Five Misconceptions about Alchemy

When I took up the study of esoteric philosophy, religion, and spirituality, I often found myself pinned between, unfortunately, dogmatic and rather unhelpful positions. The first is the arrogant and dismissive world of the Academy, which still largely rejects the topics and as a terrorism should receive serious scholarly attention. For them, topics like alchemy, mysticism, or magic deserve to remain in the dustbin of history, rejected as nonsense superstition in the intellectual failures of pre-modern people. From most of the Academy, these topics are an embarrassment for a West that likes to think of itself as modern, scientific, and most of all, enlightened.

The second are often self-appointed spiritual leaders who refuse to engage in serious scholarly study of the topics they actually claim to believe in or abide by. Rather, they selectively cherry-pick from the history of esotericism, treating the field something like a buffet. In my opinion, this buffet approach is somewhat dangerous, and it often leads to profound misunderstandings, intentional misreadings, in a sense, of spiritual entitlement to the ideas and conceptions that many suffered, and some literally died for. I just honestly find the dogmatism of both of these stances to be worrying and disappointing. This is nowhere more evident and pernicious and in the study of alchemy.

In this video, I want to take up five misconceptions about alchemy, some from the academic side and some from the spiritual side. I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and welcome to Esoterica, where we explore the arcane side of history, philosophy, and religion.

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Before we turn to the misconceptions about alchemy, I should say a little bit about what I take alchemy to be. I understand alchemy to be a complex of both theory and technology, which aimed at, among other things, the production of a universal solvent, substantial transmutation, life-extending medicines, and integrated both natural and metaphysical philosophy. Let me unpack that a little bit. When I say complex of technologies, I'm pointing to the fact that alchemy was never a completely unified, singular body of theory and practice. There was always substantial disagreement among alchemists, for instance, between Paracelsus and Go-Barian alchemists. I'll say more about alchemical technology in a bit. Despite these disagreements, some general contours do appear, such as those mentioned earlier, which included substantial transmutation, that is, the transmutation of one substance into another, such as the process of chrysocolla, or the production of gold from base metals. Finally, alchemy was a total philosophy that sought to unify all aspects of the natural and metaphysical worlds, not because this was unique to alchemy, but rather because this was actually just typical of the project of philosophy generally in the pre-modern period. So, with this definition in mind, let's take a look at a couple of the misconceptions about alchemy I've heard in the past and see if we can't clarify them a bit.

All right, misconception number one: Alchemy was just pseudo-scientific nonsense. I think this is a misconceived criticism of alchemy that I often hear coming from scientists, scientists that don't really know the first thing about actual historical alchemy. In my experience, this conception of alchemy seems wrong to me in a couple of different senses. The first, by taking a nearly contemporary category, the professional scientist doesn't really emerge until the early 19th century, and then applying it willy-nilly to historical people. To be honest, there's still a lot of philosophical debate about just what science is, so scientists seem perfectly happy to ignore that little detail. Simply put, it wasn't like the historical alchemists were just a-shooing a better method for understanding nature. Even if we now know that the Islamic, Aristotelian physics which underwrote their experimental methods and agenda were well mistaken. This brings me to how I think this criticism misses the mark in another way. If science is the attempt to understand reality using theoretical foundations, the experiment method, along with a body of literature and its criticism produced by those practitioners, that certainly qualifies alchemy as anything other than pseudoscience. The alchemists were deep theorizers on the question of substance, change, and transformation. Further, they sought to learn the truth of all this through sustained and careful experimentation. Many implements, vessels, chemicals, and processes now found in every university chemistry lab have their origin in the alchemical labs of the ancient, medieval, and early modern period. That their theories were incorrect and hence the agenda of substantial change impossible, shouldn't discount their profound and real achievements, including the production of acids, paints, perfumes, and chemical purification. Those achievements were only possible because of the intellectual and empirical rigor of the alchemists. In my opinion, dismissing alchemy as mere pseudoscience seems to commit the fallacy of anachronism, applying a modern category to pre-modern people, but also, I think this is just intellectually dishonest or lazy, or both.

All right, misconception number two: Alchemy never aimed at substantial transformation but was actually about the spiritual transformation of the alchemist. In the twilight of alchemy, two conceptions of the alchemist begin to appear. One was the misguided or fraudulent alchemist, spending their last bit of silver on some doomed hope for transmutation. You can see this depiction in art, often the alchemist's clothes are tattered, and his wife and children are weeping out of desperation in the background. Around the same time, the romantic idea of the alchemist emerged, often depicting the alchemist as a kind of quasi-sorcerer. This romantic idea of the alchemist was pitted against the so-called man of science with their materialist, atomic worldview. This reaction aimed at rescuing the concept of alchemy, did so by rebranding the task of alchemy not as natural philosophy, but as a kind of personal spiritual practice. We can trace this more romantic, spiritual conception of alchemy in its contemporary form to two sources. The first was Mary Ann Atwood's 1850 book, *A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery*, in which she argued that alchemy was about spiritual and inner transformation rather than chemical processes. It is, quote, "the finding of Sophia in the mind," with the metals and processes becoming, quote, "ethereal rather than physical." For Atwood, the chemical process was no longer for the production of metallic gold, but for dissolving and reconstituting the physical and spiritual self. This rereading of alchemy had a massive impact. It may even be seen as the first in the spiritual self-help genre, though interestingly enough, Atwood's father saw the book as revealing too many hermetic secrets and attempted to have all the copies of it burned. Luckily, he failed, and the book is widely available in reprints.

The second source for the contemporary spiritualized version of alchemy can be traced back to the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Jung argued that the modern subject-object distinction didn't exist for pre-modern peoples, and that the alchemical process was both a chemical, but more importantly, a psychic process of individuation. This psychological interpretation of alchemy is extremely complicated. I might do a video about it in the future, and it will become the sort of bedrock for new-age psychology. It's in this context that I often see the word alchemy used for personal transformation, as in the alchemy of love or the alchemy of finance. Here, alchemy is functioning as a kind of personal psychic transformation. There's no denying that both Atwood's and Jung's understanding of alchemy is both highly creative and of great interest for those seeking spiritual or psychic transformation, though I think these interpretations go too far in downplaying the actual chemical experimentation performed by historical alchemists. There's simply no doubt that most alchemists from ancient Alexandria onward saw themselves as attempting to understand and transform physical nature through experimentation. With those alchemical experiments now being recreated for the first time in modern labs, we're just now beginning to learn about those empirical processes. By leaning too heavily on these spiritual and psychic interpretations, we not only fail to appreciate the historical work of the alchemists, but we're actually prone to misread the experimental documents and texts they left behind. In my opinion, the Atwood and Jung interpretations tell us more about our own spiritual and psychic states and needs than the actual historical alchemists themselves.

Misconception 3: Alchemy never aimed at spiritual transformation, but was only ever really about substantial transmutation. If the spiritual or psychic interpretation of alchemy is too one-sided in attempting to find in alchemy a kind of perennial philosophy, then I think this one is too one-sided because it tries to see alchemy as part of a perennial science. Indeed, if people know anything about alchemy at all, it's that the alchemists were trying to turn lead into gold, and I think this is a really misguided caricature of alchemy itself. The modern scientific worldview is underwritten by a fundamentally different set of philosophical commitments. The pre-modern alchemists had to oversimplify a bit. The modern scientific worldview is committed to a materialist metaphysics, in which nature is reducible to discrete fundamental forces and particles. I think we're up to 17 of those particles and four of those forces in the standard model. In this worldview, nature is best understood through experimentation, skepticism, and the mathematization of natural laws. This conception of the world would have been utterly alien to the historical alchemists. For them, nature is just one region of a much more vast reality of macrocosm and microcosm. The alchemist finds themselves in this totality and must labor to harmonize the physical, spiritual, and ethical dimensions of it to perform the great work of understanding and transforming reality. Alchemical texts positively abound in admonitions toward religious devotion, ethical purity, and the exact balance of forces which bear on the great work. While we can isolate their experiments and recreate them, which I find to be utterly fascinating and might get involved in myself, reducing alchemy to merely these experiments amputates it from its historical, philosophical, and spiritual context. To really understand alchemy, those experiments must be placed in a radically different context, very much at odds with contemporary scientific concepts and concerns.

Misconception 4: That alchemy was banished into the night of nonsense when Robert Boyle published *The Skeptical Chemist* in 1661. This one, I think, comes primarily from positivist histories of science. I think it stems from the desire to see a sharp transition between the backwardness and superstition of the past and the Enlightenment and rationalist world of modernity. To be sure, by the mid-17th century, tectonic transitions were going on in natural philosophy, what we now call science, but looking for some sharp before and after transition is a bit misguided. Rather than drawing some sharp line between alchemists and chemists, I think we should consider the idea that there are simply some alchemists that were willing to subject their theoretical foundations and experimental agendas to change and innovation, and some that weren't. This long period of transition is sometimes denoted by scholars as the movement from alchemy to chemistry, using the early modern spelling to indicate that long period of transition. Of course, many of Boyle's concerns, the rejection of Aristotelian and Paracelsian theory of the simple bodies, was eventually borne out, but know that his skepticism was not the result of empirical data. Indeed, his appeal was to the alchemical concept of the universal solvent, the Alkahest, developed allegedly by von Helmont. *The Skeptical Chemist*, while an extraordinarily important text, I think is best understood in the light of the alchemy of its time, rather than anachronistically taking chemistry and then sort of retro-baptizing Boyle as the first chemist. In my opinion, I think it's better to imagine that the transition from alchemy to chemistry was, in fact, led by a kind of alchemical avant-garde, especially its alchemists that we sometimes now refer to as entrepreneurial alchemists. The alchemical experiments led by these entrepreneurial alchemists led to greater and greater refinements of compounds like acids and potassium nitrate, and these alchemical experiments were actually much more scientific, to use that phrase a little bit anachronistically, than the experiments being carried out by the more traditional alchemists. In fact, people like Boyle and Newton, which we take to be sort of the great representatives of the so-called new science, not that Newton himself wasn't a careful alchemist. He produced volumes of alchemical journals, I think nearly a million words of alchemical work that are so clearly and well written that we can recreate them today in a kind of forensic chemistry. So, in my mind, there isn't some kind of sharp line or birthday for modern enlightened chemistry. There was, as I see it, just alchemy which developed new theoretical foundations and new experimental agendas, and alchemy that didn't. Those new foundations and agendas proved successful, and those avant-garde alchemists wanted to set themselves apart and began using new language, the language of chemistry. So we should see this process as a slow transition with brilliant alchemists at the helm, not as a kind of sharp break with alchemy, with it being thrown to the curb and chemistry sort of emerging from nothing.

And finally, misconception number five: The supersession of alchemy by chemistry means that we have nothing to learn from alchemy. Again, this attitude just smacks of a kind of dogmatic arrogance, and I want to talk about two different lessons we can learn from alchemy: one from what the alchemists got right, and one from what they got wrong. And I hope you'll forgive me, I'm trained as a philosopher. My interest in Western esotericism is primarily from a philosophical point of view, so this is going to get, well, a little philosophical. Despite the real rigor and innovation of the alchemists, they were fundamentally wrong about nature. So was the humoral and miasma theory of medicine. So is a geocentric worldview. I mean, Paracelsian medicine is more likely to kill you than cure you. We human beings did it wrong. We just get it wrong a lot, and that shouldn't be surprising. Ignorance, not wisdom, is the default condition of every single human being ever born. We get it wrong, and rather than face skeptical criticism, we use the faculty of intelligence to rationalize what we already believe, rather than face up to the possibility that we are wrong. Despite the great gains of the new science and technological growth, we may still be wrong. We may always have a partial or distorted understanding of reality. There's just no reason why the kind of creatures that we are should have any kind of epistemic privilege in the cosmos. Only in extreme hubris could claim that we are entitled to the truth merely by existing. Humility and skepticism is what we may learn from every poor alchemist laboring to transform nature with an understanding of nature that fundamentally foreclosed upon that very possibility. A question that we should ask ourselves is, under what error, unknown to us, do we labor under?

I think we can take a second lesson away from alchemy, and this is what I think alchemy gets right. In many theories of alchemy, there is an explicit link between the moral and spiritual state of the alchemist and the possibility of a successful outcome of their experiments. That is, if the alchemist was engaged in the Great Work merely for the purposes of greed or some other vice, the very project would betray them. For the alchemist, it didn't imply would simply because you could do the physical experiment itself, didn't mean that it would work out in the process you thought it would. If you attempted to create gold with a heart full of greed, the process would never work, no matter how carefully you followed that process. In this theory, the very ethical qualities of the alchemist bear on the Great Work itself, and I think there's something valuable to learn here. The 20th century was a period where technological growth clearly outpaced ethical sensitivity. Chemists were just as happy to produce helium to float balloons as they were chlorine gas to fill the trenches of the First World War. When science becomes so unhinged from any ethical or spiritual tether, it's just as likely to buoy humanity as it is to incinerate it in a nuclear fire. I think a lesson we can take from the alchemist is: can does not imply should, and that basic moral considerations should come before the profits of shareholders or base nationalism. Where the alchemists all morally upright? No, they were people, and fraud abounded, to be sure. But when I think about what alchemy got right, the idea that innovation and transformation should serve the highest spiritual, ethical goals of humanity, rather than the other way around.

Well, there are five misconceptions that I've heard about alchemy. Not that I hear people talk about alchemy that much, but you can see they come from both the scientific side and from the new-age side. The scientific side seems to miss what I think alchemy gets right in its spiritual and ethical take, whereas the new-age side, which focuses so much on spiritual transformation, but they actually miss the historical processes and experiments that the alchemists actually did. If you're interested in alchemy, stay tuned. Here at Esoterica, it's going to be a mainstay. We're going to study alchemical texts, somehow chemical experiments, we're going to look at some pretty famous alchemical figures, and deep dives into folks like Paracelsus, our Gerber. We might also be looking at doing a little forensic alchemy ourselves. This is a Hessian crucible that I have in my collection, and this one was actually used, and I might be talking to some chemistry folks about seeing what went on in this crucible and if there are any remains of that alchemical experiment left behind here in a kind of forensic chemistry. So stay tuned for that. Until next time, I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and you've been watching Esoterica, where we explore the arcane side of history, philosophy, and religion.