Alchemy Restored
Source:
Author: Lawrence M. Principe, Department of the Histor of Science and Technology and Department of Chemistry, Johns Hopkins University
Published: June 2011
Abstract
Alchemy now holds an important place in the history of science. Its current status contrasts with its former exile as a “pseudoscience” or worse and results from several rehabilitative steps carried out by scholars who made closer, less programmatic, and more innovative studies of the documentary sources. Interestingly, alchemy’s outcast status was created in the eighteenth century and perpetuated thereafter in part for strategic and polemical reasons—and not only on account of a lack of historical understanding. Alchemy’s return to the fold of the history of science highlights important features about the development of science and our changing understanding of it.
Notes
Changing views of alchemy in early 18th century
In 1737, Abraham Kaau gives the talk “On the Joys of the Alchemists” in Leiden, Netherlands. The talk is mocking alchemy — distancing alchemy from chemistry.
20 years earlier (1718), his uncle Herman Boerhaave had given a talk in Leiden that took the transmutation of metals into gold seriously. The lecture was titled “Chemestry Purging Itself of Its Errors”. It was a defence of chemistry, against alchemy (?). His audience didn’t see a clear distinction between what we call alchemy and chemistry.
The author suggests using the term chymistry to refer to the subject (chemistry) before its separation into alchemy and chemistry.
Chrysopoeia
chrysopoeia: the production of gold through the transmutation of base metals such as lead.1
Chrysopoeia was used in the title of Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra, an alchemical work attributed to Cleopatra the Alchemist, probably (?) written in the first century, but first (and only(?)) found in a 10th/11th century manuscript.
It’s possible to synthesize gold in particle accelerators or nuclear reactors. Production cost is estimated to be a trillion times the market price for gold.2
Alchemy’s connection with natural philosophy
Alchemical texts—like other contemporaneous natural philosophical texts—are implicitly structured on the vision of a tightly interconnected cosmos of God, man, and nature that is full of meaning, purpose, and symbol. In this context chymical transformations frequently and easily carried linkages for their authors with ideas in theology, literature, mythology, and other fields that since the eighteenth century have been considered extraneous.3
“The key role—sometimes explicit, always implicit—of theology and metaphysics in alchemy does not disqualify it as a part of the history of science any more than these same features in, for example, Kepler or Newton would disqualify their work.”4
Alchemy and occultism
“Late eighteenth-century Germany saw a resurgence of alchemy, but within secret societies. The late nineteenth-century witnessed a broader revival of alchemy, but within the context of Victorian occultism. These Victorian occultists reinterpreted alchemy as a spiritual practice, involving the self-transformation of the practitioner and only incidentally or not at all the transformation of laboratory substances. Early twentieth-century psychoanalysts reexpressed this occultist interpretation in clinical terms and claimed that alchemical texts actually described psychological processes and archetypal images. These latter-day interpretations became standard ’explanations’ of historical alchemy, such that with every passing generation alchemy became more and more distanced from chemistry and from scientific thought in general.5”
The boundaries of modern science
“…the rehabilitation of alchemy helps broaden our understanding of what is meant by science…”
“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 philosophical or political formulations about science.”