Historical material alchemy

Bushness, James William. Precious metals trade guide gold, silver, platinum. Woodstock (IL) Trident Publications, 1993. 248p. ISBN 0-9632771-00-3 Includes some historical material on the history of gold, including alchemy... 

For some thoughts on alchemy, Newton, Keynes and monetarism, see Michael Neary and Graham Taylor, Marx and the Magic of Money Towards an Alchemy of Capital , Historical Materialism, n (Summer 1998), pp. 99-117. 

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. 

The historical study of alchemy has also increased dramatically in the past few years, driven in part by new research on Newton s interest in alchemy. For many years, E. J. Holmyard s Alchemy (1957, reprinted 1990) was the most commonly available introduction to the topic, but newer material such as... 

For historical and education material, there are two great sites at the Chemical Education Foundation (www.chemed.org) and the Chemical Heritage Foundation, (www.chemheritage.org). A large collection of alchemical material is maintained by Adam McClean at The Alchemy Web Site (www.levity. com/alchemy). 

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