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Alchemists were also involved in secular politics and the urge to explore and dominate nature. Medieval monarchs such as Henry VI, Edward IV and Henry VII of England; Charles VII of France; and James IV of Scotland; employed alchemists at their courts. This partly reflected their search for gold. However George Ripley and Thomas Norton, were also concerned with political power, applying alchemical philosophy and myths to foster the evolution of the body politic and to create the soul and spirit of the nation from the nigredo of the Wars of the Roses. Alchemists were also employed at the court of Elizabeth I, the most famous being the mathematician, John Dee, whose activities were satirized in the plays of Marlowe, (Dr Faustus); Jonson (The Alchemist); and Shakespeare (The Tempest). |
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By the seventeenth century alchemy was supposed to have come under attack from the scientific revolution; but the founder of modern science, Sir Isaac Newton, born Christmas Day 1642, spent much of his life studying alchemy.
This did not emerge until private papers released in 1936 revealed that he owned alchemical manuscripts amounting to over 650,000 words. He was also the author of an alchemical recipe, Clavis, which uses iron nails and employs the allegory of Jason and the Golden Fleece - the storyline of the film is also a quest, in which the term Clavis plays a vital role. Newton, as an alchemist and mathematician, had much in common with the Babylonian and Sumerian magicians. He regarded the whole world as a riddle to be solved through numbers. According to his nephew, for six weeks every spring and autumn he would never venture out of his laboratory. Alchemy for him represented an underground stream of knowledge and numbers held the key to discovering the divine unity in nature represented by the hidden word of God and the dimensions of Solomon's Temple. His writings focus on the Apocalypse in works such as Interpretations of the Prophecies. |
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| Throughout its history as a science, esoteric philosophy and secret religion whose most important principles were never written down but handed down by word of mouth from a single adept to a solitary pupil, alchemy has fascinated with its promises of earthly power and gold, the creation (palingenesis) of life (the homunculus) out of dead matter, and the harnessing of hidden powers and transformation. In the twentieth-century scientific progress in the exploration of the collective unconscious (which was directly inspired by Carl Jung's alchemical reading), nuclear fission, and genetic engineering, have shown how prescient were the medieval alchemists' intuitions concerning the exciting and terrifying power of nature. by Dr Jonathan Hughes, Research Fellow Wellcome Unit for History of Medicine University of East Anglia |
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FURTHER READING Joseph Caezza, Hermeticism and the Golden Fleece Gareth Roberts, The Mirror of Alchemy Alchemical Ideas and Images in Manuscripts and Books, (The British Library, 1994). Alexander Roob, Alchemy & Mysticism (Taschen 1997), a beautiful pictorial exploration of the history and philosophy. Betty Jo Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy or the Hunting of the Green Lyon, (Cambridge, 1975) Mark Haeffner, The Dictionary of Alchemy (Harper Collins 1991). Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (Routledge, 1953). Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (Paladin, 1975) |
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