Modern alchemy

By the turn of the nineteenth century, there was seemingly only a handful of genuine practitioners of the art left. The success of scientific materialism certainly contributed to the eclipse of alchemy. Other traditions had also begun to develop during the eighteenth century that attracted the attentions of seekers who may otherwise have studied alchemy, such as 

Freemasonry. (What alchemists there were in this period seem to have been just as active as Freemasons as they were alchemists, such as Dom Pernety and Cagliostro.) After Karl von Eckartshausen s Chemische Versuch was published in 1802, the trail seems to go cold. But as the century progressed, there was a revival of interest in Hermetic and occult traditions. It was not just concerned with alchemy, however, and figures such as Mrs Besant and Madame Blavatsky of the Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn concerned themselves with all of the Hermetic arts. 

Mrs Atwood, in stressing the entirely inner aspect of the work, paves the way for the purely psychological interpretation of alchemy that was first espoused by Herbert Silberer in 1914, whose work was later eclipsed by that of Carl Jung. However, Silberer s work showed that regarding alchemy as anything other than mediaeval mumbo jumbo could still be fatal he showed his 

Jung began to study alchemical books during his waking hours, and came to believe that the alchemist was not so much trying to create precious metals from base in the laboratory, as to redeem matter. He wrote that  

The alchemical operations were real, only this reality was not physical but psychological. Alchemy represents the projection of a drama both cosmic and spiritual in laboratory terms. The opus magnum had two aims the rescue of the human soul and the salvation of the cosmos. 

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Seaborg, G. T. "The Transuranium Elements Products of Modern Alchemy," Dowden, Hutchinson and Ross, Inc., Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, 1978, 488 pp. 

Reprints Ancient and modern alchemy (Science 1926) and A genuine copy of the De alchimia of Albertus Magnus (First published Jahrbuch der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, 1955)... 

Noyes, William Albert and William Albert Noyes. Modern alchemy, by William Albert Noyes. .. and W. Albert Noyes, jr. Springfield (IL), Baltimore (MD) C. C. Thomas, 1932. ix, 207 p. 

Soddy and Ramsay may have taken the final step of launching chemistry on a modem alchemical research program, but this paradigm shift in chemistry was only made possible within the borderland between chemistry, physics, and occult alchemy inhabited by these scientists. The identification of modern alchemy as belonging to chemistry was ultimately meant to shore up chemistry s disciplinary borders against physics. Chemistry, though, had rebuilt its walls to include a great deal of territory to which physics also laid claim—and eventually retook. 

The preceding chapters have portrayed the consequences for science and for occult alchemy of their mutual interest in material transmutation. This chapter explores different cultural consequences of modem alchemy in relationship to monetary anxieties during the Depression Era. In particular, it narrates how the idea of modern alchemy intensified questioning of the gold standard and of the moral foundation of scientific aspiration. By the late 1920s and... 

H. G. Wells s The World Set Free Modern Alchemy Destroys the Economy... 

Soddy does little more here than restate his early contention that the new atomic chemistry is fundamentally a kind of modern alchemy. 

The pulp sci-fi stories published in the Gernsback periodicals during the Depression track how economic and monetary anxieties dovetailed with the stunning rethinking of the nature of matter that the previous three decades had styled as modern alchemy. Indeed, the stories affirm that ... 

Modern alchemy s claims that atoms were not indivisible and immutable and that humans could effect elemental transmutation entailed a rethinking of the nature of money during a moment of economic and monetary crisis. 

The modern alchemy stories published during the Hoover years demonstrated a real anxiety about the economy s destruction via transmutational attacks on the Federal Reserve and on banks gold reserves. The Federal Reserve had, of course, been created to avoid monetary crises like those in the bank panics of 1893 and 1907. But in the early 1930s, as the gold standard... 

Lancet. 1907. Modern Alchemy Transmutation Realised. (July 27, 1907) 244. 

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