Medieval and Early Modern Alchemy

For its autumn meeting, the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry held an Alchemy Symposium at Birkbeck College, London. This meeting was organised by Stephen Clucas with the assistance of Peter Forshaw and Anna Simmons. The first paper was given by Jennifer Rampling of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University and was entitled “George Ripley and the Pseudo-Lullian Tradition.” In his History of Magic and Experimental Science, Lynn Thorndike dismissed the works of the fifteenth-century English alchemist, George Ripley, as “very stupid and tiresome reading.” Indeed, Ripley’s alchemy can at times seem bafflingly obscure. Yet we find that his works – including the famous Compound of Alchemy, or ‘Twelve Gates,’ and the Latin Medulla Alchimiae – attracted the attention of some of the keenest minds of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and were repeatedly printed and translated in Britain and on the Continent. Jennifer Rampling’s paper considered some of the ways in which Ripley engaged with his primary authority, pseudo-Ramon Lull, both adopting and adapting doctrines gleaned from this difficult body of work. Through examination of his pseudo-Lullian sources, it revealed how Ripley attempted to reconcile contradictions between different authorities, how he sought to adapt his texts to suit the results of his experimental practice, and why he chose twelve gates for his alchemical castle.

The second paper was given by Barbara Obrist of CNRS, Paris and was entitled “Views on History in Medieval Alchemical Writings.” Her paper addressed the question as to how medieval alchemical texts – that is, texts ranging from the mid-twelfth to the later fifteenth century – conceive the history of alchemy and what place alchemy is being assigned in history.

The fundamental form of presentation of the history of alchemy as a discipline is that of genealogical lines of descent - carnal and spiritual. In this presentation the original paternal figure is invested with the role of ensuring unity of knowledge. The relation between this figure and its disciples is one of genus and species. On an epistemological level, genealogies of knowledge entail the idea of an initial full revelation of knowledge, its (partial) loss and recovery. Fundamentally, the assumption of eternal, immutable truths recovered by sages who are merely passive channels of transmission precludes any idea of progress. Evolution and change of theories of natural and artificial transformation have no place in this type of historical account. The genre itself tends to remain uniform throughout the Middle Ages.

When considered within the frame of the history of salvation, and especially within that of the New Testament, down to the present of writers of alchemical treatises, alchemy is being assigned a particular role. In writings of Franciscan spirituals who claim to have been illuminated by divine grace – especially John of Rupescissa - and of authors that are close to these, alchemy is meant to provide material as well as spiritual means for fighting Antichrist in the last periods of history. In contrast to genealogically construed lines of transmission of knowledge, the introduction of Christocentric and anthropocentric perspectives favours the idea of progress in the sense that human knowledge of natural and artificial transformations is increasingly complete. Yet, it remains limited to that of spiritual perfection, of restoring the nature of man.

The third paper, “Missing Pieces of the Jigsaw: New Evidence about Newton's Alchemical Sources” was given by John T. Young of the Issac Newton Project at the University of Sussex. The paper derived from research conducted in the course of cataloguing Isaac Newton’s non-‘scientific’ manuscripts. Two chymical documents in Newton’s hand, whose whereabouts had been unknown since 1936, were rediscovered recently. One is a two-folio manuscript which was acquired by Columbia University Library, though it is not yet clear from whom, while the other, a sixteen-folio document, was unearthed in the archive of the Royal Society, who, astonishingly, had bought it in 1939 but had then completely forgotten about it. The two documents turn out to be more closely related to one another than it had been possible to discern from the previously available descriptions of them. In particular, both feature extensive notes on one of Newton’s favourite chymical sources, the singularly obscure and possibly fictitious figure of Johann de Monte Snyders.

The paper began with a brief account of the history of Newton’s archive and the reasons why the non-‘scientific’ papers are now so fragmented and widely scattered around the planet. It then summarised the content and character of the rediscovered documents and the connections between them, before going on to introduce Monte Snyders and the two works published in his name, and to describe and demonstrate Newton’s intense engagement with these texts. John Young concluded with an account of Newton’s own notes on Monte Snyders and of the techniques he employed in attempting to make literal sense of his author’s deliberately obscure and at times almost surreal allegorical accounts of chymical processes. He also tried to assess how far the documents represent Newton’s own work and how far they are copies or abstracts from other sources.

The final paper, “Alchemy meets Cabala: Giovanni Panteo’s Voarchadumia (1530),” was given by Peter Forshaw of Birkbeck, University of London. The Venetian priest Giovanni Agostino Panteo’s first published work was the Ars transmvtationis metallicae (Art of metallic transmutation), which appeared in 1519 and his second book, the Voarchadumia was published in 1530. The Ars transmutationis was published with a permit from the Venetian ruling Council of Ten and an edict of Pope Leo X, giving Pantheus the exclusive right of printing the work in the papal states. It is surprising that the Council sanctioned this publication. In 1488 the Council became so concerned about counterfeiting and adulteration of the currency that they prohibited the practice of alchemy.

It seems probable that someone called the existence of the papal decretal and the decree of Venice against alchemists, to the attention of either Pantheus or the Council. Whatever the case, by the time of his second publication in 1530, Pantheus is no longer professing illicit and duplicitious alchemy, but its very opposite, the art of Voarchadumia, which he presents as a ‘Cabala of Metals’, handed down from the ancient biblical ‘hammerer and artificer in every work of brass and iron’, Tubal Cain (Genesis 4:22). When Pantheus calls his Voarchadumia a ‘Cabala of the Metals’, he was tapping into a subject of immense fascination to many learned minds of the time. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola had introduced the term ‘Cabala’, literally meaning “reception,” “received lore,” or “doctrine received by oral tradition,” into Christian circles with his 900 Conclusiones Philosophicæ Cabalisticæ et Theologicæ, submitted to the papacy for debate on religious and philosophical matters in 1486. The Kabbalah was held to be a series of revelations stretching back variously to Moses, Abraham and, for some, even Adam, that had endured in the form of a secret oral tradition, whispered in the ear, passed down over the generations from master to disciple. It’s easy enough to draw a parallel here with medieval alchemy, which likewise placed importance on initiation and the preservation of secrets.

Despite their exasperating lack of explanation, Pantheus’s alchemical or Voarchadumic works evidently enjoyed some success, for they were reprinted in Paris in 1550, and were later included in the most famous and most extensive collection of alchemical texts ever printed, the six-volume Theatrum Chemicum or Chemical Theatre, published by Lazarus Zetzner throughout the seventeenth century. John Dee, Michael Maier, and Jacques Gohory are certainly not alone in showing an interest in Pantheus’s work and it is possible to find references in the writings of many of their contemporaries, particularly among the Paracelsians, including Heinrich Khunrath, Oswald Croll, David de Planis-Campy, and Johann Daniel Mylius, but also other advocates of alchemy, such as Guglielmo Gratarolus, author of Verae Alchemiae (1561), and the distinctly anti-paracelsian Andreas Libavius.

Anna Simmons