Reputation, alchemy

Hitchcock, Ethan Allen. Remarks upon alchemy and the alchemists, indicating a method of discovering the true nature of Hermetic philosophy and showing that the search after the Philosopher s Stone had not for its object the discovery of an agent for the transmutation of metals. Being also an attempt to rescue from undeserved opprobrium the reputation of a class of extraordinary thinkers in past ages. 2nd ed., 1865 or 1866. 

It is in Arabic alchemy that two concepts that were to become central to European alchemy are encountered for the first time the Philosopher s Stone and the elixir of life. The Philosopher s Stone was a substance reputedly able to transform base metals into gold. In spite of the name, it wasn t thought of as a stone and was often... 

Ashmole preserved the legacy of Forman s life and work in London, the written terrain that this study has charted. Like these papers, Forman s reputation has outlived him. Fie has featured as a charlatan in histories of astrology, alchemy, and medicine in England, but aside from his involvement (albeit hostile) with the mathematical practitioners, he has had no place in histories of the natural sciences. Fie pursued the occult and wrote in English. Fie was more interested in operative magic, divinatory techniques, and alchemical... 

The first Moslem writer on alchemy cited by later Arabian authors was Khaled ben Yezid ibn Moaonia, Prince Oneeyade, who died in 708 A. D., reputed to be a pupil of the Syrian monk, Marianas.86 No remnant of his writings of any significance has been preserved. 

Notwithstanding the reputation of Arnaldus as interested in alchemy, there is much doubt as to the authorship of alchemical works attributed to him. Schmieder lists twenty alchemical treatises attributed to Arnaldus. It is quite certain that these were not all by the same author nor all of the same period. 

When Pope John XXII issued his Bull of 1317 condemning alchemy, it was John Dastyn (or Dasteyn) who wrote to him defending the art. Dastyn was one of the leading exponents of the art of the period, and his letter to the Pope seems to have met with some success, as when the Pope died, he left a fortune reputed to be of alchemical origin. 

Before their Nobel Prize-winning work on radium, Marie and Pierre studied alchemy. (They were said to have used pitchblende as their prima materia.) After Pierre s death, Marie was approached by a mysterious cabal. They advised her to desist in her alchemical studies, a secret which, if it got out, would badly tarnish Curie s reputation at a time when she was rapidly becoming a woman of some political importance and a French national heroine. 

We mentioned earlier that science is coming full circle to that which was taught in the ancient mystery schools. Even modern medical science is beginning to recognize man s subtle energy substructure such as the acupuncture meridians. Practical alchemy has labored under a bad reputation, branded fraud or at best pseudo-science by those with no practical experience in the matter at all. 

Settling in Egypt from 640 onwards, the Arabs found manuscripts and inscribed tablets in the pyramids. The Arabic manuscripts mention the edifice Abou Hermes at Memphis, in which Hermes (the father of Thoth ) was reputedly buried it comprised two pyramids, one for him and one for his wife. ° In the tenth century, all the conditions were therefore present for the elaboration of tales of the discovery of a tablet of instruction in a tomb of Hermes, while at the same time alchemy had become fashionable among the Arabs. One of these revelations is called The Treasure of Alexander an Arabic treatise on astrology and alchemy, it also contains reflections on the microcosm and the macrocosm, talismans, and mentions Hermes as well as Apollonius of Tyana. ... 

Halle in the wake of Bottger s reputed success of transmutation - in fact, Roth-Scholtz placed it as the opening piece of the Theatrum. We have no direct evidence to indicate why Stahl s relationship with Roth-Scholtz did not continue. Yet it is obvious that once Stahl became a convinced disbeliever of alchemy, it was not in his interest to support Roth-Scholtz s agenda of alchemical publication. 

Above the title page of a Latin work on alchemy attributed to Jabir, whose name is shown here in the Western form of Geber. He was recognized as the Father of Alchemy, and his reputation was so high that probably many books by otiier authors were attributed to him to give added authority. How many of them were actually written by Jabir is still vigorously debated by many scholars. 

Above Sir Isaac Newton, famed as the man who first stated the Law of Gravitation. In spite of his present-day reputation as a strictly scientific thinker, he was much interested in alchemy. 

For both Willis and Lemery, the essential thing was that the principles of matter, if not perhaps the most fundamental reality, were nevertheless basic material substances and not Aristotelian qualities or spiritual presences somehow rooted in matter. Especially Lemery, in this regard, could have his cake and eat it, too. By insisting that chemical principles were sensible and demonstrative, he preserved a traditional way of describing chemical operations in iatrochemical terms (acids and alkalis) while, at the same time, he allowed for the mechanistic and materialistic explanations that Cartesian philosophy demanded (Powers, 1998). That kind of a mixt truth extended also to a mixing of interpretations, both academic and popular, when it came to appraising the further status and reputation of alchemy (Figure 7). 

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