Protestant Reformation

As Koistinen points out, this policy reinforced the trend toward large integrated firms, a tendency already underway four decades before the war, against which many Progressive reformers protested. Koistinen, op. cit. note 1, 163 et passim. 

Some Paracelsian alchemists, especially Heinrich Khun rath (ca. 1560-1605) and Stefan Michelspacher (active ca. 1615-23), were objects of persecution on the part of hoth Lutheran and Catholic authorities. Khunrath was an alchemist from Saxony, the heartland of the Reformation, but his theological stance was characteristic of the second generation of Protestants who felt that Luther s work had been left incomplete and that another religious reform was essential. In Khunrath s ideas this would take the form of a Lutheranism that could accommodate an autonomous personal piety. To express their Lutheran piety intellectually the alchemists employed the terms of Paracelsian theosophy, while they found an emotive outlet in the mystical experience of the power and grace of the Holy Spirit. They felt themselves to be inspired (literally breathed ) by the Spirit, a force that they identified with alchemical pneuma. Khunrath called himself an enthusiast, hlled with the presence of the divine. 

Khunrath s engraving of Christ-Anthropos, the Archetype of the universe (fig. 3), initiated many of the elements later found in Fludd s prolific illustrations of the Macrocosmic Man. These included the use of the male nude, kabbalistic inscriptions, geographical compass-points, the diagrammatic structure of the Macrocosm and the motif of the dove of the Holy Spirit. The apocalyptic context of these images and their role in the Protestant Reformation of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries will be considered in the following chapter. 

Fludd as a magus-alchemist had a most un-Protestant interest in miracles, since both the Lutheran and Reformed Churches had denied their possibility, or relevance, in post-apostolic times. 

In response to conditions in Leblanc towns the beginnings of an environmental movement developed. Among the social reformers and writers who protested were Charles Dickens, Disraeli, Mrs. Gaskell, and Emile Zola. 

That curious occult philosophy which constitutes the basis of alchemy in the modern sense of the term, derived from the Greek neoplatonists and transmitted mainly through Arabian disciples, was to find a recrudescence with, if possible, more extravagant manifestations of credulity, mysticism and charlatanism in the western alchemists of the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, a development greatly fostered also by the revolt from authority which culminated in the Protestant Reformation and was facilitated by the printing press in the latter part of the fifteenth century. 

When at the beginning of the sixteenth century the spirit of unrest in tlieologic matters culminated in the Protestant Reformation, and the censorship of the ecclesiastical authority was relaxed, a multitude of alchemical writings which had circulated surreptitiously were printed and circulated freely. The secrecy and mystery which had surrounded them in the past gave them an interest and importance which most of them would doubtless never have received except for the previous censorship. 

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