Alchemical revival

Newly emerging histories of chemistry in Britain and the United States included discussions of alchemy. The occult alchemical revival, too, influenced the writing and teaching of the history of chemistry in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Both... 

Still, despite the German influence on many nineteenth-century English chemists, the written accounts of alchemy in Britain are significantly different from those by German historians. In the twenty years leading up to the discovery of atomic transmutation, the occult alchemical revival in Britain sparked numerous translations of primary alchemical sources, and historians of alchemy—along with chemists themselves—could look sympathetically at the aims and accomplishments of alchemy as hoth a scientific and religious field, as we have seen in chapter i.2... 

Unfortunately, at this writing, I do not know of any useful monographic treatment of the alchemical revival ca. 1860 to 1915, particularly as it influenced writers and artists. For brief introductions to the issues, see Dixon, Carlos Schwabe, and E. L. Smith. For a fictional but well informed treatment of the entire hermetic panorama in modernist thought, see Eco, Foucauh s Pendulum. 

Carlos Schwabe s Spleen et Ideal A Study in 19th-Century Alchemical Revivalism. Cauda Pavonis The Hermetic Text Society Newsletter 6 (1987) 5-9. 

Contents The Myth of the Child Alchemy Its History, Revival, and Symbolism Initiation The Occultation of Surrealism Collage as Alchemy The Alchemical Androgyne Ernst and the Women in His Life As Above, So Below The Alchemical Landscapes Conclusion Notes An Alchemical Glossary Selected Bibliography Index... 

Very recent historians of alchemy, in fact, now see the spiritual alchemy hypothesis of the occult revival as historically inaccurate. They support the position held by early twentieth-century occult alchemists and historians that alchemy, in addition to its spiritual dimensions, was truly a material practice (see, for example, Principe and Newman 2001, and Newman and Principe 2002). Moreover, they deny that the chemical and physical processes in alchemical writings were simply code for entirely spiritual processes and reject the notion that alchemists had been able to transmute matter by an act of will. 

While Bolton s lecture gave examples of modern alchemical charlatans and seemed less than serious about some of the French Hermetic groups he discussed, the New York Times coverage of the speech focused primarily on the positive issue of modern science s relationship to alchemy. Its headline The Revival of Alchemy was followed by the subheadlines Dr. H. Carrington Bolton Lectures on the Modern Aspect of Chemistry s Forerunner and Many Still Believe in It (New York Times 1897, 6). 

George Ripley, Ripley Revived in Philalethes, Alchemical Works, compiled by S. Merrow Broddle (Boulder, CO Cinnabar, 1994). 

Real gold, having used up its potentiality, is dead. The alchemist is responsible for reviving gold (a process which means the death of alchemical mercury), but as long as gold is philosophical —that is, not yet... 

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