposition upon Sir George Ripley’s Hermetico-poetical Works Containing the Plainest and Most Excellent Discoveries of the Most Hidden Secrets of the Ancient Philosophers, That Were Ever Yet Published by Eirenaeus Philalethes

14that have been produced over the past 300 years. While I am critical of some of their positions (my views tend to be more spiritual), the overall picture they paint is too compelling, and full of too much evidence to try to ignore, discredit or refute.

To analyze An Exposition, I will be quoting from a paper written by Newman entitled Decknamen or pseudochemical language?: Eirenaeus Philalethes and Carl Jung. Newman has condensed sections

of the Philalethes’s treatise so that they are much easier to quote and analyze, so I will be quoting Newman directly rather than the primary source. In this paper, Newman presents portions of An Exposition, complete with images of copulating hermaphroditic royalty, and then translates the images into a reproducible chemical procedure. In doing so, Newman claims to have found an explanation of alchemical imagery without needing to resort to a Jungian interpretation. Although I question Newman’s

dismissal of Jungian views, his analysis of Philalethes is completely sound and deserves our attention here. I will delve deeper into the various conflicting inter-pretations of alchemy later in the paper, once I have more fully explicated alchemical theory and history through the present day. Beginning his description of An Exposition, Newman writes,

“Philalethes begins his allegory by welcoming the reader to the “garden of the Philoso-phers”, where he may behold a glorious castle having twelve entrances. These are the twelve gates of Ripley’s Compound of alchymie, the text that Philalethes is commenting, by which Ripley referred to twelve alchemical processes calcination, dissolution, separation, conjunction, putrefaction, congelation cibation, sublimation, fermentation, exaltation, multiplication, and projection. The first gate is recessed into the earth and surmounted by a dire inscription, “Dust thou art, and unto Dust thou shalt return”. Within the gate lies the corpse of a “Great Person”. A lady stands there in mourning, “very comely, yet black, for why the Sun hath shined upon her”. Her name is Juno. But the castle is guarded by a garrison, and Philalethes assures us that we must have a guide, lest we be taken as spies.”18

I want to emphasize the scenario that Philalethes places us in. Newman assures us this is a

laboratory text that explains a real and reproducible chemical process. And yet this introduction is unlike any laboratory procedure a modern chemistry student might find. It reads more like Lord of the

Rings than a lab book. Imagine a would be adept in Newton’s time (or ours), set upon discovering the mysteries of the material world. She opens up a text book eager to learn, but instead of receiving dry explanations of properties he is thrown into a fantastical world where castles that hide ancient wisdom are guarded by corpses. The castle not only hides the wisdom, it is the wisdom itself. Its twelve gates

18 Newman, William R. “Decknamen or Pseudochemical Language ? : Eirenaeus Philalethes and Carl Jung.” Persee 3rd ser. 49.2 (1996): 159-88. Print.

p.166. Quotes within the citation reference either Philalethes or Philalethes quoting George Ripley directly. Please view New-man’s article directly for more complete bibliographical information. It is freely available online.

Figure 15, The Mountain of the Adepts, Michelspacher, Cabala, 1654 The Mountain of the Adepts documents the various stages of matter as it progresses to the philosophers stone. Matter is transformed from one stage to the other via various active principles listed in the pyramid. These stages are reminiscent of the twelve gates of Ripley’s compound Philalethes describes.

15correspond to alchemical processes.19(Figure 15) At the door the would be adept is reminded of the scope of his quest. It is not just about Chrysopoeia, but about finding her place in the universe. She is reminded that “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return”20 Think for a moment what it would be like if our modern science pedagogy were concerned not only with describing material properties but with teaching students how to find meaning in their lives. What would it be like if our universities were built like Ripley’s compound? What if our academic buildings were cathedrals couched in symbolism whose very structure reflected the knowledge to be learned?

Our adept enters the compound, and is quickly met by the guide

Philalethes insisted upon. Newman writes,

“The guide receives a circumstantial description. He has a “humour of his own not to be equalled in the World”, so that if he is angered or made sullen, all will be lost. He is very simple, indeed, “a very stupid Fool.” Nonetheless, he is silent and faithful, though “if he can find an opportunity he will give you the slip, and leave you in a world of misfortune.” One can tell if he is happy or not by his countenance. He should therefore be “shut up close where he may not get forth,” and the alchemist should “go wisely before with heat.” The servant, who will follow, will grow red in the face if he should become angry, but if he is in a good temper, “he is indifferent active and merry.” Philalethes continues to say that the guide will “presently take snuff” if left to his own devices, for due to his “perpetual working” he tires easily.”21

On the surface, it appears Philalethes is providing a character study of the new companion that has joined our adepts quest. He resembles Shakespeare’s Caliban; a brutish servant who dutifully but

unwillingly serves the old wizard Prospero. It is doubtful that Starkey had Caliban in mind when he concocted the description, but the resemblance emphasizes that there is clearly something archetypal about the image. However, Newman warns us that before we slip into Jungian language we should take a closer look at the description, and keep chymical purposes in mind. On second glance, it becomes

19 Newton was particularly interested in fermentation and putrefaction. Putrefaction was the step of death in the alchemical process. The next step was fermentation. At its simplest, fermentation had the same meaning for Newton as it does for us today: the growth of yeast in a sugar medium. But alchemical fermentation had a much broader scope, and was the process by which all life was formed. Newton frequently referred to fermentation as vegetation. The bubbling of a fermenting flask was seen as an indication of the active spirit within. Any smoke or gas rising up was the material manifestation of that spirit. Jan Baptist van Helmont (1579-1644) is credited with introducing the word gas into chymical terminology. The word derives from the Greek word chaos and its metaphorical links with spirit run deep. One excellent example would be the Hebrew word ruach which means synonymously breath, wind, and spirit. 20 Philalethes, Eirenaeus, and William Cooper. Ripley Reviv’d, Or, An Exposition upon Sir George Ripley’s Hermetico-poetical Works Containing the Plainest and Most Excellent Discoveries of the Most Hidden Secrets of the Ancient Philosophers, That Were Ever Yet Published. London: Printed by Tho. Ratcliff and Nat. Thompson, for William Cooper ..., 1678. 21 Newman, William R. “Decknamen or Pseudochemical Language? p.166

Figure 16, Atalanta Fugiens, Emblema X, De Secretis Natura, Michael Maier, 1617The inscription reads roughly, “Give fire to fire, Mercury to Mercury and it is sufficient for thee” This image perhaps depicts something similar to Philalethes’s fire guide. The presence of two Mercuries is also a common trope. “Double Mercury” was some-times used as an analog to Philisophical Mercury.

16obvious that the servant is fire incarnate; the first thing any adept would need on his quest for the Philosophers Stone. Fire tires easily because of its perpetual working. It will treat our adept dutifully and loyally, but if given the opportunity (a stray piece of paper perhaps) he will give her the slip and leave her in a world of misfortune. To protect himself from the fires dangers our adept should shut the servant up close where he may not get forth, in a furnace. What could be the purpose in anthropomorphizing fire in this way? Doubtless, there are many reasons on multiple levels (personal, aesthetic, chemical) but rather than conjecture what was going on in Starkey’s head when he wrote the description, I want to emphasize the simple fact that these multiple levels exist at all. Even in a simple description of fire, we see a richness of meaning that is unparalleled in modern laboratory procedure. Today we have exchanged this richness for objectivity, and it has been unquestioned among historians of science until very recently that that exchange had to occur for modern chemistry to develop. I think it is possible with our modern perspective to reassimilate aesthetics and depth of meaning into our science without losing the objectivity and rigor we have worked for 300 years to produce. But I’ll get off my soap box for a moment to delve further into An Exposition. In a later scene we see further evidence of Prisca Sapientia. Newman quotes,

““I lift up mine eyes, and behold I saw Nature as a Queen gloriously adorned.” The queen is holding a book entitled Philosophy restored to its primitive purity, which she gives the alchemist to eat. After being so honored by the lady, Philalethes says “was my Understanding so enlightened, that I did fully apprehend all things which I saw and heard” ”22

Here Prisca Sapientia is personified as literal book

eating. We also see a web of inter-connected symbols in “Nature as a Queen gloriously adorned.” (Figure 17) In this context both Nature and Queen have multiple meanings. The Queen is Silver, companion to Gold, but she is also Philosophical Mercury, from which all things may grow. Nature too is Philosophical Mercury, and she is also the predictable natural law of the universe with which

Newton was deeply concerned. Newton believed (and from this quote it seems likely Starkey did too) that discovering natural law from phenomena was a method of reaching God, of discovering true religion and restoring philosophy “to its primitive purity.” The image of consuming the book of nature is an incredibly effective and evocative way of expressing this sentiment. It is again worth pausing here to note the differences between modern science and the natural philosophy of Philalethes and Newton. For them, science and religion ran parallel to each other, each complimenting the other with insights into how the world worked. What would a high school chemistry textbook look like today if it were modeled after the book Nature feeds Philalethes? What if chemistry were taught as a pathway to the divine secrets of the universe?

22 Idem. p.167

Figure 17, Atalanta Fugiens, Emblema XXVI, De Secretis Natura, , Michael Maier, 1617 The inscription reads “Man’s wisdom is the fruit of the tree of life.” Natures scrolls read, “Long life and health, wealth and infinite glory. “

17

The next quote I want to look at from An Exposition you were

first exposed to in the introduction. Newman quotes,

“Then I viewed his Pitcher well, and I found that his Pitcher was clear as pure Silver; and what was strange, the Bearer, and the Pitcher, and the Water in it were one ; and in the midst of the Water, as it were in the very centre, there was a most radiant twinkling Spark, which sent forth its Beams even to the very surface of the Water, and appeared as it were a Lamp burning, and yet no way distinguishable from the Water”23

Here we see, in a highly condensed form, the theoretical process for

producing Philosophical Mercury and the subsequent Philosophers stone. Opposites are unified to create the Philosophical Mercury, “the Bearer, and the Pitcher, and the Water in it were one.” Then the spark appears in the Prima Materia and the Philoso-phers Stone grows. Imagery of water and light are intimately tied up with the generation of life. The images have mythological parallels in Greek Ambrosia and Hindu Amrita as well as obvious biological parallels which are their original inspiration. Philalethes expands upon his procedure with more detail and varied imagery, describing the first step of the generation of the Philosophers Stone. Newman writes,

“Philalethes then lights the furnace beneath the chamber, and the Water-bearer pours forth his water, now mixed with fire. The Waterbearer then makes his exit by diving into the stream of water and disappearing. Inspecting the released liquid, Philalethes notices “a goodly Lady in the midst of it”, not Nature herself, but one as beautiful as Helen. She is naked, and her skin as bright as fine silver. Although she is tiny at first, she soon grows bigger, consuming all the water as she expands. The new lady, unlike the old, is pained horribly by the heat of the stove, and she repeatedly faints. The King, meanwhile, feeling pity for her whom he knows to be “his Sister, his Mother, and his Wife”, embraces her. He is at once covered with her sweat and tears, so that both take on the color of silver. Gallantly, he asks her what he can do to help, and she replies that she wants his “Conjugal Fealty”. Not one to be diverted by euphemism, the King grants her request in such a way that she conceives “the King’s Seed”, saying with some relief that she is now “better able to endure the Fire which did prevail upon her”. But this is not enough: The King, “wasted by his Venery” begins to sweat marvel-lously, until his body is almost consumed. The Queen, no doubt feeling a combination of guilt and disappointment, sheds so many tears that, mixed with the sweat, they produce a river, and so the two are drowned. Philalethes, musing “at the strangeness of the sight”, then notices a carcass on the surface of the water, which soon grows “livid, black, blewish, and yellowish” with putrefaction. This horrible decay soon infects the water, which now grows black and thick, like turbid slime. The heat gradually dries up this decaying mass, only to reveal “a horrible venomous tumefied Toad, [...] as it were dying [...]” A raven eats the toad, die of its poison, and dissolves into a “most filthy squallid Liquor blacker than Ink, and thick like Pitch melted.” ” 24

23 Idem. p.170 also, Philalethes, Exposition upon the first six gates..., in Ripley Reviv’d, op. cit. p.11424 Newman, William R. “Decknamen or Pseudochemical Language? p.171

Figure 18, Atalanta Fugiens, Emblema XXVI, De Secretis Natura, , Michael Maier, 1617The inscription roughly reads, “Conceived in the bath, and born in the air, the red stone was made gradually over the waters. ” The Philosophers Stone was often reffered to as the red stone. Many alchemical elements are dynamically integrated in this image. The Sun and the Moon copulate in thr water, while the Earth gives birth amidst burning mountains thick with smoke. Death and Rebirth are synthesised with Earth, Air, Fire and Water to create the Philosophers Stone.

18

Metaphors of death and rebirth are present in every image in this sequence, highlighting the first alchemical step of Putrefaction. In Putrefaction previously living matter loses its spirit, dies, and

putrefies. Putrefaction was frequently cited as evidence for spontaneous generation; flies would arise only from putrefying meat. Death and dead material was required for all life to grow. And so the lady is pained horribly by the life giving light of the stove and repeatedly faints. After the couple copulates they dissolve and drown in each other tears. Their bodies decay in the water and cause it to metamor-phose; first into turbid slime, then a toad, then a raven, and finally pure blackness. Putrefaction puts the Philosophical Mercury is on its way to completion and it soon will give birth to the Philosophers Stone.

Philalethes continues on for many pages. There is much more nuance and technicality to these images than I care to cover, all of which is explicated beautifully in Newman’s paper. To conclude

the process, I will quote not from An Exposition but from a private letter Starkey wrote to Robert Boyle in 1651. This letter had a great influence on Newton’s alchemy. He transcribed a full copy of it in the late 1670’s. Before 1987, when Newman identified an earlier version of the letter written by Starkey, many scholars (most notably B.J.T. Dobbs in The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy) believed Newton’s transcription to be an original composition entitled Clavis or Key.25 This mistake occurred in part because the style of this letter is differs dramatically from the metaphorical prose of Philalethes. Starkey is direct and to the point. Much of the letter contains detailed lists of procedures. For example, the Putrefaction

process beautifully illustrated above is put forth in much more direct terms “If [antimony] be amalgamated with mercury vulgar and is digested with it a small time (2 or 3 hours) in a closed pot with a cover or a glass stopped in such a heat that the mercury may begin to arise like a dew… and then ground [for] a convenient time, about half a quarter of an hour, (if in a hot mortar the better, yet not over hot) till it spew out a blackness, and then washed till the blackness do come in small quantity which will be discerned by the light fouling of the water (for at first it will make ye water very black) which must be poured off and fresh water poured on till ye blackness decrease, then amalgamated, then dried. [It] is to be set to the fire and kept about 3 hours more in the former heat then ground in a hot mortar as before, it yeildeth fresh blackness which must be washed as before, and this reiterated till ye amalgama-tion become as bright as burnished silver.”26

With this quote it becomes evident that the various transformations of the putrefying matter from slime to toad to raven were actually the repeated burning and removal of impurities from an

amalgamation of Mercury. Starkey is specific about tools, temperature and procedure. But we do get a glimpse of awe as well later in the letter, 25 Newman, William. “Newton’s Clavis as Starkey’s Key.” Isis 78.4 (1987): 564. Print26 Idem. p.572. This quote has been edited for clarity. I have updated most of the words to their modern spellings and changed some of the punctuation to make the meaning more clear. Words inside [square brackets] are my own insertions.

Figure 19, Atalanta Fugiens, Emblema XXXIII, De Secretis Natura, , Michael Maier, 1617The inscription roughtly translates to, “Lying in the dark like death, the hermaphrodite needs fire.” Similar to images of kings being placed into vessels to die (See pages 63&69)here we see the hermaphrodite requiring death and fire in order to transform. The use of androgeny as a metaphor for Prima Materia highlights its flexible, undifferentiated state

19“I have now in fire several glasses of Gold with that Mercury which grow in the form of trees, and by Continual Circulation resolve the trees with ye Body into one Mercury of which sort I have now one glass in which Gold is dissolved not to sight by Corrosion into atoms, but really inwardly & outwardly into Mercury as quick as any Mercury in the world. It also makes Gold to puff up to swell to putrefy, to grow with sprigs and branches to Change Colours daily which sights doe daily salute me, and truly it is the only great thing which I think is in all Alchemy.”27

Newton often made the distinction between mechanical transforma-

tions of vulgar chemistry and true trans-mutations of alchemy and Starkey is doing the same. He points out the Gold has not simply been dissolved visibly by corrosion into small atoms, but has inwardly and outwardly transformed into Philosophical Mercury. This Philo-sophical Mercury is differentiated from vulgar Mercury by its quickness, or its ability to flow. The color changing sprigs and branches seem to confirm the theoretical description of a living Philosophers Stone. Thus with Starkey/Philalethes we see a marvelous merging of vibrant alchemical theory and concrete laboratory practice. It was this alchemical landscape molded by Philalethes’s theories in which Newton learned and practiced his craft. But before we can delve into Newton’s alchemy, the subsequent 300 years of alchemical history need to be analyzed, because that analysis will profoundly affect the way that I interpret Newton. For even before Newton began searching for the Philosophers Stone, the seeds of alchemy’s undoing were being sewn. We can explore the reasons for alchemy’s decline, and the subsequent growth of our skewed modern interpretation of it, by examining one of the last alchemists, and one of the first chemists, Robert Boyle.

obert Boyle (1627-1691) is often described as the father of modern chemistry. He was one of the first members of the Royal Society and was a champion of open distribution of information, a practice shunned by many alchemists who preferred to use pseudonyms and encode their practices in metaphor. Boyle’s distaste for secrecy highlighted the differences between the

new chemistry and the older alchemy, but Newman and Principe have pointed out that the differen-tiation of chymistry into alchemy and chemistry was a deliberate and conscious act by Boyle and his contemporaries, and that at the time of Boyle’s activity the differences between the two disciplines ran only skin deep. “Boyle often strove to distinguish himself from his predecessors, thus aiding his subsequent deployment as a point of demarcation between an older alchemy (often characterized as “obscurantist”) and a modern experimental science.”28 At the end of the seventeenth century science was in its earliest infancy, and exactly what its boundaries were not well established. In order to bring credibility to their discipline, the founders of the Royal Society had to work actively to define what

27 Idem. p.573. This quote has also been edited for clarity. 28 Newman, William R., and Lawrence M. Principe. Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry. Chicago: Univer-sity of Chicago, 2002. Print. p.15

Figure 20, Atalanta Fugiens, Emblema IX, De Secretis Natura, , Michael Maier, 1617The inscription roughly reads, “The old man will eat the fruit of the tree, shut up in its dewy house, and will regain his youth.” The dewy house bears strong resemblence to the mercury solution in the Starkey quote. The Philosophers Stone was said to grant eternal life. But images of trees growing in enclosed spaces have meaning on multiple levels. They depict agriculture, and the relationship between man and nature. The tree also signifies the growth of the soul within the vessel of the human body.

20they were as well as what they were not. We see in the first actions of the Royal Society a definition of science that has lasted into the present day. But the foundations of that definition are a bit shaky. The authors remark,

“Boyle’s presentation of himself and his scientific development thus projects both the image of a disinterested and modest natural philosopher and the sense of a thinker who owed little of substance to the foregoing traditions of “the chymists.” But Boyle’s self portrayal can be taken too uncritically; indeed, his writings present a distorted image of his relationship to contemporaneous chymistry and its practi-tioners. Boyle’s public attitude toward chymistry actually involves…a posture of independence from previous chymical traditions. Boyle’s publications often display a pattern of accepting the technology and empirical results of contem-poraneous chymists while conspicuously rejecting their theories. This pattern has been largely recapitulated in much of the secondary literature, and in both locales it has had the effect of elevating Boyle’s own status and diminishing that of the foregoing traditions.”29

Modern historians of science have recently started piercing through the veil of science’s apparent positivist origins and

begun to look at what thought processes lay underneath. Dobbs writes in her introduction to The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy that,

“Modern science in its nascence surely bore the marks of the ancient womb of human thought in which it had its long period of gestation. Not all of those antique thought patterns are acceptable today as valid approaches to the world of phenomena or as genuine and honest efforts at making the world comprehensible. Modern science, like an adolescent, denies its parentage”30

I think the metaphor of a rebellious teenager is quite appropriate. I see a rejection of all things associated with the parent during

adolescence as utterly necessary for establishing identity. Many historians of science have noted that rejecting old thought patterns was required modern science to mature.31 But few have extended the metaphor to note that our young scientific method has now matured enough to look back upon its ancestors and glean wisdom from practices that earlier it had to reject as a matter of self-preservation.

he rejection of alchemy by the natural philosophers of the early eighteenth century has affected its history to the present day. The disdain of the academic community relegated the more esoteric and mystical portions of alchemy to a fantastical realm

that contained witchcraft and astronomy’s forgotten twin, astrology, while the practical elements of the discipline were assimilated into the newly forming chemistry. Hermeticism became a sort of religion in its own right (the modern day Freemasons draw much of their doctrine from Hermetic texts) and practices associated with the word alchemy became increasingly segregated from any sort of material experimen-tation. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, academics like Arthur E Waite (most famous today for the Rider Waite tarot deck,

29 Ibid30 Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, p.xi 31 See the work of Helene Metzger and Brian Vickers

Figure 21a, The Magician, Rider Waite Tarot Note the hands of the magician connecting the above with the below. 1909.

Figure 21b, The Wheel of FortuneRider Waite Tarot, 1909Note the diverse mixture of symbolism, Greek, Egyptian, Alchemical, Astrological, and Cabalistic

21figures 5&21) legitimized the view that alchemy was predominantly a spiritual quest that had little to do with the exploration of material properties.32 Waite lumped alchemy together with all things occult, which of course obscured its practical applications. Alchemy clearly has strong links to religious practices, and I think the popular modern stance to deemphasize those religious components is flawed, but writers like Waite distorted alchemy too far in the opposite direction by insisting its focus was predominantly on self-transformation. Shortly after Waite’s death, psychologist Carl Jung assimilated the spiritualist interpretation of alchemy into his psycho-logical theories. Jung is famous for claiming that alchemical imagery was a product of the unconscious mind of the alchemist. The Philosophers Stone was a metaphor for the completed individuation process, a word coined by Jung to describe a stage of consciousness akin to Buddhist enlightenment in which the True Self is found. From a Jungian perspective, alchemical imagery was produced in a trancelike state and projected into the flask, where the fermenting matter could be observed like a dream, playing out the activity of the psyche of the alchemist. The Jungian perspective does not lack evidence. Paracelsus equated Tria Prima with the Mind, Body and Soul of man, and the metaphor was widespread among other alchemists. Alchemy clearly makes statements about divine and human experiences pertaining to things other than material properties. But Newman and Principe express some very serious criticism of the Jungian explanation that cannot be ignored.

“While one cannot (and would not wish to) deny that alchemy is replete with a singular lushness of symbolism and overlapping levels of meaning or that it presents important resonances with religious speculations, it does not follow that this arises from hallucina-tion, unbridled imagination, or a predominant focus on the spiritual to the exclusion or diminution of the kind of laboratory operations we have come to view as a property of “chemistry.” Nor does it follow that alchemy is nothing but the manipulation of such symbolism or texts without reference to laboratory activities. Yet the widespread stress on the “otherness” of alchemy tends to support the view that alchemists in their laboratories

were not focused on material substances and their actual transforma-tions and even that those alchemists acted more or less haphazardly or

randomly in their operations.” 33

Throughout their work, Principe and Newman argue aggressively that the “otherness” of alchemy is an

historical construct produced after alchemy ceased to be an actively practiced discipline. In this vein, their main critique of the Jungian view is that is that it does not take into account any physical meaning of the alchemical imagery. Raw alchemical symbolism

was central to Jung’s goals. He cared little for chemical applications; he was interested in the images in their own right, and their effects on human beings. Focusing

on symbolism alone allowed Jung to further a soterio-logical34 interpretation of alchemy that differentiated it from chemistry. Principe and Newman’s many attempts to demonstrate the physical meaning of alchemical texts

32For an example of Waite’s work, see Waite, Arthur E. “The Pictoral Symbols of Alchemy.” Occult Review 8.5 (1908). Print33 Newman, William R., and Lawrence M. Principe. Alchemy Tried in the Fire. p.38 34 Soteriology, according to Wikipedia, “is the study of religious doctrines of salvation.” Soteriological goals are expressed in all of the major religions. In the east the goal is called enlightenment, nirvana, or Brahman. In the west the goal is usually personified in Christ’s ascension to heaven. The Jungian soteriological goal is individuation.

Figure 22b, Modern Alchemical Furnace and Distiller Made by William Newman, Modeled after Figure 22a

Figure 22a, Sketch of Alchemical Furnace and distilation aparatus The Art of Distillation, London, 1653, p.64.

22has led them to conclude that the Jungian interpretation is invalid, or at least superfluous. In actuality the Jungian view isn’t superfluous; it is just focused on different issues. Imagery is central to Jungian philosophy, but for Newman and Principe it represents a hurdle to be overcome. Their goal is to show how alchemy fits in with the rest of contemporary natural philosophy. As such, they need to show that the images have scientific credence, but they care little for any other meaning the images might hold. The only level of meaning that Principe and Newman are concerned with is the chemical one. They cannot be faulted for this; someone had to focus on chemical aspects of alchemy in order to bring a more balanced conception of it into the modern awareness. From the perspective the new historiographers take, it makes sense that they would be critical of the Jungian interpretation; it does not fit their needs. They are quite open about this. In one paper Principe writes,

“The Jungian interpretation has owed much of its acceptance and continuance to the fact that it advances an explanation of the origins of the notoriously extravagant imagery of alchemical texts. The very frequent references to hermaphrodites, flowers, dragons, kings, queens, and a multifarious menagerie of real and mythical creatures involved in everything from birth to marriage to incest and death have been a chief locus for arguing the “otherness” of alchemy. Indeed, [Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs] following Jung’s lead, has declared rather incautiously that “clearly these picturesque symbols have nothing to do with chemical realities or with rational theories of transmutation.”35 These figures have thus played a key role in allowing alchemy to be disjoined from chemistry and seem to countenance the formulation of the rather far-fetched Jungian notion of “irruptions of the unconscious.” Indeed, the promise of providing an explanation of alchemical imagery has probably been the chief preservative of the Jungian interpretation over so many years, even though Jung’s system does little more than explain the apparently inexplicable by means of something yet more inexplica-ble, even though tricked out in pseudoscientific language. Thus, it is crucial for any convincing dismissal of the Jungian interpretation to advance a more plausible origin for these alchemical images.”36

I cannot agree that Jungian theory is far-fetched, inexplica-ble, or pseudoscientific. Personal experiences have shown

me unequivocally that eruptions of the unconscious are a r e a l phenomenon. But I still find great value in following

Princpe’s arguments to their logical conclusion. He provides some very convincing evidence for the dismissal of the Jungian interpretation,

provided chemical meaning is the only sort of meaning we’re looking for. After the above quote, Principe goes on to describe in great detail the alchemical

history of using trees as metaphors for the philosophers stone, citing Philalethes, Maier,

Ripley and others. He then describes how he used a laboratory procedure derived from their

35 Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, p.3236 Principe, Lawrence M. “Apparatus and Reproducibility in Alchemy.” Instruments and Experimentation in the History of Chemistry. Ed. Frederic L. Holmes and Trevor Levere. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000. 55-74. Print. p.64-65

Figure 23, Reporduced Reguluses Made by William Newman in modern chemical labratory folowing manu-script procedure. A regulus was a compact alloy that theoretically mediates materials during the preparation of Philisophical Mercury. The star regulus (A,D), named for the starlike patterns on its surface, was an alloy of antimony, mercury, and other metals, that was supposed to act as a magnet and draw out Philisiphical Mercury from vulgar mercury. The Net (B,C) was a copper iron alloy whose preparation procedure was apparently derrived from greek myth. When Vucan (fire) catches his wife Venus (copper) in bed with Mars (Iron) he prepares a net and hangs the lovers within it. Newton used iron to reduce antimony sulfide and combined it with copper to produce the “network” on the alloy, as fulfilling the real meaning of the story.

D.

C.

B.

A.

23work to produce some astonishing results. Principe writes,

“After interpreting Starkey’s Marrow of alchemy for advice regarding the exact proportions and method of mixture and digestion, I used this material along with gold to prepare a mixture that was sealed in a “glass egg” and heated. The mixture soon swelled and bubbled, rising like leavened dough, recalling (perhaps not unwarrantably) the numerous references to fermen-tation and leavening in mercurialist literature. Then it became more pasty and liquid and covered with warty excrescences, again perhaps accurately recalling the “moorish low bog” that “toads keep.”37 After several days of heating, the metallic lump took on a completely new appearance, as illustrated in figure [24a]. Some today might call this a dendritic fractal, but I think most onlookers would refer to it first as a tree.”38

The resemblance of Principe’s description to the Philalethes tracts I quoted above is remarkable. It would

seem that with these results Principe has found the evidence needed to dismiss the Jungian interpretation. Principe certainly thinks so,

“Thus, we come to the surprising turn that these very same repeated images – which lead Jung to his

psychological interpretation of alchemy and lead the enlightenment writers and, more recently, [science historians] to their rejection of alchemy as serious experimentalism – may actually be (at least, in some cases) not only artifacts of, but arguments in favor of the reality and reproducibility of experimen-tal programs carried out by Stone-seeking alchemists. Of course, I agree that the choice of image is closely bound up with a variety of cultural factors, philosophical, theological, artistic, experiential, and so forth, but all I contend is that the admittedly culturally influenced metaphorical clothing, no matter how bizarre, may (in more than a few cases) cover a solid body of repeated and repeatable observations of laboratory results”39

37 Philalethes, Exposition upon the first six gates..., in Ripley Reviv’d p.6538 Principe, Lawrence M. «Apparatus and Reproducibility in Alchemy.” p.69-7039 Idem p.70

A.

B.

Figure 24, Two Alchemical Trees. A, Apparatus and Reproducablity in Alchemy p.69. B, “Miscellanea d’acheimia” MS Ashburnham 1166 (14th century) Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana. Principe uses B to argue that alchemical imagery has its root in objec-tive physical processes by comparing it to the coumpund he produced, A. Jung uses B in his work as evidence for the collective unconscious. He labels the figure Adam, and also as Materia Prima. Adam is the first matter, and as such he is dead and without a soul. The spark of life from heaven can be seen in Adams left hand. The light enlivens his body and converts it to the Philosophers Stone. The link between sexual generation is and the Philosophers Stone is exceedingly clear in this image. Both authors explain certain qualities of the drawing, but only by synthesizing the two veiws can the symbols be fully compre-hended

24

Principe is aware that the images possess depth and complexity beyond their chemical reproduc-ibility, but it is beyond his scope to do anything but label them as cultural factors. What he sees as

a dismissal of the Jungian interpretation I see as a revelation that alchemy was far more intricate than most academics to date have ever imagined. I think Principe takes too narrow a view when he relegates the function of imagery to metaphorical clothing, but doing so has some historical merit, because it allows alchemy to be viewed in the greater context of natural philosophy, rather than being dismissed as the study of occult magic. Principe concludes his paper with a strong argument for continuity,

We are not justified in disconnecting “alchemy” from “chemistry” on the basis of a radically differing valuation or of involvement in laboratory experimentation. Indeed, if we cannot make such a disconnection, we must look even more closely at the whole of early alchemical/ chemical thought and practice and at the evolving role and method of laboratory practice over a long period of “chymical” history, free from the obscuring shadows of untenable interpretations of alchemy.40

This continuity argument is in my opinion the most important idea to come out of the new historiog-raphy. It forces us to expand our view of science beyond its original boundaries. For me, it hints at

the possibility that the chymistry of the past might become the chymistry of the future. Although they are reluctant to explore the actual meaning of religions symbolism in early modern natural philosophy, Newman and Principe do an excellent job showing that that spirituality had an influence on early modern thinkers that cannot be ignored if historical accuracy is to be maintained. They write,

Seventeenth-century “alchemy” or “chemistry” was not inherently and essentially any more necessarily linked to religious interests than other contemporaneous natural philosophical subjects. It is nineteenth and twentieth-century interpretations of alchemy which stress this linkage as a distin-guishing characteristic of alchemy. This linkage would not have been considered essential before the middle of the eighteenth-century; indeed, the occult revivals which so transformed perceptions of alchemy were themselves born partly from a reaction against Enlighten-ment rationalism and secularization. “Alchemy,” as a field which “died” before the widespread seculariza-tion of the sciences, preserves in its written remains all the marks and expressions of pre-Enlightenment piety, and thus when laid alongside the secularized descendants of early modern physics, astronomy, and other sciences, it naturally appears more closely linked to theological and spiritual preoccupations. But the work of the current generation of historians of science has fully shown that theological considerations were fundamental to all branches of early modern natural philosophy. Thus, a comparison between early modern alchemy and other branches of contemporaneous natural philosophy (rather than contemporary science) indicates far less distinction on the score of theological preoccupations than previously thought.41

40 Idem p.71 41 Principe, Lawrence M. “Reflections on Newton’s Alchemy in Light of the New Historiography of Alchemy.” Newton and Newtonianism: New Studies. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2004. 205-19. Print. p.214

Figure 25, Atalanta Fugiens, Emblema XXXII, De Secretis Natura, , Michael Maier, 1617The inscription roughly reads, “The coral grows under water and hardens in the air into the stone.” In this image we again see the idea that the stone is made by unifying all the elements together. Note the life giving wind in the upper left corner, as well as the striking resemblance the Philosopher’s coral stone bears to Principe’s compound in Figure 24a.

25

Recognizing the ubiquity of religious concerns in early modern natural philosophy is incredibly important. By blurring the lines between alchemy and chemistry, the lines between modern

science and natural philosophy come into stark relief. If chymistry is really the best word to describe the exploration of matter, what happened to all the chymists? Why did they turn into chemists? What was lost during that transformation, and what was gained? It has never been my intention to segregate alchemy from chemistry as the early scientists did three centuries ago. On the contrary, my goal is to point at that such segregation exists, and to provide hints at how we might bridge the gap. Alchemy has a breadth of scope to which our modern science pales in comparison. Alchemists were not solely concerned with the palpable physical world that lay before them; they were also exploring the world of spirit that lay beyond the realm of imagination. If science could explore that realm in the past, why can’t it today? Newman and Principe have cracked opened the door to a much broader definition of what science is. Rather than emphasize where I disagree with them, I want to continue their work, break open that door, and radically redefine what science could be in the future. Principe’s conclusion to his article Alchemy Restored speaks to this issue and is worth quoting at length,

“Alchemy’s exile resulted from a conscious redrawing of the boundaries of “science,” and the modern resistance to assertions of alchemy’s importance came from proponents of a narrow view of what counted as science. This view was shaped by eighteenth-century rhetoric and enhanced by nineteenth and early twentieth-century positivism, progressivism, and a priori or normative philo-

sophical or political formulations about science. Alchemy represented the “other,” a convenient foil against which chemistry or science in general could be set off. Alchemy’s estrangement exemplifies how science does not always develop by means of cold reason or demonstra-ble experiment. Transmutational alchemy, vilified by declamation rather than disproved by demon-stration, was ostracized for the sake of professional expedience at a time in which there was no way to know that its goals were physically unobtainable. Chemists of the day had the problem of their social status and reputation to solve, and the public sacrifice of transmutational alchemy was the way they chose to solve it—“cleansing” their field and defining themselves as reputable by marking out a disreputable other. An analogous dynamic explains the antagonism of some twentieth-century historians and scientists toward claims for alchemy’s importance and its connection to major figures. They were invested in a particular foundation myth of science. To maintain it, they needed alchemy to be “something other,” something in opposition to which modern, rational, experi-mental science could define itself and upon which they could in

Figure 26, Kepler’s Platonic Solid model of the Solar System, 1597The relationship between alchemy and chemistry is mimicked by the relationship between astronomy and astrology. Johannes Kepler believed he could find perfection in the cosmos and tried to map the orbits of the planets to circumscribed platonic solids. By remarkable coincidence, the error between the actual observed orbits and the geometric circumscrip-tions was less than 10%. Kepler’s religious relationship with the cosmos is evident in other ways. His posthumously published book Somnium documents a dream where a student of Tycho Brahe is transported to the moon by a sorcerer and from the lunar landscape is able to confirm the Copernican system. Somnium has been referred to as the first work of science fiction and shows a remarkable synthesis on astrological and astronomical ideas.

26turn define themselves. Hence the intensely personal nature of some of their attacks. There was no place for alchemy in accounts of the canonized heroes of modern science. A similar incredulity or dismissal (and often by the same individuals) sometimes greeted the fact that religion was a crucial motivating force behind the Scientific Revolution and that our heroes from the period were almost invariably committed Christians. Over the past fifty years, insistence on the importance of alchemy (and theology) has broadened our disci-pline’s vision and enhanced our understanding of the ever evolving thing we call science. Alchemy’s exclusion illustrates strategic redefinitions of science, while its rehabilitation points to the contextual nature of those

definitions. One gift offered by the history of science is the recognition that science is a far messier process than simple models, wishful thinking, or programmatic philosophies will allow. It collects elements from unexpected sources and synthesizes them in unexpected and unpredictable ways. It is never a mechanical or impersonal process—nor would we want it to be. While the laws of nature exist independently of us, the ways we choose to conceive of them, to explore or not to explore them, to describe or not to describe them—that is to say, science—is a very human affair, filled with all the complexities and simplicities, errors and insights, pettiness and nobility that customarily attend human activity. And, to be sure, alchemy forms an important part of that story.42

The final paragraph is one of the most beautiful and unique descriptions of the interaction of science and humanity that I have come across, but what I want to emphasize in this quote is how Principe’s

rhetoric describing the differentiation of alchemy from science unconsciously parallels the Gnostic Pleroma that I used as an introduction to alchemical theory. I think we can use alchemical philosophy itself to define how alchemy should be viewed from and integrated into our modern perspective. The fundamental alchemical belief, stretching from Hermes to Philalethes, was that the unification of opposites leads to perfection. Alchemy was not about rational exploration of matter. It was not about attaining enlightenment. It was about the interplay between those two goals; about merging the material with the spiritual worlds. I find it almost laughable to have read so many scholarly articles arguing that alchemy was or wasn’t scientific; is or isn’t spiritual, when it seems so obvious to me that it was and is both. Like the twin Caducean Snakes entwined around Mercury’s rod, so alchemy can only be understood when both its spiritual and rational practices are taken into account. This concept seems so central to me, that I am often surprised when it isn’t shared. Even with their broad and dynamic redefinition of science, the new historiographers still display a profound distaste for mysticism. In one paper they write,

“Finally, the casual equation … of alchemy with “mysticism,” even to the point of calling alchemy “mystic chemistry” – a conflation which is so odd and so thoroughly annoying to informed modern readers – undoubtedly springs from an acquaintance only with nineteenth-century occultist constructions rather than with seventeenth century primary sources.”43

42 Principe, Lawrence M, Alchemy restored p.311-31243 Principe, Lawrence M. “Reflections on Newton’s Alchemy in Light of the New Historiography of Alchemy.” p.212

Figure 27, Aurora Consurgens,A black angel stands upon a charred world as she rips herself in two.

27his is the quote against which I must differentiate myself and single out ‘the other’ so that my identity may be more clear. I am an informed modern reader and I am very well acquainted with seventeenth century primary sources. I do not find calling alchemy mystic chemistry a thoroughly annoying conflation. Quite the contrary, I think it is one of the best descriptions of

alchemy I have come across so far. In all my research I have come across zero evidence which indicates that alchemy should not be correlated with mysticism and much evidence that would make mysticism a defining characteristic of alchemy instead. Newman and Principe should not be ignored, and perhaps mysticism is better assigned as a defining characteristic of all early modern natural philosophy rather than of alchemy per say, but that simply expands the issue onto a larger playing field. Where did mysticism go? The new historiographers approach the question, but they never quite reach the point of producing what I believe to be the correct answer. They recognize at least that alchemy’s relegation had nothing to do with its content. Principe writes, “The banishment of chrysopoeia—increasingly called “alchemy” in the early eighteenth century—from respectable chemistry remains a topic of study. Yet it is clear that developments in the understanding of nature had little to do with it.”44 He expresses a similar idea in another paper, “The “otherness” of alchemical texts rests, then, more on their modes of expression than on their modes of laboratory work.”45 Thus it was not what alchemy was saying, but how alchemy was saying it that was the problem. From my perspective in this paper, the segregation of spirituality from science came from thinkers who were uncomfortable with the use of symbolism and mysticism as methods of explaining reality. A profound discomfort with religion and metaphor in general has been perpetuated and expanded by the entire scientific community over the course of its brief lifetime. Even Principe and Newman, who most view as defenders of a more holistic interpreta-tion of alchemy, cannot bring themselves to assign meaning to alchemical imagery outside of a physical reality. In arguing for alchemy’s methodological rigor, the historiographers have taken the position of downplaying it’s symbolic and religions aspects, stressing their importance mainly as evidence for laboratory reproducibility that have no inherent value on their own. They seek to explain alchemical images as “metaphorical clothing,” and feel that once that clothing is removed, alchemy’s rightful place in the history of natural philosophy can be revealed, and the practice can be rescued from being ostracized as something occult. But throughout their argument, metaphor is something in the way of the truth that needs to be removed. It is an aesthetic coating under which meaning is hidden, not a means of expression that has meaning of its own. Newman writes of the history of alchemy in the late middle ages that, “The increasingly picturesque language of alchemy represented a real turning away from academic discourse,”46 as if picturesque language and academic discourse were mutually exclusive. Metaphor is simply not seen as a valuable mode of expression, at best it functions only as a tool. The authors write that, “In all these interactions of alchemy with spirituality, it is clear that alchemy functions as a source of tropes and imagery for rhetorical embellishment or didactic exemplifica-tion rather than as an inherently spiritual exercise which elevates the practitioner by some esoteric illumination.”47 Or, in 44 Principe, Lawrence M, Alchemy restored p.30645 Principe, Lawrence M. “Apparatus and Reproducibility in Alchemy.” p.7146 Newman, William R. “Decknamen or Pseudochemical Language?” p.16247 Principe, Lawrence M., and William R. Newman. “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy.” Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2001. 385-431. Print. p.398

Figure 28, The Greene Lyon Devouring the Sun, Stadtbibliothek Vadiana, St. GallenHere raw antimony ore, the greene lyon, draws in vivifying ætherial influences symbolized by the sun, and emits Philosophical Mercury, whose vitalistic, menstrual nature is symbolized by blood.

28another example, “What may have appeared at first to be a naïve case of hylozoism48 turns out to be a deliberate choice of metaphor.”49 But what is hylozoism but a deliberate choice of metaphor? The meaning of alchemy cannot rest only in its raw content. As Principe wrote, alchemy’s “otherness” stems from its modes of expression, rather than what it was expressing. A vitalistic mode of expression imparts just as much meaning to an alchemical text as any chemical procedure encoded within it. The fact that the alchemists used vitalistic metaphors is the only evidence needed to prove that alchemy contained implicit vitalistic philosophies.

In alchemy we see a system in which parallel truths on multiple levels of meaning can exist simul-taneously. Symbols provide the medium in which disparate aspects of reality, internal, external,

objective, subjective, spiritual and material, can all find expression and comprehension. I see symbolism as a topic deserving study in its own right, and I am fascinated by the potential symbolism has to affect scientific thought. The history of religion shows how humanity has universally used symbols to make statements about the unknown50 and I think that symbolism could enable scientists too to make statements about the immaterial, the unknowable, and the infinite. Our modern positivist perspective tells us that the scientific method can say nothing about the question of spirit, in the same way that Newton could say nothing about the cause of gravity. From a scientific standpoint, something that cannot be observed does not exist. But if our scientific methodology prevents us from making statements about spirit, perhaps that methodology needs to be expanded. As Principe said, the laws of nature exist independently of us, but our expression of them is an entirely human affair. When constructing our models of reality we need to be concerned not only with their accuracy and predictive power but also their ability to be comprehended and accepted by a vital human mind. Models must have two components in order for them to be considered Truth. To be True, the model must be correct, but it must also be meaningful. It is correct to say that the force of gravity = , but it is much more meaningful to say that gravity is a universal force that connects every particle in the universe with every other. A scientific law describing a geometric relationship is useless without comprehension, and a religious metaphor saying we are all connected is useless without a medium for its action. Alchemy is notable because it considers both halves of Truth when expressing its theories.

The new historiographers have done an admirable job dispelling some major myths about the nature

of alchemy. They have shown conclusively that alchemy was deeply linked to laboratory practice and chemistry; so deeply linked in fact, that both disciplines should

rightfully be called chymistry. But by accepting chymistry as part of natural philosophy, they reveal a deeper question: How does natural philosophy differ from modern science? While the difference between alchemy and chemistry may be a modern one with little historical validity, the fact remains

48 Hylozoism, according to Wikipedia, “is the philosophical point of view that all matter (including the universe as a whole) is in some sense alive. This may include the view that “inanimate” matter has latent powers of abiogenesis, a widely held position in the scientific community.” Throughout the paper, I will usually refer to hylozoic alchemical philosophies as vitalism. 49 Idem p.41350 For the use of symbolism in cosmology see Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York, NY: Meridian, 1956. Print.

Figure 29, Aroura Consugens In the stage of putrefaction, the black crow rips the two halves of the hermaphrodite appart.

29that from my modern perspective I look back upon the history and see a chymical practice with philos-ophies very different from the modern ones I grew up learning. And in some of those philosophies, far from the apparent gibberish many academics see, I see wisdom. It is important to note how remarkable an idea it is that it is possible to draw wisdom out of alchemy at all. No one would read a modern chemistry book and say they became wise from exploring its contents. They would learn chemistry, not wisdom. But the idea that there was true, genuine wisdom to be found in alchemy, passed down from the ancients, was widespread. Likewise, there was a notion of vitalism that pervaded virtually every alchemical work. All matter was alive, be it metals vegetating in the ground or planetary Gods orbiting the cosmos. All matter was alive because all matter contained spirit. Determining the nature between matter and it’s spirit was the fundamental quest of alchemy. Zozimos of Panopolis (~300A.D.) wrote that alchemy is “the composition of waters, movement, growth, embodying and disembody-ing, drawing the spirits from bodies and bonding the spirits within bodies.”51 Very few things can be said about all alchemists universally, but I can say this with confidence: As a whole, not only did the alchemists believe that spirit existed, they also believed that it had properties, potentially material properties, which could be observed and measured. This belief in spirit had a remarkable effect on Newton’s work, which I finally feel ready to approach. Throughout my argument, I have hinted at what effects a vitalistic interpretation could have on modern science. This has been one of my main goals all along; I have been using alchemy as a medium to make that argument more clear. In the rest of the paper, I will use Newton’s natural philosophy: his alchemy, his religion, and his physics combined, as a medium of much greater fidelity (a medium of increasing subtlety, to use Newton’s terminology) to show how a vitalistic interpretation affected Newtonian science, which will make its potential effects on modern science much more clear.

51 “Zosimos of Panopolis.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation,

Figure 30, Aroura Consugens On the right, the Sun and the Moon Battle each other on lyon and griffin. On the left, an exposed woman is surrounded by the zodiac. Much of the sense of what alchemy was can be gleaned from the aesthetics of illuminated manuscripts. I am often struck by how beautiful they are. I have tried to mimic the feeling of a manuscript somewhat with the formatting and illuminations in this paper. Many of the illuminated letters at the beginning of sections were pulled directly from Royal Society reports.

30newton’s alcHemy

here are a bundle of six1 interrelated ideas of varying scopes surrounding Newton’s alchemy which I wish to explain, describe, or prove. The largest, which I have already argued in some detail, is that science needs spirituality in order to make meaning out of the unknown. Something is missing in our current methodology, a spark, spirit, symbol, or metaphor, that keeps our thinking stuck in the realm of the knowable. Another, smaller idea, is that

alchemy had that living spark. To further that idea I will attempt to describe is how a subtle change in interpretation could help us regain spirit in modern science. A parallel idea is that alchemy theorized a vitalistic interpretation of the cosmos. The world the alchemists lived in was suffused in spirit, and the recognition of that spirit allowed them to produce theories of matter which, although they pale in predictive power when compared to our matter theories today, had far more theological meaning than any p orbital. Newton specifically was looking for deep theological meaning in his theories. So, the next idea is that Newton saw natural philosophy as a way of restoring true religion. The last ideas contain some jargon that may not hold much meaning at the moment. They are that the alchemical notion

of an active principle allowed Newton to theorize action at a distance, action without mechanism; and that these alchemical active principles eventually evolved into our modern notion of fundamental forces.

I’ll start with the idea that Newton saw natural philosophy as a way

of restoring true religion. Proving that idea will lead nicely to all the others. This is one of the few aspects of Newton’s thought that I believe actually is objectively provable. Ill provide quotes of Newton’s writing, as well as modern and early modern scholars expressing similar views. It’s relatively strait forward to prove, and quite beautiful. After that things will quickly get a lot more messy.

Let’s begin the way the Principia began in 1687, with an ode by

Sir Edmond Halley. Halley’s ode was written as a sort of introduction to the

Principia. While its devoid of any scientific content, its metaphorical meaning could not be clearer. The first few lines of the ode are quoted below,

Behold the pattern of the heavens, and the balances of the divine structure;Behold Jove’s calculation and the laws

That the creator of all things, while he was setting the beginning of the world, would not violate;

Behold the foundations he gave to his works.Heaven has been conquered and its innermost secrets are revealed;

1 Six is really just an arbitrary number. There are hundreds of ideas that I want to explain that split off from each other like fractal tree limbs. But 6 is a good place to start. These six ideas are the trunks of the tree I suppose.

Figure 31, Atalanta Fugiens, Emblema I, De Secretis Natura, , Michael Maier, 1617The inscription roughly translates to, “He carried the wind in his womb.” This image shows a unique version of the hermaphrodite, not as two conjoined bodies, but as a deity with both male and female qualities.

31The force that turns the outermost orbs around is no longer hidden.

The Sun sitting on his throne commands all thingsTo tend downward toward himself, and does not allow the chariots of the heavenly

bodies to moveThrough the immense void in a straight path, but hastens them all along

In unmoving circles around himself as center.2

Think about how powerful a statement it is to claim that heaven has been conquered and its in-nermost secrets are revealed. Just who exactly does Halley think Newton is? Today, scientists

don’t reveal the secrets of heaven, prophets do. But in 1687 a natural philosopher was a kind of prophet. Also note the kind of cosmos Halley is prophesizing. The sun has a throne on which he sits. The heav-

enly bodies are chariots. Halley was one on the most famous astronomers who ever lived; he knew per-fectly well the sun was a star made of matter. But that knowledge did not prevent him from anthropo-morphizing him as a king. Halley’s ode shows a re-markable interplay between reason and faith. Heav-en has a pattern, a divine structure with laws, which were calculated…by Jove! Halley saw the Principia as revelation. His view of the role science is to play in our lives differs fundamentally from the modern one, but I do not believe he was mistaken. Newton unveiled the force that moves the outermost orbs. Think about that for a moment. The theological im-plications of the law of gravity are not insignificant. Newton was well aware of them; he viewed his dis-covery of gravity as discovering the word of God. In one of his private theological manuscripts he wrote, “So then the first religion was the most rational of all others till the nations corrupted it. For there is no way (without revalation) to come to the knowledge of a Deity but by the frame of nature”3 In this quote we see Newton adhering strictly to the doctrine of Prisca Sapientia. The wisdom of the ancients was imparted to them via revelation, which was quickly corrupted. Only so much of the original wisdom was passed down in the scriptures. What knowledge of the deity the scriptures could not produce had to be learned by examining the frame of nature. Thus sci-ence and religion played complementary roles for Newton; either could be used as an avenue towards truth. Newton thought that true religion was ratio-nal; scientific even. These two opposites, reason and faith, were unified in Newton, and both were uti-lized in his quest.

2 Newton, Isaac, and I. Bernard Cohen. The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Berkeley, Calif. [u.a.: Univ. of California, 1999. Print. p.379 3 Newton, Isaac. Yahuda MS Var 1, Newton MS 41, F.7. MS. Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem. I found this quote in Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius, p. 151

Figure 32, Title page of the Principia , 1728 editionI took this photo at the Wilson rare book library at UNC Chapel Hill, with my smart phone, in an air conditioned room under florescent lighting, while a librarian watched me and asked me to turn the pages slower so that I did not damage the text. I like to imagine how the printer in 1728 would have reacted, after lining up the metal typeface and pulling a lever to print each page, if he could have seen me photographing it with a silicon chip in a library across the ocean almost 300 years later. I wonder if Newton ever dreamed of the technological innovations that the scientific method laid out in the Principia would produce.

32

The last sentence I quoted of the Ode is also worth noting. “The Sun sitting on his throne commands all things to tend downward toward himself, and does not allow the chariots of the heavenly bod-

ies to move through the immense void in a straight path, but hastens them all along in unmoving circles around himself as center.” There again is the interplay between scientific and religious language that I noted above,4 but, in addition, the orbital struc-ture Halley is describing itself implicitly contains the dichotomy. Of course Halley is describing the correct orbital geometry, but he goes one step fur-ther to imbue that geometry with meaning. Halley is describing the prytaneum, which B.J.T. Dobbs provides an excellent description of in her book The Janus Faces of Genius,

““The structure by which the ancients repre-sented the world in the most ancient form of religion, Newton said, was, “a fire for offering sacrifices [that] burned perpetually in the middle of a sacred place.”5 This arrangement, which Newton called a Prytanæum, symbol-ized the cosmos, with the fire representing the sun at the center and the sanctified space around the central fire representing the entire world which was “the true and real temple of god.”6

“The whole heavens they recconed to be the true & real Temple of God & therefore that a Prytanæum might deserve the name of his Temple they framed it so as in the fittest manner to represent the whole systeme of the heavens. A point of religion then which nothing can be more rational.””7

For Newton, the Copernican system wasn’t sim-ply the way things were, it was also the most

grand and majestic temple honoring God to ever be conceived by human kind. The universe itself was an indicator of God’s presence and grandeur, and evidence of God was to be looked for rational-ly in all natural phenomena. Newton wrote in his general scholium to the Principia that, “To treat of God from phenomena is certainly a part of natural philosophy.”8 For Newton, science and spirituality were not segregated; they were one and the same.

So, now, the idea that Newton saw natural philosophy as a means of restoring true religion has been covered. It is evident that theological concerns were of primary importance to Newton as he practiced natural philosophy. But what exactly were his religious views? What did he think “true religion” was? Newton’s most famous statements on God likely occur in

the general scholium to the Principia. There he writes, 4 Compare the sun on his throne commanding heavenly chariots to bodies moving through the void on a strait path. 5 Newton, Isaac. N.d. MS Yahuda MS Var. 1, Newton MS 17.3 Ff.8-10. National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, Israel.6 Dobbs, Betty Jo Teeter. The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Print. p.151 7 Newton, Isaac. Yahuda MS Var 1, Newton MS 41, F.7. N.d. MS. Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem. f.6r8 Newton, The Principia, p.943

Figure 33, Metamorphosis Planetarium, John de Monte Snyders, 1663Perhaps this image, or something similar is what Newton had in mind when speaking of the Prytanæum, or what Halley had in mind when writing about Jove’s calculation and laws.

33“He rules all things, not as the world soul but as the lord of all. And because of his domin-ion he is called Lord God Pantokrator. [Παντοκράτωρ, or Universal Ruler] For “god” is a relative word and has reference to servants, and godhood is the lordship of God, not over his own body as is suppose by those for whom God is the world soul, but over servants. The supreme God is an eternal, infinite, and absolutely perfect being; but a being, however perfect, without dominion is not the Lord God”9

Such intense focus on lordship and dominion might seem a bit archaic to our modern sensibilities, but we should not pass it off as a worthless expression of pre-enlightenment piety. Deeper mean-

ing can be found in this description if we take into account Newton’s anti-trinitarianism10. Newton was clearly a deeply religious man, but like his views on mechanics, his religious views were not at all mainstream. Newton’s insistence on God’s dominion came from a desire to differentiate him from Gods source of action in the world: Christ. For Newton, God could not the world soul because in al-chemy spirit and matter were linked, and God needed to be distinctly separate from the material world he created. The world needed a soul, and it had one, Christ. God instead was an entity more akin to the

Pleroma than Christ was.11 The Pleroma is the source of all, but creation has this property of created-ness which differentiates it from nothingness. The Pleroma transcends creation because it embodies the properties of uncreation as well. And so God was omniscient, and was everywhere, but in a sense he was also nowhere. This idea perhaps places Newton’s words about God’s resistance in the general scholium into their proper con-text. Newton writes,

“In him all things are contained and move*, but he does not act on them nor they on him. God ex-periences nothing from the motion of bodies; the bodies feel no resistance from God’s omnipres-ence.

*This opinion was held by the ancients: for example, by Pythagoras…Virgil…Jeremi-ah 23.23,24. Moreover, idolaters imagined that the sun, moon, and stars, the souls of men, and other parts of the world were parts of the supreme god and so were to be worshiped, but they were mistaken.”12

It was important for Newton to provide a metaphys-ical reason why God, in his omniscience, should

not impede the motion of bodies. Resistance of bodies in the void of space was one of Newton’s chief concerns,

9 Idem p.940. 10 Newton was an Arian, i.e. a follower of Arius (250-336 A.D.) an influential Christian priest from Alexandria, Egypt who was pronounced a heretic for his views. Arianism is not to be confused with Aryanism which formed the core of Nazi racial ideol-ogy. Rather, Arianism is the belief that the holy trinity is hierarchical. There was a time before time when God created Christ. The son is subordinate to the father. Christ is Logos, the word of God, but he is not the omniscient lord himself. 11 I do not mean to say here that Newton’s conception of God was identical to that of the Pleroma, or that Newton was even aware of the Gnostic concept. Rather, I make the comparison because Newton was clearly influenced by neoplatonic writers, and his conception of God bears important similarities to the Pleroma that may not be immediately evident to the general reader. 12 Newton, The Principia, p.941-942 The footnote is from the first edition.

Figure 34, Jupiter Enthroned, Yale Medical LibraryNewton’s drawing with his copy of John de Monte-Snyder’s Metamorphosis Planetarium. Note how Jove plays a unifying role similar to Hermes Trismegestus. The Sun and the Moon are linked through his arms. Under his feet are two large antimony symbols (Earth) that contain the other six elements and celes-tial bodies. These are all connected through his body to an antimony symbol at the crown of his head.

34and we will see how his thoughts on divine resistance affected his theory of gravity later in the paper. Newton wanted to make very clear that the properties of the Pantokrator were not to be confused with the properties of the world; such things as the sun, moon, stars and souls. For the interaction of God with the world, there needed to be a medium, and that medium was Christ. There is one phrase that Newton repeats in his theological manuscripts that makes Christ’s role as a medium exceedingly clear, “God doth nothing by himself which he can do by others.”13

[Christ] is said to have been in the beginning with God & that all things were made by him to signify that as he is now gone to prepare a place for the blessed so in the beginning he pre-pared & formed this place in which we live, & thenceforward governed it. ffor the supreme God doth nothing by himself which he can do by others.14

God was present before Christ, and at the beginning of time Christ was God’s first and only cre-ation15. It was then Christ that acted in the world and created it. The will of God was enacted

through Christ. The most important idea here is that God works through mediums. There is a signifi-cant isomorphism between God working through Christ, and gravity working through the æther. In order to make this isomorphism sufficiently clear, Newton’s thoughts on miracles need to be eluci-dated. In one of his theological manuscripts he wrote,

For Miracles are so called not because they are the works of God but because they happen seldom & for that reason create wonder. If they should happen constantly according to certaine laws imprest upon the nature of things, they would be no longer wonders ↑or miracles↓ but might be considered in Philosophy as a part of the Phenomena of Nature notwithstanding that the cause of their causes might be unknown to us. And Occult qualities have been exploded not because their causes are unknown to us but because by giving this name to the specific qualities of things, a stop has been put to all enquiry into the causes ↑of their qualities↓ as if they could not be known because ↑ the great Philosopher ↓ Aristotle↑ was not able to find them.”16

Essentially, what Newton is saying is that the ultimate unknown cause of everything is God,

or to be more sensitive to his Arianism, Christ. We

13 This phrase appears twice in Yahuda MS 15.5, on f.96v and 97.r 14 Newton Ms. 15.5. MS Yahuda MS Var. 1. National Library of Israel, Israel, Jerusalem f.97r 15 This sort of cosmology is not unique. In the Hindu creation myth there is a long succession of Gods, all stemming from the eternal Brahman, or alternatively from Vishnu’s navel. Less anciently, J.R.R. Tolkien produced a similar cosmology in his epic The Silmarilion. There Iluvatar in the time before time created the Valar, and they in turn created the world. 16 This quote seems to be related to the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence but was written by Newton. I took the quote is (and the notes on it below) directly from Dobbs, Janus Faces of Genius, p. 230. Dobbs writes, “Lehigh University Libraries, Beth-lehem, PA, Isaac Newton, “MS on Miracles,” verso (of its single page); all indication of Newton’s deletions omitted ... Arrows up and down indicate Newton’s interlineations. The recto and part of the verso of this sheet arc concerned with Catherine Barton’s inheritance from Lord Halifax.” This quote is also cited in McLachlan, H. Sir Isaac Newton Theological Manuscripts. Liverpool: University, 1950. Print. p.17

Figure 35, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum, 1495By John Trevisa, Westminster: Wynken de WordeHere Christ is depicted as the mediator of the four elements

35can ask as many why questions as we want, but we will only find answers to how. Why does the earth rotate around the sun? Because the force of gravity impels it to. Why does the force of gravity impel it to? Because the strength of the force is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the centers…Why does gravity obey that formula?...etc. We can describe how something works, but ultimately not why. The only answer we can ever give to all our why questions is, “God did it; it’s

a miracle.” Carl Jung stated in The Red Book that, “Magic happens to be precisely everything that

eludes comprehension.”17 There will always be another why question, the causes of the causes will always need to be found out, and the unknown that eludes comprehension will always lurk underneath. There will always be concepts like infinity which are by definition incomprehensible. And so magic underlies every aspect of reality because root causes will always be unknowable. Recognizing this fact produces a subtle shift in our definition of miracles. If root cause of everything is mi-raculous, then existence is a constant, self-re-newing miracle. Miracles need not be defined by their rarity. By incorporating miracles into the fabric of the universe, Newton made God, or more correctly, his medium Christ, an active participant in Creation. Christ was not the deist’s watchmaker, who wound up the world and let it tick away undisturbed. No, every moment was mediated by Christ and existed because God willed it to be so. The only thing that differentiates miracle from natural law is regularity. Miracles are extraordinary exceptions to everyday life; natural laws are equally unexplainable phenomena that scientists have observed to fit into certain defined patterns. To translate

this idea into some theological jargon, Newton is speaking to the balance between Gods absolute

and ordained providence. Christ would be exercising his absolute providence when performing miracles, and

his ordained providence when upholding natural law. Newton is emphasizing that he believes Christ’s ordained natural law to be just as active and dynamic as a miracle. Although ordained natural law is predictable, it is not mechanical, and does not necessarily require contact. Miracles make action at a distance possible. Newton takes great care here to point out that unlike natural law, occult qualities do not fit into predictable and defined patterns, or at least, no effort is made to deduce them. He sets up Aristotle as a straw man who would interpret his message to mean that everything was magic and incomprehensible. There is no special occult quality that keeps the earth rotating around the sun, while another different quality that keeps the moon around the earth, and a third which causes apples to fall to the ground. If this were the case, we could sufficiently explain the whole world by saying “It has a quality which makes it so.” But such an answer is clearly unsatisfactory, and as Newton points out, puts a stop to all enquiry of the causes of qualities. It is far 17 Jung, C. G., and Sonu Shamdasani. The Red Book: Liber Novus. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2009. Print. p.313

Figure 36, Spiritus Mercurialis Here the Spirit of Mercury is personified as a grotesque dragon

36more true to say that all of the special qualities working on the earth, and the moon, and the apple, are in fact the same quality working in a different context, because “Tis suitable with infinite wisdom not to multiply causes without necessity.”18 Just because the ultimate cause is assuredly unknowable does not mean that there are no patterns and reasons to be found.

Newton’s definitions of miracle, natural law, and occult quality given here make his famous discussion active principles and occult qualities in query 31 of The Opticks much more clear. An important portion of that query is quoted at length below. “It seems to me farther, that

these Particles have not only a Vis intertiae, accompanied with such passive Laws of Motion as naturally result from that Force, but also that they are moved by certain active Principles, such as that of Gravity, and that which causes Fermentation, and the Cohesion of Bodies. These [active] Principles I consider, not as occult Qualities, supposed to result from the specifick Forms of Things, but as general Laws of Nature, by which the Things themselves are form’d; their Truth appearing to us by Phaenomena, though their Causes be not yet discover’d. For these are manifest Qualities, and their Causes only are occult. And the Aristotelians gave the Name of occult Qualities, not to manifest Qualities, but to such Qualities only as they supposed to lie hid in bodies, and to be unknown Causes of manifest Effects: Such as would be the Causes of Gravity, and of magnetick and electrick Attractions, and of Fermentations, if we should suppose that these Forces or Actions arose from Qualities unknown to us, and uncapable of being discovered and made manifest. Such occult Qualities put a stop to the Improvement of natural Philosophy, and therefore of late Years have been rejected. To tell us that every Species of Things is endow’d with an occult specific Quality by which it acts and produces manifest Effects, is to tell us nothing: But to derive two or three general Principles of Motion from Phaenomena, and afterwards to tell us how the properties and Actions of all corporeal Things follow from those manifest Principles, would be a very great step in Philosophy, though the Causes of those Principles were not yet discover’d: And therefore I scruple not to propose the Principles of Motion above-mentioned, [Gravity, Fer-mentation, Cohesion, Electrick and Magnetick attractions], they being of very general Extent, and leave their causes to be found out.”19

18 Newton, Isaac. Dibner MSS 1031 B “Of Natures Obvious Laws and Processes in Vegitation” N.d. MS. Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technol-ogy, n.p. f.4r19 Newton, Isaac. Opticks; Or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light. Based on the 4th Ed., London, 1730;. New York: Dover Publica-tions, 1952. Print. p.401-402 [square brackets] are my own, for clarity.

Figure 37, Frontpeice of Museum Hermeticum Reformatum et Amplificatum, 1678.At the risk of sounding repetitive, note the pairs of opposites. Sun and Moon, figures above and underground, Fire and Water combine to make æther, four elements in the corners. The central figure in red represents the Philosophers Stone.

37

Newton used the term active principle in an alchemical context to refer to a property of matter that produces an effect. The term is found throughout his written work, although Query 31 is impor-

tant because it makes the relationship of active principles and natural laws exceedingly clear. On a very simplistic level, Query 31 is the only text I need to prove my idea that the alchemical concept active principles evolved into our modern idea of fundamental forces. The parallels are obvious. Newton cites the active principles of ‘Gravity and magnetick and electrick attractions’ as ‘general Laws of Nature.’ He even calls them “Forces or Actions.” I’m sure that if Newton had been able to observe the Weak force and the Strong force in his time, he would have labeled them as active principles too. But simply proving that Newton correlated a modern term to an archaic one is not my intention. I want to empha-size the difference between Newton’s idea of active principles and our modern conception of force, to show where we might improve our science. The difference I see relates fundamentally to notions of vitalism (or lack thereof). I will be expanding on this idea throughout the rest of the paper; proving that alchemy was vitalistic, and that we should adopt that vitalism once more, is one of my major goals.

Newton’s active principles were, for lack of a better word, active. They were vital, they had life to them. The active principle Newton listed that is not one of our fundamental forces, fermentation,

is most telling of this difference. Fermentation was the alchemical stage after Putrefaction where the dead matter in the flask began to bubble with life. Another term that Newton often used synonymously with Fermentation was Vegetation, or the vegetable spirit. But the modern connotation of these words does not encompass the scope of Newton’s use. For Newton, Fermentation was the source of all life and growth, be it animal, vegetable or mineral. Much more about the vegetable spirit needs to be said, as it is central to my ideas about vitalism, but for now I want to keep focusing on Query 31. The query

illuminates another major quality of active prin-ciples in the line, “These [active] Principles I con-sider, not as occult Qualities, supposed to result from the specifick Forms of Things, but as general Laws of Nature, by which the Things themselves are form’d.” Newton is making a subtle causality shift. Properties produce matter; matter does not produce properties. He expressed a similar idea in an earlier alchemical treatise. He wrote, “Tis the office therefore of those grosser substances to bee medium or vehicle in which rather then upon which those vegetable substances perform their actions.”20 It is similar to the difference be-tween a physicist today saying, “electrons exert electromagnetic force” and “electromagnetic force is manifested in electrons.” Richard Westfall ex-presses the idea nicely in his book, Never at Rest. There he writes,

As it appears to me, Newton’s philosophy of nature underwent a profound conversion in 1679-80 under the combined influence of alchemy and the cosmic problem of orbital mechanics, two unlikely partners which made common cause on the issue of action at a distance. Insofar as he continued to speak of particles of matter in motion, Newton remained a mechanical philosopher in some

20 Newton, Isaac. Dibner MSS 1031 B “Of Natures Obvious Laws and Processes in Vegitation” f.5r

Figure 38, Portrait of Isaac Newton, Never at Rest p.852This portrait was sketched by William Stuckley when Newton was about 77. Note its cosmic and alchemical nature. Newton is held by Nature incarnate, seated upon the earth drifting among the stars.

38sense. Henceforth, the ultimate agent of nature would be for him a force acting between particles rather than a moving particle itself--what has been called a dynamic mechanical philosophy in contrast to a kinetic.21

Newton was the first to propose the idea, still largely held today in

some form, that the ultimate agent of nature is force. In Query 31, but also more famously in his introduction to the Principia, Newton essentially defines natural philosophy as a quest to find out the fundamental forces of nature, “For the basic problem of philosophy seems to be to discover forces of nature from the phenomena of motions and then to demonstrate the other phenomena from these forces.”22 So then it is essential to pay careful attention to what exactly Newton conceives of as a force. In Que-ry 31 Newton diligently differentiates active principles from occult qualities,

and in the quote on miracles I provided earlier Newton differentiates miracles from occult qualities on exactly the same grounds. He even uses Aristotle as a foil in both cases. The similarity of the arguments shows how much fluidity there was between Newton’s theological and scientific concerns. Natural philosophy contained miracles. Occult qualities are to be shunned because the use of them puts a stop to all inquiry. But shunning occult qualities does not mean we need to shun everything inexplicable, incomprehensible, or magical. Quite the contrary, what at its root may be inexplicable, can, with care-ful observation, be found to follow certain regular laws that manifest themselves at higher levels of complexity than the original root why question. All natural laws might as well be considered miracles, but that does not make them occult.

To expand this idea further, it is useful at this point to examine the implications that Newton’s ac-tive definition of force has on the philosophical problem of free will. Determinism makes me un-

comfortable. The Cartesian analogy of the universe as a giant machine, a computer or clock that slowly ticks away my fate, is useful for building technology like computers or clocks, but leaves me with a dull grey taste in the back of my mouth. From the wrong perspective, a deterministic universe governed by causality can suck all meaning out of life. What is the point of living if every smallest detail of existence

21 Westfall, Richard Samuel. Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton. Cambridge [etc.: Cambridge UP, 1980. Print. p.390. Westfall expands on these ideas throughout his book. Elsewhere he writes, “In the mechanical philosophy, Newton had found an approach to nature which radically separated body and spirit, eliminated spirit from the operations of nature, and explained those operations solely by the mechanical necessity of particles of matter in motion. Alchemy, in contrast, offered the quint-essential embodiment of all that mechanical philosophy rejected. It looked upon nature as life instead of machine, explained phenomena by the activating agency of spirit, and claimed that all things are generated by the copulation of male and female principles….[In alchemy Newton found an idea] that refused be reconciled with the mechanical philosophy. Where that phi-losophy insisted on the inertness of matter, such that mechanical necessity alone determines its motion, alchemy asserted the existence of active principles in matter as the primary agents of natural phenomena.” Westfall, Never at rest. p.299 22 Newton, The Principia, p.382

Figure 39, Atalanta Fugiens, Emblema XXIV, De Secretis Natura, , Michael Maier, 1617The inscription roughly translates to, “The wolf was consumed, burned, and returned to life.” Note the dynamic interplay of opposites between the King burning the Wolf and the Wolf consuming the King. Also note the presence of Earth, Air, Fire and Water in this image.

39is determined by an infinite series of causes and effects? Newton’s conception of active principles al-lows us to sidestep this problem a bit. Christ did not set up an infinite row of dominoes at the beginning of time just to sit back and watch them fall. He is not an absentee landlord. Rather, Christ is the gravity actively pushing each domino down. He is present everywhere, making sure each and every moment occurs exactly how it does. Newton wrote in the general scholium to the Principia that, “A God with-out dominion, providence, and final causes is nothing other than fate and nature”23 Clearly Newton had something more dynamic than mechanical causality in mind when he conceived force in this way. With this interpretation, the world is still deterministic and follows certain patterns and laws, but those laws are perpetually actively manifesting themselves. This is the fundamental difference I see between forces and active principles. Forces are static. They are fixed and rigid and as such they are conceptu-ally removed from the phenomena which they describe. But an active principle is dynamic and vital. It is the soul of the phenomena, not just a description of it. The rules are not separate from the ruled.

lright. Let’s pause for a second. Things have gotten a bit abstract and heady, and you’re probably wondering how philosophizing about free will has anything to do with alchemy. I’d like to use this juncture to take stock of exactly where we are in my argument. We’re about half way. I’ve proven that Newton believed that natural philosophy was a method for

restoring true religion. While science and religion were not identical pursuits per say, they were pursu-ing the same goal. I then went on to show how the union of natural law with miracle produces a highly dynamic conception of force that differs from the modern one in its vitality and religious associations. By quoting Query 31 I proved that force and active principles are rhetorically linked, but that linkage still requires much more exploration. Essentially, by focusing on those words I was arguing that New-ton saw semantic linkages between ideas that today hold fairly disparate meanings. The words force, miracle, active principle, and spirit all served similar functions for Newton, although their context varied. All four words were connected by Newton’s Arian views of Christ. Christ was perpetually in the world, actively manifesting the will of God. Christ was the medium through which the divine and material worlds interacted. But there was another me-dium of great importance which linked all those words together with Christ: Æther. My final ideas – that alchemy was inherently vitalistic, that vitalism allowed Newton to conceive of action at a distance, and that our science would improve if we readopted a vitalistic phi-losophy – all hinge upon a close analy-sis of Newton’s æther theories.

So, what exactly is æther? Æther has a very long history in scientific,

religious, and metaphysical contexts. Its meaning has changed dramatically over time, and one of the most dramatic shifts occurred in the process of sciences conversion from a Cartesian to Newto-nian mechanical philosophy. Although humankind has certainly had ætherial notions since before antiquity, the ori-gin of our word æther comes from the

23 Ibid 942

Figure 40, Atalanta Fugiens, Emblema XVII, De Secretis Natura, , Michael Maier, 1617The inscription roughly translates to, “Four orbs of fire rule this great work.” This image shows clearly the idea that all four elements at their root are composed of æther.

40Greek αiθήρ. Aiθήρ, also known as Acmon, was one of the primordial el-emental Greek gods, along with Earth, Water, Air and Fire.24 His name means light in ancient Greek. The first person to use æther in a metaphysical context was Aristotle. Along with the four clas-sical elements, there was the fifth ele-ment, æther, which was quintessence. For Newton, and other early atomists, the Aristotelian elements corresponded roughly to particle size. The elements made up the spectrum of the alchemi-cal pair of opposites gross and subtle, which are roughly isomorphic to den-sity, thick and thin, or big and small. The best translation of the Aristotelian elements into modern lexicon would be that Earth, Water, Air, and Fire cor-respond to the states of matter solid, liquid, gas and plasma. Thinking of the elements as states of matter explains the corpuscularian associations with densi-

ty; solids tend to be solid at room temperature because of their large particle size, and compounds with smaller particles tend to be liquid or gas. Following this idea to its logical conclusion, if particle size decreases with increasing subtlety, then æther, which is the subtlest matter of all, must have a particle size of zero, or infinitesimally small. Viewing æther as a fluid with infinitely small particle size allows us to fit some of its supposed alchemical properties into a modern context. Infinitesimal particle size makes æther the ideal fluid for the continuum hypotheses25, and it also makes æther the ideal medium for alchemical interactions between matter and spirit.26 An æther of ultimate subtlety exists exactly on the boundary between material and immaterial opposites. Newton defined it as, “spiritus corporalis et corpus spirituale,”27 spiritual body and corporeal spirit. Æther, like Christ, mediates the interaction between physical and divine. Infinitesimal particle size also fits in quite nicely with the alchemical postulate of the universality of matter. Newton theorized that all the varieties of matter were made of gross corpuscles that adhered together in patterns based on active vegetative principles. Those gross corpuscles were themselves concatenations of smaller corpuscles, which were in turn made up of even smaller corpuscles, on and until the universal indivisible particle was reached. All matter was made up of this same universal substance; variety was caused by the varying actions of the vegetable spirit. It is easy to imagine why the alchemists would theorize that the universal matter was in fact æther. For what else could be indivisible but the infinitely small? Newton expressed the idea that all mater came from æther in 1675 in a letter to Oldenburg,

24 “Aether (mythology).” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation25 Fluids are composed of molecules that collide with one another and solid objects. The continuum assumption, however, considers fluids to be continuous. That is, properties such as density, pressure, temperature, and velocity are taken to be well-defined at “infinitely” small points. “Fluid Mechanics.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. 26 It also makes æther the ideal medium for my discussion of science and spirituality because meaningful statements about æther can be made in so many different contexts. I love that I can talk about infinity, fluid mechanics, and spirit in the same sentence. Æther is the perfect symbiosis of known and unknown. 27 Newton, Isaac. Praxis.

Figure 41, Atalanta Fugiens, Emblema XIX, De Secretis Natura, , Michael Maier, 1617The inscription roughly translates to, “If one of the four is killed, all will die.” Here, an alchemist fighting the four elements is reminded that they are all linked together at their root through the æther.

41“Perhaps the whole frame of nature may be nothing but various contextures of some certain æthereal spirits, or vapours, condensed as it were by precipitation, much after the manner, that vapours are condensed into water, or exhalations into grosser substances, though not so easliy condensible; and after condensation wrought into various forms; at first by the im-mediate hand of the Creator; and ever since by the power of nature; which, by virtue of the command, increase and multiply, become a complete imitator of the copies set her by the protoplast. Thus perhaps may all things be originated from æther.28

It is important to note that Newton used æther in two distinct ways. In the quote above, æther is Prima Materia, out of which all matter can grow. What sparks and guides that growth is Christ,

enacting God’s will through the function of the vegetative spirit. But in some cases, the vegetative spirit is equated with æther itself. For example, in one alchemical tract Newton writes,

This and only this is the vital agent diffused through all things that

exist in the world. And it is the mercurial spirit, most subtle and wholly volatile, dis-

persed through all places. This agent has the same general method of operating in all things, namely, excited to action by a moderate heat, it is put to flight by a great one, and once an aggregate has been formed, the agents first action is to putrefy the aggregate and confound it into chaos. Then it

proceeds to generation. And the particularities of its method are many, according to the nature of the subject which it operates.

For it accommodates itself to every nature. From metallic semen it generates gold, from human

semen men, etc.In the metallic form it is found most plentifully

in Magnesia.And from this one root came all species of metals.

And that in this order: Mercury, lead, tin, silver, copper, iron, gold. 29

In this quote, the vegetative spirit and æther are fused, and permeate all things that exist in the world. Æther mediates the various alchemical stages of transmutation; putrefaction, fermentation,

and so on. Not only that, æther was linked to Philosophical Mercury. This connection gives us a better picture of what Philosophical Mercury ought to be. Philosophical Mercury was the root universal mat-ter, so essentially it was æther than had been corporialized enough to be contained in a vial (Figure 42). As such it was supposed to be exceedingly subtle and volatile, and run quicker than water or quick-silver. This quote makes clear that Philosophical Mercury had deep meaning beyond chrysopoeian contexts. It was the root not just of metallic growth but human growth. It was the vital agent diffused through the world, everywhere and nowhere, its particles too subtle to actually be material, and just subtle enough to connect matter to Christ. But I should be careful to point out that linking the æther

28 Newton, Isaac. “Hypothesis Explaining the Properties of Light.” The History of the Royal Society. Comp. Thomas Birch. Vol. 3. London: n.p., 1757. 247-305. Print.29 Newton, Isaac. Keynes MS 12. 1675. MS. Kings College, Cambridge. ff 1v-2r

Figure 42a, Æther vial, 2004Today, æther is relegated to the realm of science fiction and fantasy. And yet it still plays the metaphys-ical role it always has. These images are from a popular collecting card game, Magic the Gathering. cont...

Figure 42b, Æther vial, 2010...inued In the game, as in alchemy, to capture æther in a vial is to harness great power. Note how æther is depicted in the cards. It emits light, but it also flows like a fluid. It is plasma, liquid light.

42to infinitesimals, while pedagogically and philosophically useful, is far too anachronistic to be taken at face value. Æther theory was well established before Newton, and use of infinitesimals only became common practice after his death. A more nuanced description of æther in the early modern period would be that, while æther definitely had both spiritual and material properties, its particle size and the manner in which it interacted with matter was not at all well-defined. It seems to me that Newton’s awareness of these issues, among others, (and his ability to utilize infinitesimals) is what caused him to break with Cartesian æther theory, and to develop an æther theory of his own that permitted action at a distance.

The Cartesian æther was conceived to solve a number of problems

plaguing celestial dynamics. The doctrine of mechanical theory was that all phenomena were produced by particle to particle interactions. A vacuum was impossible, and all apparently empty space was filled with exceedingly subtle ætherial particles that transferred impact effects from one place to another. Magnetic attraction was caused by tiny screw shaped particles being emitted from the magnet and screwing into holes in the attracted body. Celestial motion was caused by vortices in the cosmic æther dragging planets around with it in like a sailor drowning in a whirlpool. The Cartesian æther was decidedly corporeal, at least in retrospective comparison to the æther Newton developed in response. The æther had to be corporeal in order for it to interact with the planets; collisions of æther particles with the earth were what provided the impetus to keep the planet in motion. Much of the Principia was devoted to disproving Cartesian æther vortex theory. Key to Newton’s proof was the extensive work on fluid resistance in book II. Newton pointed out, correctly, that if æther had enough corporeality to drag the planets along with it, then at some point, when the orbits of the planets were interacting, or when comets were passing through, that same corporeality would cause resistance. No resistance had ever been recorded in the motions of the planets, so Newton performed an experiment to see if the æther resisted at all.30 He created a pendulum out of a hollow box of wood, and observed it swinging for several trials. He then filled the box with heavy metal and repeated the experiment. If the Cartesian æther theory was correct, and æther permeated all space, and also interacted with matter via impact, then the box filled with metal should experience an observable resistance. Newton records his results as follows,

“The resistance encountered by the empty box on its internal parts is therefore more than 5000 times smaller than the similar resistance on the external surface. This argument depends on the hypothesis that the greater resistance encountered by the full box does not arise from some other hidden cause but only from the action of some subtle fluid upon the enclosed material.”31

30 The experiment is recorded in Book 2, section 6 of the Principia , p.722-723 31 Newton, The Principia, p.723

Figure 43, Atalanta Fugiens, Emblema XLV, De Secretis Natura, , Michael Maier, 1617The inscription translates to, “The Sun and its shadow perfect the work.” The image and the inscription make clear that the Philosophers Stone is the world and is to be attained by unifying light and dark. Note also how the rays of light suggest an ætherial fluid through which the earth and moon move.

43

It is important to note here that Newton does not conclude that the æther does not exist, only that its resistance must be exceedingly small. This result brings to focus the problem of the corporeality

or incorporeality of æther. Too many metaphysical arguments hinged on the existence of an æther for it to be completely abandoned, but Newton’s experiments put many of æther’s purported physical prop-erties in serious doubt. This tension between metaphysical necessity and physical reality is evident in Four Letters from Sir Isaac Newton to Doctor Bentley containing some Arguments in Proof of a Deity, written in 1692-3. In perhaps the most famous quote from the letters Newton writes,

“It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact…That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I be-lieve no man who has in philosophi-cal matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Grav-ity must be caused by an agent act-ing constantly according to certain laws; but whether this agent be ma-terial or immaterial, I have left to the consideration of my readers.”32

Just as God, in his Arian separation from the world, works through

the medium of Christ, gravity cannot be innate to matter but must too work through a medium. For Newton a medium was a metaphysical necessity. True action at a distance was impossible, with the caveat that the medium for force trans-ference could be immaterial. Thus, determining what that medium was became a primary concern, and after the æther pendulum experiments its identity became increasingly difficult to pin down; there were significant arguments against both material and immaterial agents. It is likely that Newton never completely resolved the issue for himself. I don’t think it is even resolved today. From a modern perspective, one solution to the issue would be to consider the gravitational force fields we now postulate to be none other than Newton’s material immaterial medium, but that explanation lacks the divinity Newton was trying to get at. There are still tensions between what seems to me to be an innate human belief that something exists beyond physical reality, and our inability to prove that such a thing exists, mainly because it would not be a thing. I think that if we want to find a more meaningful answer to the matter-spirit problem, a good place to start looking would be alchemy, with its long history of unifying seemingly opposite qualities.

e see the matter spirit duality popping up in all sorts of alchemical contexts. For example, there’s the interaction of gold semen (spirit) and Philosophical Mercury (matter) to make the Phi-

32 Newton, Isaac, I. Bernard Cohen, Robert E. Schofield, and Marie Boas Hall. Isaac Newton’s Papers & Letters on Natural Philosophy and Related Docu-ments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1958. Print. p.302-303

Figure 44, Atalanta Fugiens, Emblema XXXVI, De Secretis Natura, , Michael Maier, 1617The inscription roughly translates to, “The mercurial stone was cast out into the coun-tryside, lifted into the mountains, enlivened by the air and fed by the river.” The boxes floating in the air are suspended by mercurial spirits; the same sort of thing Newton was looking for in his æther experiments.

44losophers stone. In a somewhat contradictory example, we also saw that Philosophical Mercury, the most mate-rial of all matter, was actually made up of pure æther, the subtlest substance imaginable. The whole practice of alchemy is this dance between the material and im-material. For Newton, I think that dance was best per-sonified by his conception of the vegetable spirit. I have been making passing references to the vegetable spirit for the past 5 pages, since Query 31, and have been hop-ing you would sort of guess at its properties based upon all the other words I associated with it, like æther, force, active principle and miracle. These similitudes are very important33, because they link disparate ideas in surpris-ing ways, but it’s high time I give vegetative spirit an explanation all of its own.

Much of Newton’s views on the vegetable spirit were expressed in an alchemical tract posthumously en-

titled Of Natures obvious laws & processes in vegetation, which was its first sentence. The tract is dated to the early 1670’s and I will be quoting from it extensively. Of Natures obvious laws was an attempt at a sort of the-ory of everything. In it Newton postulates the vegetable spirit as an explanation for what we identify today as a whole host of phenomena spanning electromagnetism, molecular bonding, and evolutionary biology. The veg-etable spirit was the spark of life that caused all things to grow. It was Mother Nature incarnate; Christ incarnate34. It was the semen which, when placed into Philosophical

33 On the topic of similitudes in alchemy, I find this quote by Newman and Principe very eye opening, “When alchemical au-thors deploy sacred texts or spiritual terminology, this is a relatively unproblematic use of images, concepts, and terms drawn from the religious culture of the time, rather than evidence that alchemical practices were concerned primarily or essentially with the spiritual enlightenment or development of the practitioner. These linkages were made by minds more attuned to the drawing of similitudes and the reading of “meanings” (and more convinced of the epistemological value of similitudes in gen-eral) than are those of our highly literal modern world.” Principe, Newman. “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy.” p.399

The historiographers make an important correction to the historiography of alchemy by pointing out these false similitudes. However, the spiritual interpretation of alchemy did not pop out of nowhere, and I believe that alchemy itself, not just its Vic-torian interpreters, was more convinced of the epistemological value of similitudes than modern thinkers are. Newton’s ability to equate such disparate ideas as miracles, spirits, and forces shows that a focus on similitudes can produce some surprising meanings. I think that if we are to re-imbue our science with theological significance, as a society we will need to re-convince ourselves that similitudes and metaphor have value, even if the meaning of our metaphors does not equate directly or com-pletely to our physical models. 34 A good example of a direct link between the vegetable spirit and Christ can be seen in an alchemical tract Newton trans-lated entitled Out of La Lumiere sortant des tenebres. There Newton writes that the vegetable spirit is, “A corporeal spirit diffused through all nature, the principle of all vegetation, life, attraction, sympathy, and motion; a composite of salt, sulfur, and mer-cury; the fire of mercury and most digested part thereof; the form informing all things; the innate heat of the elements; the lawful son of the sun and the true sun of nature.” In this quote it is useful to note the references to the Paracelsian Tria Prima, as well as the word play at the end which clearly connects the vegetable spirit with Christ. Newton, Isaac. Out of La Lumiere Sortant Des Tenebres. 1687-92. MS Babson MS 414 B. The Babson College Grace K. Babson Collection of the Works of Sir Isaac Newton, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. f.1r

Figure 45, The Mountain of the PhilosophersFound In Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians, 1785. The 1604 date indicates that their is likely an earlier source for this image.

45Mercury, would grow gold. Most importantly, unlike Cartesian mechanism, it was vital and alive. Newton is very clear on this. He writes,

“Natures actions are either vegetable or purely mechanicall (grav. flux. meteors. vulgar Chymistry) The principles of her vegetable actions are noe other then the seeds or seminall vessels of things those are her onely agents, her fire, her soule, her life.” 35

Newton wrote this passage well before he had written the Principia, in a time where he still con-ceived the force of gravity to be a gross mechanical æther that could physically interact with mat-

ter. Yet even with this juvenile perspective on gravity, Newton still has a strong conviction that there were other, more active, principles at work in the universe. Almost of implicit with that world view is the anthropomorphisation of nature as a goddess. If nature is a goddess, sort of a female Christ,

then it follows that she should have a soul. That soul is the vegetative spirit. We see that the vegetative spirit has many of the properties that I ascribed to æther above. Later in the tract New-ton writes,

“There is therefore besides the sensible changes wrough in the textures of the grosser matter a more subtile secret & noble way of working in all vegetation which makes its products distinct from all others & the immeadiate se-ate of thes operations is not the whole bulk of matter, but rather an exceeding subtile & inimagin-ably small portion of matter dif-fused through the masse which if it seperated there would remain but a dead & inactive earth.”36

Here we see the matter spirit duality in full force. The vegetative spirit

is an exceedingly subtle and unimagin-ably small portion of matter (strikingly

similar to my earlier discussion of æther), that pervades the structure of all living things and makes them alive. The spirit is defined as material, but it doesn’t really have any material properties. It is omnipresent, and does not seem to interact with the physical world in any corporeal way. Rather, its activity is decidedly spiritual, it acts as a sort of energy source, and if it were removed (as happens in the alchemical stage of putrefaction) what is left is but a dead and inactive earth. The material / spiritual properties of the spirit become even more convoluted when we take into account Newton’s idea in his letter to Oldenburg that “all things may be originated from æther.” We see that Idea repeated with more nuance in Of Natures obvious laws. Newton writes,

“And thus perhaps a great part if not all the moles of sensible matter is nothing but Aether congealed & interwoven into various textures whose life depends on that part of it which is in a middle state, not wholy distinct & lose from it like the Aether in which it swims as in life.”37

35 Newton, Isaac. Dibner MSS 1031 B “Of Natures Obvious Laws and Processes in Vegitation” f.5r36 Idem f.5v-6r 37 Idem f.3v

Figure 46, Atalanta Fugiens, Emblema VIII, De Secretis Natura, , Michael Maier, 1617The inscription roughly translates to, “Beat the egg with a fiery sword.” Eggs were often used to symbolise glass vials; both contained new life. Among the images in Atalanta Fugiens, this one is particularly surreal. Its geometric structure makes it appear more like the work of M.C. Escher than Michael Maier.

46

Thus æther makes up not only the body of matter but also its spirit.

Truly, it is the universal menstrum from which all things are generated. Here the matter spirit duality reaches some sort of stability, where “life depends on that part of it which is in a middle state.” Only when the corporeal and incorpo-real aspects of the æther spirit are in balance can life emerge.38 Thus for Newton matter, force, spirit, and life were deeply intertwined. He saw a clear and defined difference between vitalistic and mechanistic actions.39 These vitalistic active principles were what Newton had in mind when he sent science on the quest for forces in the Principia. But, although active principles were accepted in the guise of forces, later scientists still insisted on maintain-ing the inertness of matter. The dynamism of the ætherial medium that makes up matter and imbues it with spirit was lost. But, if we begin to view the fundamental forces of the universe once again as active spirits, perhaps we can regain the sense of vitalism we have lost. Expanding upon the ætherial linkage between matter and spirit allowed Newton to contrive some remarkable images of the cosmos. My favorite is quoted below. Newton writes,

“Thus this Earth resembles a great animall or rather inanimate vegetable, draws in æthereall breath for its dayly refreshment & vitall ferment & transpires again with gross exhalations, And according to the condi-tion of all other things living ought to have its times of beginning youth old age & perishing. [This is the subtil spirit which searches the most hiden recesses of all grosser matter which enters their smallest pores & divides them more subtly then any other materiall power what ever. (not after the way of common men-struums by rending them violently assunder etc) this is Natures universall agent, her secret fire, the onely ferment & principle of all vegetation. The material soule of all matter which being constantly inspired from above pervades & concretes with it into one form & then if incited by a gentle heat actuates & enlivens it”40

38 In this idea we see hints of sulfur mercury theory, where the form of the Philosophers Stone emerges from a tiny spirit of life acting on the Philosophical Mercury. The idea is that the spirit of matter is only the smallest portion of the body, and yet it gives the matter its purpose and structure. Here is another telling quote, “Yet those grosser substances are very apt to put on various external appeanes according to the present state of the invisible inhabitant as to appear like bones flesh wood fruit etc Namely they consisting of differing particles watry earthy saline airy oyly spirituous etc those parts may bee variously moved one among another according to the acting of the latent vegetable substances & be variously associated & concatenated together by their influence” “Of Natures Obvious Laws and Processes in Vegitation” f.5v39 Another, perhaps redundant, example would be the following quote, “So far therefore as the same changes may bee wrought by the slight mutation of the textures of bodys in common chymistry & such like experiments may judg that such changes made by nature are done the same way that is by the sleighty transpositions of the grosser corpuscles, for upon their disposition only sensible qualitys depend. But so far as by vegetation such changes are wrought as cannot bee done without it wee must have recourse to som further cause And this difference is vast & fundamental because nothing could ever yet bee made without vegetation which nature useth to produce by it. [note the instance of turning Iron into copper. etc.]” “Of Natures Obvious Laws and Processes in Vegitation” f.5v40 Idem f.3v

Figure 47, Atalanta Fugiens, Emblema XII, De Secretis Natura, , Michael Maier, 1617The inscription roughly translates to, “The stone which Saturn consumed for the son of Jove, is vomited out and placed upon Helicon as a monument for mortal men.” In this, and other images from Atalanta Fugiens, we see a version of the mountain of the philosophers.

47

To me this passage represents a culmination of all of the theory I have described so far. We see the concepts of death and rebirth in the earths life cycle. The infinite subtlety of æther has imbued

the earth with spirit, and that spirit has transformed it into a pyrtaneum with a secret fire at the heart of the world. The earth has become alive. (Figure 48) This view has remarkably strong parallels with modern Gaia Theory.41 Newton expands this idea further. Not just the earth, but the entire cosmos is vivified by the ætherial spirit. He writes,

“And, as the earth, so perhaps may the sun imbibe this spirit copiously, to conserve his shining, and keep the planets from receding further from him. And they, that will, may also suppose, that this spirit affords or carries with it thither the solary fewel and material principle of light: and that the vast æthereal spaces be-tween us and the stars are for a suf-ficient repository for this food of the sun and planets.”42

ther is not only the substance but the sustenance of the cosmos. Its pervasive actions keep the universe alive.

This quote also hints at one of the most astounding insights I have found in my research of Newtons alchemy. That is, that æther may be none other than light itself. Consider the following quote,

“Note that tis more probable the aether is but a vehicle to some more active spirit and the bod-ies may be concreted of both [aether and active spirit] together. They may imbibe aether as well as air in generation and in that aether the spirit is entangled. This spirit perhaps is the body of light. 1) because both have a prodigious active principle (both are perpetual workers) 2) be-cause all things may be made to emit light by heat. 3) the same cause (heat) banishes the vital principle 4) Tis suitable in infinite wisdom not to multiply causes without necessity. 5) No heat is so pleasant and bright as the suns. 6) Light and heat have a mutual dependence on each oth-er and [there is] no generation [of light] without heat. Heat is a necessary condition of light and vegetation. (heat excites light and light excites heat, heat excites the vegetable principle that increaseth heat) 6 [6,7]) No substance so indifferently, subtly and swiftly pervades all things as light and no spirit searches bodies so subtly piercingly and quickly as the vegetable spirit.” 43

41 Gaia theory proposes that all organisms and their inorganic surroundings on Earth are closely integrated to form a single and self-regulating complex system, maintaining the conditions for life on the planet. The scientific investigation of the Gaia hypothesis focuses on observing how the biosphere and the evolution of life forms contribute to the stability of global tem-perature, ocean salinity, oxygen in the atmosphere and other factors of habitability in a preferred homeostasis. The Gaia hy-pothesis was formulated by the chemist James Lovelock and co-developed by the microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s. “Gaia Hypothesis.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation42 Newton, Isaac. “Hypothesis Explaining the Properties of Light.” p.25143 Newton, Isaac. Dibner MSS 1031 B “Of Natures Obvious Laws and Processes in Vegitation” f.4r Italics and [square brackets] are my own.

Figure 48, Atalanta Fugiens, Emblema II, De Secretis Natura, , Michael Maier, 1617The inscription roughly translates to, “The Earth is our Nurse.” In this image a living earth is beautifully depicted as a fertile woman. The babies on the lower right depict Rome’s creation myth; its founders, Romulus and Remus were suckled by wolves. It is impossible to miss the fecundity of this image.

48

From a modern perspective it is difficult for me to not look at Newton’s connections between æther, light, heat, and life, and not see Einstein’s mass energy equivalence formula, E=mc2. With that

interpretation, æther’s infinitesimal particle size begins to make perfect sense. What particle could be smaller than a photon, which isn’t really even a particle at all? And yet Einstein’s formula says that these immaterial photons can be converted into all the gross forms of matter. Perhaps I’m straining the meaning of the formula a bit, but that strain arises only in the details of implementation, not the relationship itself. Newton had no way of guessing at the correct mechanisms, but the big picture concept is there. Light is energy. Energy is the spirit of life. Light can be converted into living matter. Reason 4 for Newton’s argument that light and spirit are the same is particularly interesting. It shows that Newton felt it would be fruitful to apply rigorous logical arguments to even decidedly spiritual phenomena. Interestingly, that very rule is what prompted later scientists to conclude that the idea of an ætherial spirit was superfluous. Everything could be explained by force and energy. There was no need for the intermediary ætherial spirit to explain phenomenon. But while our science may have be-come more precise and correct by removing the ætherial spirit, in the process some of its essence was lost. The grandeur of an interconnected universe was replaced by an infinite series of small, causally related changes.

Energy existed in Newton’s time in exactly the same form that it does

today, and our ideas about it have no power to change what energy objec-tively is (if such objectivity exists). The vocabulary, methodology and milieu of the natural philosophy Newton surrounded himself with were conducive to formulating ideas of energy as a spiritual, ætherial, vital, substance-less substance.44 Today, our vocabulary, methodology and environment rife with technology lends us to conceive of energy as something controllable, quantifiable, mechanical even. We have theories of fields and entropy that define and refine the concept of energy so that we can use it to produce technology. But those theories, at their root, do not give us any real indication of what energy actually IS. What is there to do? If we reverted back to calling it æther, or even worse, spirit, we would be tapping into a whole host of religious connota-

tions that science has declared unclean. But I would like you to consider for a moment that perhaps those very religious connotations are what is needed to truly understand the concept as we move into the future. For what is energy but an immaterial body? Large, almost incomprehensible, amounts of

44 For another intriguing use of æther as energy, see Query 24 in The Opticks. “Is not animal motion perform’d by the vibrations of this medium, excited in the Brain by the power of the Will, and propagated from thence through the solid, pellucid and uniform Capillamenta of the Nerves into the Muscles, for contracting and dilating them? I suppose that the Capillamenta of the Nerves are each of them solid and uniform, that the vibrating Motion of the Ætherial Medium may be propagated along them from one end to the other uniformly, and without interruption.” Here Newton sees the æther as literally the driving force of all animal motion. Newton, Isaac. Opticks p.353-354

Figure 49, Atalanta Fugiens, Emblema XL, De Secretis Natura, , Michael Maier, 1617The inscription roughly translates to, “Blatant prosecution, destroy your books.”

49energy are stored in each and every atom, and yet we don’t really know what it is. Is it a fluid? A field? An infinitesimally small particle? A string? All of these descriptions have a degree of truth to them, but to my mind the best description I’ve found is Newton’s, spiritual body, spiritus corporalis. It bears noting here that the early modern concept closest to modern energy (mathematically speaking) was developed by Gottfried Leibneiz and was called vis viva, which means, literally, living force.45 How would our science look if we started calling energy life force?

To my mind, much of what separates alchemy from modern science has to do more with our se-mantic use of terminology than fundamental differences in perspective. Recall Principe’s state-

ment that, “The “otherness” of alchemical texts rests… more on their modes of expression than on their modes of laboratory work.”46 Newton’s editor, Roger Cotes, said something similar in an attempt to disprove the Cartesian gross æther, “For since there is no way to distinguish a fluid matter of this sort from empty space, the whole argument comes down to the names of things and not their natures.”47 Perhaps our modes of expression today are more sophisticated. Our names of things are more precise. But their natures remain constant. Fundamentally, I believe that the alchemical notion of spirit and the modern notion of energy are isomorphic. Many of the phenomena seventeenth century natural phi-losophers were explaining (incompletely) with æther theory we now explain (more completely) with thermodynamics, electromagnetism, force fields, atomic orbital theory and a whole host of additional jargon – the complexity of which dwarfs any alchemical notions of transmutation. Much knowledge has been gained, but think about what wisdom was lost in that rhetorical transition! Imagine if a Catho-lic priest, in giving a sermon on the eternal soul, were able to work in ideas of entropy, or infinity? What ramifications does the Hindu idea of reincarnation have if we consider that the ‘reincarnated soul’ is in fact the body’s energy, which by the first law of thermodynamics cannot be created or de-stroyed? Linking energy with the soul has profound philosophical consequences that I cannot hope to delve into completely here. Let it suffice to say that while the functional, predictive power of alchemical theory was lacking by modern standards, its metaphorical power, its power to imbue meaning in our lives, was far greater. That power has been lost with the shift to modern terminology. My goal with this paper was to hint at how it might be regained.

45 Smith, George E. «The Vis Viva Dispute: A Controversy at the Dawn of Dynamics.”Physics Today 59.10 (2006): 31. Print.46 Principe, Lawrence M. “Apparatus and Reproducibility in Alchemy.” p.7147 Newton, The Principia, p.397

Figure 50Alchemist Sendivogius.186773 × 130 cmOil on PanelAlchemist Michael Sendivogius presents gold to the king.

50conclusIon

t’s been six months and 56 pages since I started this quest for my own personal sort of Philosophers Stone, and I’m feeling quite relieved that

this chapter is drawing to the end. I nev-er expected myself to become so gripped by such an esoteric corner of academia. By some weird twist of Prisca Sapientia, I found myself pouring over 300 year old laboratory notes thinking that somewhere within them I might find the secrets of the universe. I’ve spent the majority of this pa-per looking into the past, explaining old ideas and trying to reinterpret them to fit my opinionated needs. I recognize that at some points I may have twisted Newton’s words a bit, but unlike the historians I was reading, it has never been my intention to faithfully recreate the past with my words. I think it is false to believe that we can sep-arate ourselves from our history enough to do such a thing, in a similar way that it is false to believe that we can ever sepa-rate ourselves from our science enough to achieve true objectivity. My goal has al-ways been to use a unique interpretation of the past to further my own ideas on what science should be in the future. I will be using this conclusion to showcase some of those future ideas.

Throughout this paper I have been speaking of a divide between sci-ence and religion, but the divide

runs much deeper than that. A similar di-vide exists between mathematicians and artists, or between poets and logicians. The boundaries between the disciplines are actually illusory1, and I think they stem from the bizarre idea that the meaning of some form of expression can only be housed in one soli-tary place. Scientists are reductionists. They look to find a meaning that is shrouded by a whole host of unwanted variables. Meaning can only be found when the variables are removed and the underlying principles are revealed. Artists, in artificial contrast, are holists. The meaning of a piece of art is not usu-ally to be found by removing an aesthetic covering to reveal a gem of fact underneath. The entire piece, in its totality, is the expression of its meaning. In our society, a focus on aesthetics is usually associated with a notion of shallowness, as if aesthetic interests run only skin deep. I think that it is important to realize that how a truth is expressed is just as important as what the expression is. Remember, Truth has two aspects; it must be both correct, and meaningful.

1 Examples like Lewis Carroll and Carl Sagan show how much potential there is when the two modes of thinking merge.

Figure 51, Alchemist with Scale, 19th century, Johannes Weiland, Dutch, 24 x 16 in. Oil on canvas, mounted on board, Fisher Collection, FA 2000.001.268A bearded alchemist wearing a fur-trimmed top coat is carefully weighing ingredi-ents with a balance. On top of his table is an exotic carpet covered with papers, a copper pitcher, and ceramic jar. Resting on a bench in front of the table is a large book and jug with blue glaze marks and glass.

51

I am fascinated by all the art that I found surrounding alchemical theory. I included a picture on every page of this essay because what alchemy looks like is an overwhelmingly essential aspect of what it is. Ideally, you should have been able to get a sense of my ideas from the images I

chose alone. Alchemy was a science that had an established art form and aesthetic associated with it. There is very clearly an alchemical style associated with the iconography; a universal language of symbol arrangement that all alchemists employed. Think about how remarkable that is! Our physics textbooks come with charts and diagrams, but when was the last time they contained illuminations? What would our textbooks be like if we could associate each one with a different artistic style, like sur-realism or expressionism?

Of course, inserting metaphor into modern science is not nearly as simple as saying we should. Metaphor isn’t precise; it is by definition subjective, and so in some ways metaphor is opposed by its definition to scientific thought. Our science is built upon the illusion of objectivity; on

the idea that we can somehow measure and experiment upon the world without being affected by it. Actively assimilating metaphor into our science is to accept that reality is interpretable; that there are no universal truths. Metaphor varies from person to person, so a metaphorical science would not be one science, but multitudes. Science would vary with its practitioners. But this wouldn’t really be anything new; the world has been this way all along. I am just trying to make us more aware of the hu-man element of the science that we do. When we experiment on matter, we experiment upon the stuff which we are made of. Transmutations in the flask can indeed produce transformations of the soul, if interpreted in the right context.

Figure 52Der Alchimist

After Carl Spitzweg (1808–1885), German

Paper: 8 x 10.25 in.

Lithograph

Fisher Collection

FA 2000.001.079

An alchemist bends over to observe his experiment in a laboratory; reminiscent of the Miller-Urey experi-ment

52

Perhaps the most famous words from the Principia are those Newton wrote on hypothesis in the general scholium,

I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reason for these properties of gravity, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypothesis, weather metaphysical or physical, or based on oc-cult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this experimental philosophy propositions are deduced from the phenomena and are made general by induc-tion. The impenetrability, mobility and impetus of bodies, and the laws of motion and the law of gravity have been found by this method. And it is enough that gravity really exists and acts according to the laws that we have set forth and is sufficient to explain all the mo-tions of the heavenly bodies and of our sea. 2

What can be made of this? Newton clearly delineates what methods are acceptable for deriving models of reality. Only conclusions based on extraordinarily sound reasoning are acceptable. Ideally, if his methodology were followed effectively, it would be impossible to be wrong. All

conclusions would be based purely on logic, without human conjectures and aesthetics getting in the way. What then, is to be said of Newton’s ætherial spirits, which from our modern perspective, ring with the hollow sound of hypothesis? Was he a hypocrite? How could the æther be anything other than hypothetical? Æther has long been derided as a scientific catchall; when we did not understand the cause of something or the mechanism under which it functioned, we imagined some hypotheti-cal æther to solve the problem. All the way through the twentieth century scientists like Maxwell,

2 Newton, The Principia, p.943

Figure 53, The Alchemist, 17th century, Mattheus van Helmont, Flemish22.5 x 16.5 in. Eddleman Collection, FA 2000.003.002An alchemist hard at work amist a chaos of books.

53Michelson, and Einstein postulated one or an-other forms of æther in order to solve problems apparently unsolvable without it.3 Æther theory has died and been reborn dozens of times over the past 300 years. What this tells me is that the æther may not exist in external reality, but it un-doubtedly exists in our minds. Æther exists in our collective consciousness in myriad forms, and simply because we have not found external proof for it does not make it any less real. Ideas have the power not to describe the world but to define it. We come from the Pleroma and the world is what we make it. I would prefer to live in a world where æther exists than a world in which it does not. Reality needs spirit. This is not a delusion. It is the recognition that science is a process that stems from a human mind, and as such it must be conformable to how we are best suited to perceive reality. We should not in-vent occult qualities to make our models work better, but we do need to ensure that they can answer life’s existential questions in a meaning-ful way. Perhaps statements about spirit in the modern era are best left to psychologists and neuroscientists rather than chemists. However, all of our science needs to in some way reflect the existence of spirit, because it is an existence feel and experience, even if it can never be proved. A science that does not take into account observed phenomena is incomplete. Spiritual phenomena cannot be observed the way the force of gravity can, but the religious history of the world shows definitively that spiritual experiences are real phenomena that need to be accounted for in or-der for our science to be whole. We created God in our image, why not science too?

3 Robert B. Laughlin, Nobel Laureate in Physics, and endowed chair in physic at Stanford University had this to say about æther in contemporary theoretical physics, “It is ironic that Einstein’s most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise [in special relativity] was that no such medium existed [...] The word ‘ether’ has extremely negative connotations in theoretical physics because of its past association with opposition to relativity. This is unfortunate because, stripped of these connotations, it rather nicely captures the way most physicists actu-ally think about the vacuum. . . . Relativity actually says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of matter pervading the universe, only that any such matter must have relativistic symmetry. [..] It turns out that such matter exists. About the time relativity was becoming accepted, studies of radioactivity began showing that the empty vacuum of space had spectroscopic structure similar to that of ordinary quantum solids and fluids. Subsequent studies with large particle accelerators have now led us to understand that space is more like a piece of window glass than ideal Newtonian emptiness. It is filled with ‘stuff’ that is normally transparent but can be made visible by hitting it sufficiently hard to knock out a part. The modern concept of the vacuum of space, confirmed every day by experiment, is a relativistic ether. But we do not call it this because it is taboo.” Laughlin, Robert B. A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom down. New York: Basic, 2005. Print. p.120-121. Quoted directly from, “Aether Theories.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation.

Figure 54 ,The Alchemist, 1937, N.C. Wyeth, American, 75.75 x 50.625 in. Oil on canvas laid down on board, 2002.001.001Alchemical apparatus are scattered throughout the laboratory. A puffer fish hangs from the ceiling, and doves are flying near the windowsill in the background. Through the window is a castle atop a mountain.

54

A few years ago I lived in a Hindu monastery. Every night, we would gather together and the Swami would give us a lecture about Hindu theology. While I could tell there was wisdom to his words, most of his tropes were old and outdated and had become stale with constant repeti-

tion. Often the lectures would be structured like a school class would be; for four nights in a row we would learn about the four stages of consciousness. The next five nights would cover the five paths of yoga. He would touch on morality or metaphysics, but rarely said anything of much interest to me. What kept me going to the Swami’s sermons wasn’t their content explicitly. As I said, that was rather stale. I went rather because I liked the feeling of being in a congregation, and that everyone around me was searching for the unknown. For a long portion of humanities history, the quest for the unknown was done in a religious setting, without the firm backbone of the scientific method. It is clear to me that any future exploration we do as a species will be done from within the framework of a scientific methodology, and I want to make sure that we don’t lose mysticism and communion in the process. For most of this paper I have been pointing out areas where science and spirituality have diverged, but now I would like to propose one way in which they might be unified again; how science might be taught and done in a religious context. Imagine a Swami who spends five nights giving lectures not on the five paths of yoga, but the five states of matter. She would start with earth. She would talk of order and stability, and of our need to find grounding. But he would talk about order in another way, order with a crystalline structure. He would cover maybe a bit of the mathematics of crystal formation, or the geology, all the while staying attuned to the metaphorical ramifications of stability and order in hu-man life. The next night she would cover water. Theologically, the focus would be on the importance of flexibility and flow, but scientifically there would be a rigorous discussion of fluid dynamics. The next night, air, would be a study of evanescence, but also of the ideal gas law. The next two nights would cover fire, æther, and plasma. He would talk about electrons dropping down orbitals to emit light, and of electromagnetic radiation, but also of energy in a much more religious guise. She would talk about energy as spirit, and its relation to the infinite. I have to insist that it is possible to unify scientific and religious sensibilities. But to do so will require us to abandon the Cartesian notion that all phenomena must be explainable by mechanism. Likewise, we must abandon the Catholic insistence on blind faith and divine providence.

In Query 31 Newton listed as active principles gravity, electrick and magnetick

attractions, and fermentation. We have identified two of these three as fundamental forces of the universe. Why not entertain for a moment that life is a fundamental force too? What would life force look like? We know that the gravitational attraction of bodies tends to increase over time. Stars draw matter into themselves towards their centers, which increases the mass of the star and makes its attractive force even greater. Heavy bodies convert non heavy bodies into heavier bodies. Might life work in a similar fashion? Living bodies convert nonliving matter into more living matter. The biggest difference is, instead of expanding inward, until it collapses into a speck of infinite gravity and density, life expands outward, and transmutes everything around it into living flesh.

Figure 55, The Alchymist, in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone, Discovers Phosphorus, and prays for the successful Conclusion of his operation, as was the custom of the Ancient Chymical Astrologers” Joseph Wright of Derby, 1795, 50x40in

55Soon, perhaps very soon, cosmic explorers will set out from earth and begin to make nations and cultures on other worlds. Would it be wrong to say that, with human colonization, a formerly lifeless planet is slightly more alive than it was before? At one point, the earth was a barren and lifeless ball of molten rock. Now it teems with life, and everything about it has transformed in that transition. Life is a web of extraordinary complexity. It is impossible for any life form to go through its existence without relying in some way, either symbiotically or parasitically, on another species. There are 100 bacteria cells inside you for every one of your cells. You could not live without them, nor could they without you. Where does the human end and the bacteria begin? Zoom out your perspective enough, and it becomes obvious that this whole planet is interconnected, alive, growing and transforming. Is it growing according to particular laws, or is life just another occult quality? Imagine for a moment that Newton was right; that at the core of the solar system, 4 billion years ago, some ætherial spark of life was illuminated. The agents first action was to putrefy and confound the matter around it into chaos. Then it proceeded to generation. And the particularities of its method were many, according to the nature of the subject upon which it was operating. This vital agent grew until it was diffused through all things that existed in the world. Its forms were constantly emerging, changing, dying, growing, until, one day, one of those forms discovered this strange ability to look backwards and forwards, and see itself from within and without, and began to wonder where it came from, and where it might go…

Figure 56, Integrae Naturae, Utriusque Cosmi Historia, 1618. Man is depicted at the center as an ape, surrounded by all of Nature, first minerals, vegi-tables, animals, and then the celestial bodies, and then the heavens. The ape is chained to Nature who in turn is chained to God. Much of Fludds work attempts to integrate occult wisdom accross the entire spectrum of early modern study.

56

I’d like to end the paper where I began, with Hermes Trismegistus and the unification of opposites. The term might still seem a little archaic, so instead I’ll call it by its modern name, integration. Figure 55 is an alchemical cosmology by Robert Fludd from the Utriusque Cosmi

Historia dated 1618. The mandala depicts the total integration of man, Nature and God in terms of the cosmos. The caption uses “Integrae Naturae” and I interpret this literally, mathematically, by breaking nature down into infinitesimal pieces and then applying a magic sigma symbol which unifies it again into a whole. It’s funny how even with all of our attempts to flee from the incomprehensible, the unknown finds its way into the very foundations of our rational thought, mathematical integration. Take an undefined area under a graph. Break it into pieces. Break it into so many pieces that each piece isn’t a piece anymore. The pieces become so small that they cease to exist as anything besides an ætherial idea. They are infinitely subtle; everywhere and nowhere at the same time – an infinity of nothingness. And then what do you do? You combine them, unify the opposites, and you get a finite number, that is different every time. Max Born (a founder of quantum theory) said that theoretical physics is “the quasi-magical process in which [mathematically formulated] laws of nature are abstracted from experience.”4 Science works by simplifying and reducing phenomena until a state of simplicity is reached that can be described by a mathematical relationship. By breaking things up we can understand their tiniest inner workings. But sometimes, for under-standing, a reductionist approach does not work. We need to be able to understand reality on all of its scales. Intriguingly in our physics, on the largest and smallest scales, astronomical and quantum, where the comprehensibility of size breaks down, so does our science. We do not know how to process the infinitely big or the infinitely small. Because infinity falls more into the realm of religion than science. I believe that infinity is just another word for God, or that which we cannot understand, that which, by the way in which we define it, is not understandable, or expressible, even in symbols. Integration is the key to bringing the spirit back into rational thought. We can look at a cell, and see all the little machines that make it up, and we can talk about the physical rules which govern how the little machines act. We can delve as deep as we want into the inner workings of this stuff we call matter, but the deeper we go, the further away we get from understanding what makes life, alive. All we end up with is an infinite sum of infinitely small pieces, each meaningless on their own. Only by integrating all the pieces together can we make it alive. Integration is that magic trick by which we turn the fractured into the whole, the many into the one. And that, for me, is the meaning of alchemy.

4 Lindorff, David P. Pauli and Jung: The Meeting of Two Great Minds. Wheaton, IL: Quest, 2004. Print. p.xi

Figure 57, Splendor Solis, Plate 22The Sun finishes its journey.

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