Mark S. Morrisson
For many, the word “alchemy” conjures up visions of deluded fanatics wasting their lives, health, and fortunes on a futile quest to manufacture gold from other metals, the so-called “puffers” of early modern art and literature whose bellows fed the flames of their furnaces and their unrealizable ambitions. Historians of chemistry have often supported this understanding, looking at alchemy as a dead-end pseudoscience that was left behind by the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this interpretation, alchemy is portrayed as the last vestige of medieval thought, swept aside by the mechanical philosophy of Boyle and others. Yet in recent years, the notion of a “Scientific Revolution” has itself come under criticism. Many historians “now reject even the notion that there was any single coherent cultural entity called ‘science’ in the seventeenth century to undergo revolutionary change. There was, rather, a diverse array of cultural practices aimed at understanding, explaining, and controlling the natural world, each with different characteristics and each experiencing different modes of change” (Shapin 1996: 3). Moreover, “Literary and rhetorical forms contributed to the development of science as a modern discipline so that early modern ‘literature’ and ‘science’ cannot always be sharply distinguished” (Cummins and Burchell 2007: 2).
Alchemy is one of the “diverse array of cultural practices” of medieval and early modern thought that has gone through a significant recent re-evaluation. Historians of science have shown that important figures in seventeenth-century science – such as Boyle and Newton, who had been the heroes of earlier accounts of the Scientific Revolution – had significant investments in alchemical practice and theory. For example, Newton studied alchemy for decades, transcribing alchemical treatises, reading widely in the field, and conducting laboratory work in alchemy in his hand-built brick furnaces (Dobbs 1991: 1). Alchemy played an important role in the development of what eventually became modern chemistry, and it should be seen as a key contributor to the science of Boyle and others (Newman 1994, 2004, 2006; Newman and Principe 1998, 2002). “The historiographic mistake … is the belief (or presumption) that there existed before the eighteenth century a clear and widely held distinction between alchemy and chemistry (or alchemists and chemists)” (Newman and Principe 1998: 32–33). Yet, while the term “Scientific Revolution” might be problematic, “few areas reveal the great divide that separates us from the mainstream medieval and Renaissance view of nature so effectively as the theory of matter and its operations” (Newman 2006: 4). Alchemy offered “the experimental means to debunk scholastic theories of perfect mixture and to demonstrate the retrievability of material ingredients” (Newman 2006: 3). Instead of supporting the hylomorphism of medieval scholastic matter theory –“the interaction of immaterial forms that imparted qualities to an otherwise undifferentiated prime matter” (Newman 2006: 13) – alchemists such as the thirteenth-century writer Geber actually invoked a corpuscular theory of matter akin to the later work of Descartes, Gassendi, and Boyle (Newman 2006: 13). In other words, medieval alchemy and scholasticism were not always in step with each other, and some alchemical work helped pave the way for later theories of matter that would replace scholastic interpretations. Newman’s and Principe’s work on Boyle and on the American alchemist George Starkey has documented the many theoretical and laboratory contributions of alchemy to what eventually became the understanding of matter in modern chemistry. In addition, as I will show, alchemy and alchemical tropes became important to science again in a much later period – and played a significant role in the emerging science and culture of what eventually became the domain of nuclear physics.
Alchemy has had a long and rich history in literature, and many alchemical manuscripts were written as poetry and often heavily illustrated. For example, the alchemical text translated centuries later by A.E. Waite as The Book of Lambspring: A Noble Ancient Philosopher, Concerning the Philosophical Stone was written in Latin verse by Nicholas Barnaud Delphinas at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II and circulated in manuscript form before beginning its publication history as an emblem book, De Lapide PhilosophicoTriga Chemicum in Prague in 1599. Its haunting visual illustrations and poetry were then published by Lucas Jennis in Frankfurt in his Musaeum Hermeticum in 1625 (McLean 1986), again in 1678 in an expanded Latin collection, and finally in 1893 in Waite’s translation in The Hermetic Museum Restored and Enlarged, an important publication of the late nineteenth-century revival of interest in Hermeticism. Both The Book of Lambspring and The Hermetic Museum Restored and Enlarged remain in print today. Scientific documents of the early modern period commonly took the form of illustrated treatises, often in verse. Cummins and Burchell emphasize the rhetorical and literary dimensions of early modern science, noting that “Even Galileo, who was a great scientific and mathematical innovator, used dramatic dialogues to convey his ideas” (2007: 2).
In addition to the practicing alchemists who adopted literary forms, literary figures of the early modern period – such as Shakespeare, Jonson, and Donne – often invoked alchemical practices or tropes in their work. Anne Sutherland (2007) has tracked the alchemical references in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale (1611), suggesting that alchemy, with its hints of the new empirical sciences as well as medieval thought, contributes to the scientific contexts of the overall theme of regeneration in the play. Similarly, Katherine Eggert argues that Ben Jonson’s 1610 comedy The Alchemist, which depicts an increasingly popular image of the alchemist as charlatan and trickster preying upon the gullible, is in fact more complex than a simple voice of the scientific modernity to come:
The Alchemist’s ambivalent treatment of alchemy and of other branches of the natural sciences establishes Jonson not simply as an advance man for the Scientific Revolution but rather as a writer profoundly engaged with scientific practice as it existed in his time, which was a long period of both transition and overlap between old and new.
(Eggert 2006: 201)
The Alchemist both debunks alchemy and evinces “an undeniable attraction to the inventive patterns of thought that this ‘old fashioned’ science proffers” (Eggert 2006: 201). Scholars have also devoted increasing attention to Donne’s frequent invocations of alchemy in his poetry and sermons. Donne was “acquainted with alchemy in its broader aspects, since many of his figures refer to the philosophical, occult, and mystical doctrines associated with alchemical practices and theories” (Mazzeo 1964: 60).
By the early eighteenth century, alchemy was beginning to be seen as an activity distinct from “chemistry.”“Alchemy” began to be “applied almost exclusively to topics related to metallic transmutation, whereas ‘chemistry’ was increasingly being defined as the art of analysis and synthesis; thus, by that time ‘alchemy’ and ‘chemistry’ had acquired nearly their modern meanings” (Newman and Principe 1998: 39). “Alchemy,” then, in a sense newly differentiated from “chemistry,” found itself under assault across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as modern “chemistry” began to assert its privileged right to scientific legitimacy. Above all, the new chemistry rejected what nineteenth-century thinkers understood as alchemical views of the nature of matter. John Dalton’s key 1808 treatise, A New System of Chemical Philosophy, laid out the dominant view that would hold until the end of the nineteenth century, that atoms were the smallest particles and neither divisible nor alterable. Each was a distinct, fundamental particle. Alchemical views that elements could be transmuted, then, were held to be an intellectual mistake – and even a pseudoscience akin to superstition – as nineteenth-century chemistry focused upon the importance of “elements” and their interactions with each other.
During the nineteenth century, Daltonian views of matter reigned supreme in scientific communities (see Keller 1983: 9–10). Alchemy continued to appear in literature, but was often cordoned off into the realm of the occult, rather than the scientific. Perhaps the quintessential popular fiction about alchemy (and Rosicrucianism) of the period was Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni (1842). Bulwer-Lytton, a widely read novelist who had been a successful politician, was involved in explorations of spiritualism, mesmerism, astrology, geomancy, and other topics that engaged Victorian England. Through fiction such as Zanoni, A Strange Story, The Coming Race, and “The Haunted and the Haunters,” he was a major influence upon the occult revival in Victorian Britain. He also influenced and befriended the French occult figure Éliphas Lévi, who would, in turn, shape the understanding of occultism espoused by many in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Set during the French Revolution and the Terror, Zanoni features two surviving initiates of an ancient Chaldean order: Zanoni, who is only 5,000 years old, and his older fellow adept, Mejnour. A young neophyte aspires to be initiated into the wisdom of Zanoni and Mejnour, but refuses to follow the ascetic purifying rituals prescribed to him before his ordeal of initiation. Zanoni himself, like Mejnour, has had to forswear the human passions in order to achieve and maintain the virtually immortal life of the adept, but when he falls in love with a young singer, he gives in to his human passions, and is finally put to the guillotine during the Terror. While Zanoni is steeped in the language and concepts of alchemy and Rosicrucian initiatic experience, and addresses the relationship between the occult and the natural world, the magical universe of the novel was largely outside the bounds of Victorian science. While medieval and early modern alchemical texts had used complex and esoteric symbols and images, perhaps to prevent their secrets from falling into the wrong hands, they were primarily focused upon material research, that is, proto-scientific activity, even if it was understood within the spiritual framework of alchemy. In Bulwer-Lytton’s occult classic, though, scientific investigation has been replaced by knowledge gained through contact with supernatural beings.
But two things occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that brought alchemy again into a significant relationship with science. The first was the renewed interest in alchemy that began during the nineteenth-century occult revival and extended to historians of science and, eventually, to the mainstream press and to scientists themselves. The second, in some ways inflected by the first, was the emergence of the field of science that eventually became known as “nuclear physics,” but which, at first, was also seen as in the domain of chemistry and was often styled as “modern alchemy” (see Morrisson 2007, ch. 3).
The revival of interest in occult subjects, which had begun as early as the 1840s with the broad interest in spiritualism in Europe and America and encompassed such mid-century writers as Bulwer-Lytton and Lévi, by the late nineteenth century flourished in two types of institutions that still exist today – multinational organizations such as the Theosophical Society, which could boast members around the globe and the support of journals and book publishers that espoused its synthesis of Eastern and Western esotericism, and small, largely secret Hermetic or Rosicrucian orders that were based, in part, on Masonic structures of initiation into various grades and sought to revive Western Hermeticism in private. These institutions of the occult revival were successful primarily in that they both offered compelling syntheses of broad domains of knowledge and spiritual practice.
The Theosophical Society was founded in 1875 by the Russian Ukrainian H.P. Blavatksy and the American Colonel H.S. Olcott. Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled of 1877 and Secret Doctrine of 1888 brought together Western esotericism and concepts from Buddhism and Hinduism, and advocated the notion of a secret brotherhood of adepts living among us. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in 1888 by three high-degree Masons. The group’s fame is due in part to the several prominent people who were members, including the eminent chemist Sir William Crookes, the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, the feminist and actress Florence Farr, and several initiates who were significant to the Irish literary revival – W.B. Yeats, Maud Gonne, and the Abbey Theatre’s patron Annie Horniman among them. The Golden Dawn revered an ancient wisdom that could be found in alchemy, Kabbalah, tarot, and other occult knowledge, bringing it together with Masonic initiation structures. Upon its splintering in the first few years of the twentieth century, the Order spurred several successors. Both the Theosophical Society and the Hermetic orders featured alchemy, and scholars connected to both, such as the alchemical scholar Wynn Westcott (who had helped found the Golden Dawn) and Arthur Edward Waite, helped bring several alchemical texts into print and into public discussion at the end of the nineteenth century.
Alchemy had been an important source of hermetic knowledge for the Golden Dawn, and several members and subgroups, such as that of Rev. W.A. Ayton, passed on alchemical knowledge through hand-copied manuscripts. The Golden Dawn initiates had originally been attracted to a key (though likely mistaken) interpretation of medieval alchemy emerging in the mid-Victorian period. Mary Anne Atwood’s occult classic A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery, published in 1850 and then almost immediately withdrawn and burned in a bonfire on the lawn of its author and her father, who feared they had revealed too much, argued that alchemy was primarily a spiritual rather than a scientific pursuit. Atwood argued that alchemical writings had been deliberately cryptic in order to conceal alchemical truth from the unworthy, and also that the chemical language truly described a process at the heart of alchemy that was a kind of mesmerism that allowed the practitioner to be purified and achieve a mystical union with God. Atwood’s vast tome hardly touched upon science at all, arguing that alchemy was precisely not related to any modern science.
However, alchemy was also present for the newly emerging science of radioactivity. In an oft-quoted exchange between the chemist Frederick Soddy and the physicist Ernest Rutherford in their lab at Canada’s McGill University in 1901, when they realized that radioactive thorium was transforming into an inert gas, to quote nuclear historian Spencer Weart,
Soddy recalled, “I was overwhelmed with something greater than joy – I cannot very well express it – a kind of exaltation.” He blurted out, “Rutherford, this is transmutation!”“For Mike’s sake, Soddy,” his companion shot back, “don’t call it transmutation. They’ll have our heads off as alchemists.”
(Weart 1988: 5–6)
From that moment until the post-Hiroshima period, but perhaps peaking in the 1920s, atomic science was often styled “modern alchemy,” and the press often imagined the radioactive element radium, discovered by the Curies in 1898, to be a modern Philosopher’s Stone. It was, of course, the reconceptualization of the chemical elements as transmutable that attracted Soddy originally to imagine their experiment as suggesting the overturning of Daltonian chemistry by alchemy. And this alchemical emphasis owed its origin, at least in part, to the occult alchemical revival which had fostered the translation and republication of alchemical texts, and also brought alchemy back to public attention again as a facet of the wider occult revival.
Since the 1920s, nuclear physics has been the field contributing the most to our understanding of the sub-atomic world. However, in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the scientists who most advocated elemental transmutation as a goal of research and a heuristic principle for understanding the nature of matter – the Nobel Prize winners Sir William Ramsay and Frederick Soddy as well as Sir William Crookes, a Golden Dawn initiate and Theosophical Society member – were chemists, not physicists. During this period, leading academic experimental chemists raced to achieve the artificial transmutation of elements – what I have called the “transmutational gold rush” (see Morrisson 2007: ch. 3). These chemists included not only Ramsay and Soddy but also J.N. Collie, Hubert Patterson, E.C.C. Baly, Thomas Merton, Irvine Masson, and A.C.G. Egerton. This work was rooted in the inclusion of alchemy in newly emerging histories of chemistry in Britain and the United States and in the teaching of alchemy as part of the history of chemistry in British university classrooms – and this broader interest in alchemy was intensified by key publications of the occult revivalists, such as Waite’s five alchemical translations culminating in the two-volume Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of … Paracelsus of 1894. Ramsay’s boyhood friend M.M. Pattison Muir, a Cambridge chemist and popular historian of alchemy and chemistry, made extensive use of Waite’s new translation of Basil Valentine’s Triumphal Chariot of Antimony in his Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry of 1902. By the 1920s, the word “alchemy” had popularly come to stand in for “chemistry” (witness the 1929 crime fiction The Alchemy Murder, in which the term stands for the chemical industry).
During the early twentieth century alchemical concerns also did considerable work in negotiating the borders between the new disciplines of radio-chemistry and atomic physics. Chemists themselves and the broader public often associated the new science of radioactive elements not so much with physics as with chemistry. Moreover, physical chemistry, Ramsay’s and Soddy’s sub-field, was relatively young and open to alchemical intervention. To varying degrees, Crookes, Ramsay, and Soddy were each influenced by the occult alchemical revival. In his teaching at University College, London, in 1896, for instance, Ramsay quoted alchemical texts from occult sources – such as the American Rosicrucian Paschal Beverly Randolph’s 1871 edition of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus: His Divine Pymander – and asked his class to imagine themselves as medieval students and himself as Basil Valentine as he read a treatise by the Benedictine alchemist. (A.E. Waite had brought out a work by Valentine in English translation three years earlier.)
While lecturing in the United States in September 1904, giving his presidential address to the Society of Chemical Industry on the transmutation of elements, Ramsay also directly involved himself with secret attempts in America to transmute silver into gold (see Morrisson 2007: 116–17). The New York Daily Tribune, covering Ramsay’s presidential address, connected his talk to the efforts of Stephen Emmens, an American who had made claims of transmutation of silver into gold. For two decades Ramsay and several of his chemist colleagues in the U.K. set radio-chemistry on a course of attempted transmutations that involved several key scientists in Britain, America, and eventually Germany. Radium, with its high-energy emissions, might in fact be the alchemical Philosopher’s Stone:
If these hypotheses are just, then the transmutation of the elements no longer appears an idle dream. The philosopher’s stone will have been discovered, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that it may lead to that other goal of the philosophers of the dark ages – the elixir vitae.
(Ramsay 1904)
Writers on occult themes were quick to pick up on radioactive explanations of occult phenomena, as the occultism of the period increasingly sought material scientific explanations for such phenomena. Compare, for example, Bulwer-Lytton’s 1842 Zanoni, in which alchemical and other Hermetic processes were grounded in the wisdom of a supernatural universe, to Bram Stoker’s occult classic The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), published the year after Rutherford and Soddy’s publications on the mechanisms of radioactive transmutation. Like Bulwer-Lytton’s, Stoker’s novel features a 5,000-year-old being. But his is an Egyptian Queen and magus, Tera, resurrected through the efforts of an academic Eyptologist. Tera had learned black magic, alchemy, and the like during her age and ensured her eventual resurrection. This “Great Work” is now, by the modern scientific characters in the novel, described as the “Great Experiment,” and they restore the queen and her ancient occult knowledge via the radium in her coffer. Similarly, in Rider Haggard’s Ayesha: The Return of She of 1904–5, the follow-up to his popular 1887 novel She, Ayesha’s alchemical creation of gold and her vast occult powers are ascribed to chemistry, specifically to her ability to harness the radium emanating from her volcanic mountain home. Even Charles Williams, one of the “Inklings” group (along with J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis) and a member of an offshoot of the original Golden Dawn, similarly ascribed the magical powers of the Holy Grail in his War in Heaven (1930) as something like the stored powers of radioactive elements.
Ramsay’s speculations connecting alchemy to radium in 1904 had already become common among occultists seeking scientific validation for alchemical practices. Ramsay and other academic chemists, beginning with a high-profile announcement in Nature in 1907 that he had transmuted copper in his laboratory, continued through 1914 their quest to document an artificial transmutation of an element, frequently using radioactivity, cathode rays, or X-rays as energy sources. It eventually became clear that Ramsay’s experimental results were marred by leaky glass, cigarette smoke, and other problems, but, for a brief period, several significant chemists participated in similar experiments to document artificial chemical transmutations. These experiments made Ramsay into a press celebrity in both Britain and the U.S., and alchemy was often invoked in newspaper and magazine coverage – as evidenced, for example, in a 1911 New York Times article, “Alchemy, Long Scoffed At, Turns Out to Be True, Transmutation of Metals, the Principle of the Philosopher’s Stone, Accomplished in the Twentieth Century.” A feverish session at the Chemical Society annual general meeting in March 1913 featured widespread acceptance of Ramsay’s work and forecast its implications for the discipline of chemistry, positioning it as the great science of the century. Occultists followed these press articles carefully, seeing in them scientific confirmation of their beliefs. Even though Ramsay’s work was eventually rejected a few years before his death in 1916, his experimental trajectory was briefly picked up again by chemists in the 1920s, before being debunked once more.
The role of this peculiar gold rush in academic chemistry has been largely ignored by historians of chemistry, with the exception of interesting work by Sclove (1989) and Trenn (1974), who focus narrowly on the general issue of transmutation in Soddy, Rutherford, and Ramsay, rather than on its broader cultural implications. In part, this is because the instruments and methods of physics, not chemistry, at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge made it possible for them to document an artificial transmutation and to claim the field of radioactivity, and, indeed, of transmutation, for physics. It was Rutherford in 1919, as Trenn has noted, who was finally able to document true artificial transmutation. But Rutherford did not transmute silver into gold, or mercury into gold, or cause any of the other light-element fusions chemists had attempted. Rather, he transmuted nitrogen into an isotope of oxygen, and he documented it with a cloud chamber rather than with spectroscopes. “Modern alchemy” had been a phrase adopted by chemists picking up transmutation paradigms of the occult revival and applying them to radioactive substances. But by the 1920s and 1930s, “modern alchemy” meant something new in textbooks and newspapers. It referred to nuclear physics.
Literature, especially science fiction, supported by a concerned newspaper press, soon began to connect the transmutational possibilities of the modern alchemy with economic anxieties about the gold standard and the nature of the modern monetary supply. After the initial euphoria in the public response to the possibilities of artificial transmutation, the possibility that an alchemist, radio-chemist, or nuclear physicist might harness the mysterious alpha and beta rays to synthesize gold seemed to entail fantastic yet alarming consequences. If alchemy enabled the mutual influence of the new atomic science and occultism, it also raised the specter of a global economic crisis. Atomic alchemy quickly disturbed the border between occultism and monetary theory. Nowhere was this more evident than in fears about the gold standard’s stability in early twentieth-century Britain and America.
Alchemy – and, in particular, the new, scientifically validated sense that matter might be transmuted through various processes of energy bombardment – did not cause Britain and America to abandon the gold standard. Numerous market crises, World War I, and changing governmental responses to depressions helped lead the West away from classic gold standards. However, the transmutational possibilities that “modern alchemy” raised did highlight the problems of a metallic standard for money – whether the bimetallism of silver and gold or a pure gold standard – and, further, of the nature of money itself. And the implications of alchemy helped turn Soddy, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, into what was commonly called a “money crank”–one of several theorists working against the grain of accepted monetary and economic theory to ascribe the faults of the modern economy to its monetary and banking practices. Exploring Soddy’s move into economic and monetary theory in the inter-war period, Linda Merricks traced the influence of Ruskin and of contemporary theorists on Soddy’s thinking. But she noted that “what is missing is any sign of a particular moment or event which led to this new specific direction for his interests” (Merricks 1996: 112). That missing link was Soddy’s readings in alchemy.
Soddy’s thought had linked radium, transmutation, and the gold supply as far back at least as 1906, when he opined that “We may anticipate a more scientific system of currency being devised than the present” (Soddy 1906: 10). In 1908, Soddy held six popular lectures at the University of Glasgow that became the basis for his key book, The Interpretation of Radium (1909). Here Soddy discussed the nature of radioactivity, the possibility that the new science and future uses of the energies of the atom could transform the world for the better, and the history of humanity as a history of energy use. But he also cautioned that:
The race has grown used from the earliest times to the idea that gold is a metal possessing a certain fixed degree of value, enabling it to be used safely for the purposes of currency and exchange. It is no exaggeration to say that the whole social machinery of the Western world would be dislocated if gold altered violently in its degree of rarity.
(Soddy 1909: 211)
Soddy continued to push the idea that gold is not wealth, but just a convention of exchange, and continued to advocate that real wealth was a function of energy (Soddy 1912: 187). It is beyond the scope of this chapter to follow out Soddy’s later connections to Arthur Kitson and other monetary theorists, but his most immediate impact would be on the writer H.G. Wells.
Wells was inspired to write his 1914 novel The World Set Free by Soddy’s 1908 lectures and The Interpretation of Radium. Wells’s novel, the first to envision nuclear warfare, picked up on Soddy’s interest in alchemical transmutation in relationship to the new science, as well as his concerns that the synthesis of elements would undermine the gold standard – which occurs in Wells’s novel as one of the catastrophic consequences of rapid scientific change and the control of vast powers of energy without a change in social structure and economy. Indeed, noting that the Manhattan Project physicist Leo Szilard was reading Wells’s The World Set Free while working on the atomic bomb, John Canaday summarizes the connections among Soddy’s Interpretation of Radium, Wells’s novel, and the bomb: “The first nuclear weapons were in an important sense … a scientific interpretation of a fictional interpretation of a scientific interpretation of radioactive substances” (Canaday 2000: 228).
Many scientists and occultists helped feed the popular press’s appetite for alchemy. Alchemical transmutations that had been a topic for occult or gothic literature now became a key theme for science fiction as well. Written during the years of monetary crisis and eventual abandonment of the gold standard, this new generation of science fiction provided the fullest elaboration of the economic threat posed by modern alchemy. This can be seen clearly in Hugo Gernsback’s sci-fi pulps between 1926 and the mid-1930s. Stories with such titles as “Jeremiah Jones, Alchemist,”“The Gold Triumvirate,”“The Mystery Metal,” or, simply, “Gold,” particularly focused on the effects of atomic alchemy on the world economy. In particular, they interrogated the nature and perils of a metallic currency. In a way that would look familiar to Soddy, these stories portrayed how science might move us beyond the crises and limitations a metallic system of exchange imposed on twentieth-century economies. Indeed, the arc from an occult alchemical classic like Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni in the mid-nineteenth century to the atomic alchemy stories of the Depression era represents a blurring of lines between gothic and science fiction, and even between those genres and the monetary reform pamphlet.
By the 1930s, then, the scientific occultism born in the late nineteenth century and the alchemical inflections of the new atomic science had broken down longstanding barriers demarcating science from occultism. “Modern alchemy” even extended its reach into the domain of international monetary theory. But on August 6 and 9, 1945, atomic bombs – whose destructive power dwarfed the weapons imagined by H.G. Wells in 1914 – leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atomic bomb forced the trope of alchemical transmutation into the background. The Cold War’s nuclear fears would take its place.
In the post-Hiroshima period, the alchemical understanding of atomic science gave way to concerns about nuclear warfare and the environmental devastations wrought by radiation. Some writers, such as Edith Sitwell in her 1947 “Three Poems of the Atomic Age,” attempted to reinvoke the alchemical understanding in an effort to question the direction in which nuclear physics had taken the world with the atomic bomb program. But in the post-war era, alchemical tropes have largely been used in other contexts, and particularly in the domain of psychoanalysis and psycho-therapeutics. For example, Elizabeth Severn published books and papers on alchemical self-transmutation through therapy; in 1914 Freud’s student Herbert Silberer published an alchemical interpretation of psychoanalysis entitled Probleme der Mystik und Ihrer Symbolik; the Golden Dawn-style Hermeticist and therapist Israel Regardie combined psychotherapy with ritual magic in his practice, publishing The Philosopoher’s Stone: A Modern Comparative Approach to Alchemy from the Psychological and Magical Points of View in 1936–37. Most prominent, of course, is Carl Jung, who published several key works on alchemy and psychology, most importantly Mysterium Coniunctionis in 1954.
Alchemical tropes have also crept into the discussions of psychedelic drug experience and its self-transformative potentials, as in Alan Watts’s 1960 article on LSD, “The New Alchemy,” and the many current works ascribing the self-transmutations of alchemy to various entheogenic substances (ergots, mushrooms, and the like). Alchemy as a metaphor for self-transformation, whether put in spiritual or psychiatric terms, is commonplace in New Age culture and a prominent strand of discussion on alchemy listservs and websites. Paulo Coelho’s 1993 novel The Alchemist simply uses alchemy as a metaphor for self-transformation. Clearly, alchemy’s ability to negotiate boundaries between scientific disciplines, between the scientific and the spiritual, between the natural and the artificial, and between the scientific and that which is pushed outside the boundaries of science, remains with us in the twenty-first century.
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