Didier Kahn
Alchemy is best defined as research into transmuting base metals into silver and gold, removing all diseases and prolonging life until God’s appointed time through the preparation of the “philosophers’ stone” or “universal medicine,” and the ability to heal metals and human beings as well (Principe 2013, 1–7). The basic way to reach these goals was to understand the natural laws and try to reproduce the process of nature in the laboratory. Alchemists did not care to evoke spirits or demons, nor to attract the influence of the stars. The subject of their quest was the natural, and above all mineral, world. Since an uncontrolled production of gold might turn the whole world upside down (in addition, the discovery of the philosophers’ stone was often considered a donum Dei, a “gift of God”), alchemy had to be kept hidden from the unworthy: hence its often obscure, symbolic language.
The first alchemical writings appeared in Egypt in Greek language during the first century CE. Greek alchemy began to be translated into Arabic in the eighth century, and alchemy only reached the Christian West in the twelfth century, when the whole Arabic science began to be translated into Latin. Meanwhile, Greek alchemy had been entirely forgotten, so that in the twelfth century, alchemy seemed to be a novelty of Arabic origin. Even when Greek alchemy was re‐discovered in the fifteenth century, its language was found so obscure and corrupt that it raised little interest among humanists. Latin medieval alchemy itself had inherited the obscurity of all previous alchemical texts, for Greek alchemy had been translated in Arabic, then reworked or elaborated upon by Arab alchemists, before being in turn translated into Latin. In fact, it was never quite possible to really understand an alchemical text: alchemists could only interpret it – which they all did, to the best of their abilities.1
Quite surprisingly, classical mythology was not used by Greek alchemists in their symbolic language (Matton 1992, [1]–[3]; Matton 1995, 74). A chronicler from the seventh century alone, John of Antioch, evoked an alchemical interpretation of the Golden Fleece. Far from being such a fleece as the poets said, John argued that the Golden Fleece was a book written on parchment teaching the reader how to make gold through alchemy; which was the real motivation for the quest of the Argonauts. We do not have, however, any other trace of this kind of exegesis in the whole corpus of the Græcum chemicum, which extends from the first to the eleventh century.
Thus, alchemy had no roots in classical Antiquity. Nor had it any in the Bible, nor even in ancient Oriental literature such as Barlaam and Josaphat, the romance of the Seven Sages, or the Alexander romances (Kahn 2013a, 7–16). To the scholars and writers of the Latin West, alchemy was only a recent discipline, classified as a mechanical art owing to its practical side, and thus deprived of any authority. Therefore, from the twelfth century onwards, alchemists struggled to gain more authority in two different ways: first, by elaborating new matter theories in order to establish their art as a real scientia, that is, to give it a philosophical dignity; second, in giving more weight to new treatises by attributing them to the great medieval doctors (Michael Scot, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Raymond Lull, Thomas of Aquinas, etc.).
In this quest for authority, classical mythology became a crucial issue in the Renaissance, when poetry, and especially poems transmitting classical myths, such as those of Homer, Virgil, or Ovid, were no longer considered as mere lies (as in Aristotle’s works, and more generally in medieval culture), but began to be commonly praised as “poetic theology”; a way for the Ancients to hide divine truths behind fables (Kahn 2013b, 97–99, 108–109). It was in this context that Renaissance alchemists began to alchemically interpret Greek, Roman, and Egyptian mythology, thinking to discover in it the alchemical truths hidden by the Ancients. Fables, they argued, had preserved those truths more safely and faithfully than the alchemical writers did in their obscure treatises. Besides, this allowed Renaissance alchemists to claim much older roots in history than before.
The notion of “poetic theology” was resonating with that of prisca theologia, prisca philosophia, or prisca sapientia (“ancient theology, philosophy, or wisdom”), an idea which originated from the philosophers of late Antiquity such as Diogenes Laërtius, Iamblichus, or Proclus, and from Church Fathers like Augustine, Lactantius, or Tertullian, according to which the most ancient theologians and philosophers – Hermes Trismegistus, Zoroaster, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Democritus, or Plato –, though pagan they were, met in Egypt with parts of the teaching of Moses, the most ancient theologian of them all. Their doctrines were therefore imbued with part of the Christian revelation, which made them most precious, since they were closer to the origins of the revelation of God than any other doctrine (Schmitt 1966, 507–513). This idea was revived by the Florentine Renaissance in the second half of the fifteenth century, in the frame of the revival of Platonism initiated by Marsilio Ficino, and the “universal concord” that Giovanni Pico della Mirandola tried to establish between all religions. It was incredibly widespread until the end of the seventeenth century. It was a natural complement to the idea of “poetic theology,” inasmuch as the most ancient poets, Orpheus, Hesiodus, or Homer, were also intended as “ancient theologians.” Classical mythology was understood by most Renaissance thinkers, all the more by supporters of the “ancient theology,” as the proper theology of the Greeks and Romans. It was, therefore, quite natural for Renaissance alchemists to investigate classical myths in order to discover in them a hidden truth. This was clearly expressed, for example, in 1585 by an English alchemist, R. Bostock, at the head of a detailed interpretation of the myth of the golden fleece, which was by far the most successful myth among the alchemists2:
Divers Poets before the tyme of Plato, and also after his tyme did wrapp and hide this Arte in Ridles, darke speeches and fables. As by the fable of the golden Fleece brought from Colchos by Argonautae, the companions of Jason, […] by their perrilous navigation, by the place where it was kept, which was the fielde called Martius, […] by ye plowing of it with Oxen, that breathed & plowed out fire at their nosethrills, by the ground which should be sowne with the teeth of the Dragon that watched and kept the golden Fleece, by the bringing the Dragon a sleepe, and obtayning the golden Fleece, they signified the practice of this Arte, daungers and perrills in this worke, the purging and preparing of the matters and substaunce of the medicine, in the furnaces that breath out fire at the venteholes continually in equal quantitie: the Quicksilver and Mercury sublimed, which should be sowen in Mars his fielde like seede, which by often sublimation, doth so rise out of the matter contained in the Alembick, into the helme or head, and in it maketh divers formes, figures and fashions, as if men were fighting, and one killing an other.
(Bostocke, 1585, quoted in Debus 1987, 20)
Within a few decades, the alchemical interpretation of classical mythology became an essential nutriment to alchemy. As early as the end of the fifteenth century, the French humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples wrote an alchemical exegesis of two labors of Hercules as part of his unpublished treatise De magia (Pierozzi and Mandosio 1996, 207–213). In 1515, another humanist, Giovanni Aurelio Augurelli, gave an alchemical meaning to a number of classical myths such as the love affairs of Mars and Venus, or the quest for the golden fleece, in his alchemical neo‐Latin poem, Chrysopœia libri tres (“Three books on the making of gold”). In 1544, Giovanni Bracesco assigned in great detail an alchemical meaning to a comprehensive list of ancient fables in his treatise La espositione di Geber philosopho, where he commented on a medieval alchemical treatise. Some examples from it may be quoted (Matton 1995, 77–78): the fixation of the elixir was hidden by the ancients under the Gorgon turning all those watching her to stone. The distillation was hidden under the metamorphosis of Jupiter in eagle, uplifted in the sky with Ganymede:
Under the thick cloud with which Jupiter wrapped Io is meant the film that appears during the coagulation of the elixir. The black films appearing during the calcination of sulphur are the black sails with which Theseus came back to Athens. […] Under Leto confined in Delos island, the Ancients meant our copper which, once it has been put in the vessel, generates the sun and the moon [i.e., gold and silver].
(Braceso 1544 in Matton 1995, 77–78)
The alchemical interpretation of ancient myths became such prominent a topic in the sixteenth‐century alchemical literature that it still left traces even after the complete decline of alchemy, in the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries, in the most unexpected places. Thus in 1837, in a short notice on the life and works of the fourth‐century Latin poet Claudian, a distinguished professor in the Faculté des Lettres of Paris, Victor Leclerc, mocked “those who figured to recognize the secret of the philosophers’ stone in De Raptu Proserpinae.” Leclerc had probably in mind the alchemical neo‐Latin poem published in 1631 by the Strasbourg physician J. N. Furichius, Chryseidos Libri IIII, which drew, among others, on the myth of Proserpina as described by Claudian; unless he knew the Kurtze Erklährung uber die höllische Göttin Proserpinam published by the German alchemist J.R. Glauber in 1667: “A short explanation about the infernal Goddess Proserpine […] and how the souls of the dead metallic bodies are led, thanks to this Proserpine, from the chemical Hell to the philosophical Heaven.”3 A few years before, in 1829, the German classicist C.A. Lobeck began his Aglaophamus with a brief survey of the diverse interpretations of ancient Mysteries up to his time. The very first author he mentioned was the seventeenth‐century alchemist Michael Maier, “the most learned of the Spagyrics [i.e., alchemists],” who “stated that the principles of alchemy had been secretly transmitted in the Eleusinian, Samothracian, and Olympian Mysteries.”4 As a matter of fact, between 1614 and 1622, Michael Maier wrote the most systematic alchemical exegesis of classical and Egyptian myths ever seen, in such works as his Arcana Arcanissima (“The most secret of secrets”), Atalanta fugiens (“The fleeing Atalanta”), or Cantilenae intellectuales […] de phœnice redivivo (“Intellectual songs on the resurrected Phenix”). Thus Maier’s Arcana Arcanissima dealt in turn with:
(1) The Egyptian Gods, Hieroglyphs, Osiris, Isis, Mercury, Vulcan, Typhon, etc.; the Works and Monuments of Egyptian Kings. (2) The Grecian Myths, the Golden Fleece and Jason, the Apples of the Hesperides, which all have reference to the Golden Medicine. (3) Genealogies of the fictitious Gods and Goddesses shown to be really philosophic, chemical and medicinary. (4) The ancient Festivals and Plays in which the charm of science was commenced. (5) The Labours of Hercules and their meanings. (6) The Trojan Expedition. […] Just as the dismemberment of Osiris and the re‐assembly of his fragments by Isis represented to the Egyptians that quest, so, for the Greeks, Jason’s hunt for the Golden Fleece.
(Sheppard 1972, 53)
For that reason, Maier’s works were among the favorites of a host of alchemists, including such an eager reader of those texts as Isaac Newton.5
How fascinating indeed to imagine (odd as it was) that the Ancients might have concealed the secret of the philosophers’ stone in the whole range of their myths, the manifest absurdity of which, Maier stated, could only be explained by alchemy being their ultimate meaning. As late as 1932, such a modern, avant‐garde author as Antonin Artaud appropriated the alchemical exegesis of ancient Mysteries – an exegesis he probably inferred from the reading of Grillot de Givry’s Le Musée des sorciers, mages et alchimistes, published three years before – and integrated it in his essay The Alchemical Theatre (Kahn 1988, 35–44; Kahn 2007). Since the origins of theater laid in ancient Mysteries, if the myths used by the priests in the Mysteries were actually pertaining to the philosophers’ stone, then the origins of theater itself were alchemical. In Artaud’s words:
the Orphic Mysteries which subjugated Plato must have possessed on the moral and psychological level something of this definitive and transcendent aspect of the alchemical theatre, [and] with elements of an extraordinary psychological density, […] must have evoked the passionate and decisive transfusion of matter by mind.
(Artaud 1958, 52)
Artaud expressed here his conception of theater as a kind of transmutation of the spectators’ minds, giving a spiritual meaning to the mere alchemical meaning which, in the times of Michael Maier, only consisted, however, of plain laboratory processes (thus the castration of Osiris meant that the penis of the god was “these black, useless faeces through which Osiris first took his growth, but which must be separated, after the dissolution, from the cleaned, pure rest of the body”). According to Maier, Orpheus had indeed used ancient Mysteries in order to transmit the Egyptian secrets of alchemy to the Greeks under this veil (Leibenguth 2002, 281; Matton 1987, 213). The same fascination for the alchemical interpretation of ancient Mysteries may be noticed in the early work of W.B. Yeats – less surprisingly, given Yeats’s temporary addiction to contemporary “occult” secret societies: thus his story “Rosa Alchemica,” published in 1897, significantly opens on a quotation from Euripides, Bacchae 72–77, celebrating those initiated into the rites of Dionysus (Arkins 1990, 103).
Was there a consensus among alchemists on the meaning of the myths? By no means: each alchemist used myths in adapting them to his peculiar alchemical theory. This situation might be illustrated by many examples. Let us examine the interpretation of the love of Mars and Venus by two different alchemists: G.A. Augurelli, in 1515, and Stanislas R. Acxtelmeier, in 1701. In the Chrysopœia, a poem modelled on Virgil’s Georgics, Augurelli exposed the Ficinian doctrine of the spiritus mundi (the spirit of the world) (Matton 1993, 142–146, 164–166). The fifteenth‐century neoplatonist philosopher Marsilio Ficino conceived the world, in a typical Platonic manner, as a living being, which possessed a body, a soul, – and a spirit. This spiritus mundi was an intermediary between the soul and the body of the world – that is, between the world soul and nature. It was the vehicle of the celestial seeds issued from the world soul, which came on earth to animate everything here below. Even metals were animated by celestial seeds. If the alchemist was skillful enough to extract the seed of gold through a certain operation on fire (which Ficino did not explain) and warm the seed long enough, Augurelli said, to have its germinal power reinforced, then the seed was able to activate the multiplicative virtue in gold:
Then comes the time of the sacred marriage [i.e., the mixing of duly prepared gold with its own seed]: the chamber of the vivifying husband [i.e., Vulcan’s forge, i.e., the crucible] is embrased by the perpetual torchs of Hymen, which shall be named Venus’s real love.
(Augurelli 1659, 236)
Here the alchemical interpretation rests on two analogies: the mixing of gold with its seed is equated to the love of Mars and Venus, and the crucible is compared to Vulcan’s forge.
The exegesis of the same myth by Acxtelmeier has to be understood within another context: that of antimonial alchemy. Antimony is a metalloid, the ore of which is usually combined with sulfur under the form of antimony trisulfide. From the end of the sixteenth century onwards, more and more alchemists believed antimony trisulfide to be the prime matter of alchemy, it being able to purify gold from all his impurities and allied metals. This ability is due to the sulfur of the trisulfide, which attracts all impurities from gold and separates at once from the pure metallic antimony, or “antimony regulus,” which allies with gold and falls to the bottom of the crucible. The production of antimony regulus (consisting of separating the pure metallic antimony from its sulfur and other impurities) could lead, being skillfully conducted and using some iron, to the so‐called “star regulus” of antimony, a star‐like crystallization of metallic antimony occurring on the upper surface of the regulus. This “star” was considered by alchemists as a sign of God, like the star of the Magi announcing the birth of Jesus. Therefore, many of them struggled to prepare the philosophers’ stone using antimony as their prime matter or an essential ingredient (Principe 2013, 140–166). In this context, bearing in mind that Mars usually means iron, and that Venus does not necessarily mean copper here, but that Mars and Venus also might point to sulfur and mercury as the male and female principles of metals, one can now read Acxtelmeier’s exegesis of the love of Mars and Venus:
Antimony is the rock in which Mars and Venus hide and become golden. Furthermore, the antimony regulus, once produced, is usually covered with a hard skin which is like the net of Vulcan. The fact that all gods come to make Mars and Venus ashamed means that the nature of all metals is hidden in this regulus
(Telle 1980, 148).
The point here is not only the strong emphasis put on antimony by Acxtelmeier, but his obvious conviction that the ultimate significance of the myth of Mars and Venus is the preparation of the philosophers’ stone. We have here two extremely different examples of an alchemical exegesis of one and the same myth. The same is true of the extensive interpretations of classical myths by Michael Maier: besides them, we find many other alchemical exegeses of the same fables. Thus, at the end of the sixteenth century, Vincenzo Percolla interpreted no less than 209 myths in his manuscript Auriloquio (Percolla 1996). In 1687, the Dutch classicist Jacob Tollius, head of the Latin school in Gouda, performed a similar task in his Fortuita (Matton 1987, 219–221; Matton 1995, 80–83). In the eighteenth century, Maier’s Arcana were plagiarized, but also extended, by Dom Antoine Pernety in his Fables égyptiennes et grecques dévoilées (“The Egyptian and Greek Fables Unveiled and Reduced to One and the Same Principle”), published in 1758 and re‐edited as late as 1786 and 1795. This work was supplemented by Pernety with a Dictionnaire mytho‐hermétique, also published in 1758, both intended to explain the alchemical meaning of allegorical terms and to be used as an index to the Fables égyptiennes et grecques. Mostly from the twentieth century, this dictionary became – and still is for unlearned or lazy interpreters – a basic tool for alchemizing nearly everything, as exemplified by the alchemical readings of the nineteenth‐century French poet Gérard de Nerval performed by Georges Le Breton in 1945 (Le Breton 1994). Pernety seems indeed to have done his best to concentrate in this dictionary the very essence of the old saying: omnia in omnibus (“everything is in everything”). On the other hand, Les Fables égyptiennes et grecques offers a pleasant, useful and learned rendering of Maier’s views in the vernacular.
Other authors had a less ambitious purpose and focused on a single myth, source, or hero. In the first third of the sixteenth century, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (the nephew of Giovanni Pico) investigated the myth of the golden fleece on the basis of his alchemical reading of the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, a Greek epic poem from the third century BCE, and of the Argonautica Orphica, a forgery from the fourth or sixth century CE attributed to Orpheus himself (Secret 1976, 93–108). In 1605 the German physician and alchemist Joachim Tancke spoke about his project to both edit Ovid’s fables and comment on the secrets of nature and art supposed to be hidden in them (Telle 1980, 141). This project probably was never achieved, but in the years 1690–1710, an unknown alchemist completed an illustrated manuscript entitled Medea spagyrica (“The spagyric [i.e. alchemical] Medea”), “or that part of Ovid’s Metamorphoses which contains the secrets of the physico‐chemical art,” with a prologue allegedly written by the god Chronos (Telle 1980, 141 n. 22). In the middle of the seventeenth century, the sieur de Villebressieu, a physician who was in correspondence with Descartes, became convinced (probably on the basis of Maier’s writings) that Homer’s Odyssey contained the secrets of the philosophers’ stone under the veils of the fable. As he could not read Greek, he asked his friend Paul Pellisson, the first historian of the French Academy, to translate Homer into French for him (Hepp 1970, 47–56). Another French alchemist and physician, Pierre‐Jean Fabre, in his Hercules piochymicus published in 1634, purported to systematically unveil the alchemical – and Christian – secrets hidden under the 12 labors of Hercules, thus extending to the whole myth the previous project of Lefèvre d’Étaples (which he did not know of).
The alchemical reading of classical mythology often supposed the interpreters to be endowed with a considerable knowledge of Antiquity. While some of them brought together many different authors of all times and languages in order to illuminate the meaning of a myth, others performed a thorough commentary of a myth line by line, as did in 1701 the Kehl professor of medicine Johann Frick, in his De auro potabili, with the account of the golden branch in Virgil’s Æneid (Matton 1995, 82). As early as 1617, Michael Maier theorized the alchemical interpretation of myths, locating it at the very core of the intellectual activity of the alchemists (Leibenguth 2002, 70–71). Maier wanted the alchemists to be knowledgeable in the arts of discourse and language – and especially poetics, since the very subject of poetry had first been to conceal alchemical allegories and enigmas; but also grammar, rhetoric, and logic, which formed the basis of all other fields of knowledge. Besides, the alchemist had to know geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and physics; then, of course, medicine. Without these arts and sciences, the alchemist was unable to interpret the allegories; an ignorance that would bring him darkness instead of the truth hidden behind their veils. In addition, the alchemist must learn more specific arts like docimastics, which allows one to know the differences between all the minerals and metals, to analyze the purity of precious metals, to know what pertains to their colors, their vitrification. The arts of the goldsmith and smith were also of great help. Finally, the alchemist must become much experienced in the observation of nature (especially the nature of minerals), and perfectly know the very theory and practice of alchemy. For Maier, the ideal alchemist was thus a sort of encyclopedic scholar, both competent in academic, scientific, and technical fields, due to his major task: to alchemically interpret the classical myths in order to put into practice their secret learning in the laboratory. This encyclopedic purpose was exemplified in 1617 in Maier’s Atalanta fugiens, “an attempt at a total work” (Van Lennep 1985, 181). This treatise was basically an alchemical exegesis of the myth of Atalanta as related by Ovid in the Metamorphosis. Bringing together image, text, and music, Maier composed a series of 50 beautifully engraved mytho‐alchemical emblems that simultaneously provided the theme for a musical fugue, an epigram, and a didactic account. Maier’s aim was to penetrate the “secrets of nature” through a synthesis of the “three most spiritual senses,” namely sight, hearing, and intelligence. Through the interplay of sensory correspondences, alchemical research opened up into a quest for knowledge (Kahn 2013b, 125).
Some early modern alchemists not only interpreted classical myths, but also invented new fables in order to express alchemical processes under the veil of myths of their own. Thus, a medieval Latin allegorical text, the Visio of John Dastin, described the lament of the planetary metals (silver/Moon, iron/Mars, lead/Saturn, and so on), stricken by leprosy, unlike their king (gold/Sun), who tried to cure them. In early modern times, the Visio was translated into English and versified under the title Dastin’s Dreame, where the planetary metals became the gods of Olympus (Ashmole 1652, 257–268). In the same manner, the Metamorphosis Planetarum (“The Metamorphoses of Planets”) by Johannes de Monte‐Snyder, published in Amsterdam in 1663, used planets (actually metals), symbolized by the classical gods, in order to describe the changes of metals in the alchemical work. Another example of free mytho‐alchemical invention is Basset Jones, an impressive alchemical poet from the years 1650, interested in alchemical prisca theologia as well as in laboratory practice. In his neo‐Latin Lapis chymicus, published at Oxford University in 1648, and in his later manuscript English poem Lithochymicus: or A Discourse of a Chymic Stone, Jones elaborated upon the castration of Uranus by Saturn and invented the allegorical love of Pyrelius for Hydra (Schuler 1995, 272–273, 382–383). Another anonymous seventeenth‐century author described an alchemical process in his poem The Hermet’s Tale, using such mythological characters as Phebus, Vulcan, Narcissus, Mars, and Venus in a new invented fiction. His process was partially deciphered by the prominent alchemist George Starkey, alias Eirenaeus Philalethes, in one of his laboratory notebooks, before his death in 1665 (Ashmole 1652, 415–419; Starkey 2004, 244). A number of such examples are to be found in the alchemical literature.
Not all early modern scholars, by far, agreed with the alchemical exegesis of mythology. In 1556, the French translator of the first three books of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Barthélemy Aneau, refused to follow the alchemists on this field, for he never read “any ancient author, nor Greek, nor Latin, who gave way to such interpretation,” and doubted whether Ovid himself, and the ancient Greeks on which Ovid drew, ever thought of any such meaning (Moisan 1987, 135–136). In 1568, one of the prominent mythographs of the sixteenth century, Natale Conti, dismissed alchemical interpretations as an aberration in his influential Mythologiae sive explicationum fabularum libri X (Matton 1992, [13]). In 1609, Francis Bacon, in the preface to his De Sapientia Veterum, wondered how “sottishly do the Chymists appropriate the Fancies and Delights of Poets in the Transformation of Bodies, to the Experiments of their Fornace.”
While Michael Maier replied to Natale Conti in his Arcana Arcanissima, Bacon’s attack against alchemical readings of classical myths was answered by Elias Ashmole in 1652, in the preface of Ashmole’s collection of English alchemical poems, the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum. Ashmole’s answer was as much a defense of alchemical poetry as a defense of alchemical readings of mythology (Kahn 2011, 72–73). Ashmole focused on the notion of “poetic theology,” yet his point was to affirm the superiority of poetry over prose. He called upon the antiquity of Orpheus and his poem on the Argonauts (the pseudo‐Orphic Argonautica), which was, he argued, an alchemical treatise, and extolled the innate qualities of poetry in order to show that it was “in the Parabolical & Allusive part” of poetry that the Ancients wrapped their most important mysteries, for that part of poetry was “the most Sacred, and Venerable in their Esteeme, and the securest from Prophane and Vulgar Wits.” Accordingly, their “Wisdome and Policy” lay first in finding a way to teach their knowledge and, second, finding a way of concealing it. This art was poetry, both intended as the classical mythological poems of the Ancients, and the medieval and early modern English alchemical poems Ashmole was editing in his book.
In the eighteenth century, the polemics against alchemical exegeses of classical myths did not stop, especially in the work of a famous French mythographer, the Abbé Banier, who opposed Tollius’s Fortuita and mocked Tollius’s scholarship, which he felt were ridiculous and strained, in his Explication historique des fables (A Historical Explanation of the Fables), published in 1711 and re‐issued in a new version in 1738–1740 under the title La Mythologie et les fables expliquées par l’histoire (Mythology and Fables explained by History), a witty dialogue led by several fictional characters in an alleged fashionable salon. Banier’s book was but a restatement of traditional euhemerism, a rationalizing method of interpretation, going back to the Greek mythographer from the fourth‐century BCE Euhemerus, which treated mythological accounts as a reflection of historical events, or mythological characters as historical personages. It was easy for Dom Pernety to ridicule Banier in turn in his Les Fables égyptiennes et grecques dévoilées, since the latter was based on Maier’s Arcana Arcanissima, the polemical parts of which had been already directed against euhemerism through Maier’s critics against Natale Conti. The polemics between Banier and Pernety was echoed in 1758 in some of the prominent French journals. Not surprisingly, Pernety’s book was attacked in the Journal Encyclopédique, which sided with the Encyclopedists, and was defended in the Année Littéraire by one of the fiercest opponents of the Encyclopedists, E. C. Fréron (Matton 1995, 80–83). We should not caricature, however, the wide interest in alchemical interpretations of classical myths in the eighteenth century as a battle field between rationalism and obscurantism, Enlightenment and tradition: the reality was far less simple (Kahn 1997, 42–45). Thus, an alchemical manuscript explaining “the genealogy of the gods of the fables” was written in 1789 by an obvious supporter of the French Revolution (Matton 1995, 86). On a scientific level, we even find around the end of the eighteenth century an explanation of Greek and Egyptian mythology grounded on the then leading chemical theory of phlogiston (a principle of fire supposed to be contained within combustible bodies and released during combustion) in a widely circulated manuscript entitled Concordance mytho‐physico‐cabalo‐ermétique (A Mythico‐Physico‐Cabalistico‐Hermetical Agreement), written by a man named Fabre du Bosquet who knew Lavoisier’s first chemical theories, and even used them without acknowledging his source (Matton 1987, 225–226). As a whole, in the eighteenth century the alchemical exegesis of classical myths was no longer accepted in scholarly or scientific circles, but it reached a more popular audience, thanks mostly to Pernety’s books.
The best introduction to the history of alchemy is Principe (2013). The notion of “poetic theology” is best illuminated by Chevrolet (2007), Demats (1973) and, with regard to alchemy, Obrist (1982). Alchemical interpretations of classical mythology have been contextualized by Matton (1992; 1995) and Telle (1980). A famous example of decipherment of a mytho‐alchemical allegory is Newman (1994). The alchemization of ancient Mysteries performed by Michael Maier in the seventeenth century has been given a second life in the twentieth century by Alleau (1953).