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Sean Martin

Alchemy and Alchemists

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Often alchemy is seen as an example of medieval gullibility and the alchemists as a collection of eccentrics and superstitious fools.
In this Pocket Essential Sean Martin shows that nothing could be further from the truth. It is important to see the search for the philosopher's stone and the attempts to turn base metal into gold as metaphors for the relation of man to nature and man to God as much as seriously held beliefs.
Alchemy had a self-consistent outlook on the natural world and man's place in it. Alchemists like Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus were amongst the greatest minds of their time and the history of alchemy is both the history of a spiritual search and the history of a slowly developing scientific method. Sir Isaac Newton devoted as much time to his alchemical studies as he did to his mathematical ones.
This book traces the history of alchemy from ancient times to the 20th century, highlighting the interest of modern thinkers like Jung in the subject, and in the process covers a major, if neglected area of Western thought.
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155 printed pages
Copyright owner
Bookwire
Original publication
2011
Publication year
2011
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Quotes

  • Сафира Тайhas quoted3 years ago
    Alchemy can also be seen to have played a part in the arts and culture. Jonson’s play is no doubt the most celebrated example, and Blackadder the Second the most recent, but alchemical ideas have also found their way into the works of Honoré de Balzac, Thomas Mann, the art of Joseph Beuys and Marcel Duchamp, countless books in the self-help sections of bookshops, and into more recent novels such as Lindsay Clarke’s Whitbread Prize-winning novel The Chymical Wedding, Patrick Harpur’s Mercurius and Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle.
  • Сафира Тайhas quoted3 years ago
    Alchemical books were often profusely illustrated. Anyone familiar with the history of Western art will, however, find the images strangely timeless and possibly a little shocking. There are pictures of people tearing their own hearts out, or of bodies being dismembered. People are shown as cripples, as if to mirror their crippled or limited understanding of the art, or the world (if indeed there is ultimately a difference). Sexual imagery is strong, with the alchemical archetypes of the King and Queen frequently portrayed engaging in sexual intercourse. In others, a man has a tree growing out of his body where his penis should be. Men and women merge, not just in the sexual act, but to become hermaphrodites. It seems clear that these images were to be read or meditated upon, not merely looked at. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung believed that, whatever sort of gold the alchemists were looking for, they had in fact discovered the unconscious, and that their frequently strong, challenging images were portraits of various states of consciousness that could lead us into a greater understanding of ourselves.
  • Сафира Тайhas quoted3 years ago
    Perhaps more interestingly, so did most of the founders of modern science, men such as Jean Baptiste van Helmont, Robert Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton. Bacon discovered the properties of antimony, while the great Arab alchemist Alhazen invented the camera obscura.
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