Alchemy as the ‘Occult Other’

What about alchemy as a discipline that is linked to discourses of science and religion? In general, we can posit a similar development as with astrology, or, in Bruce T. Moran’s words,

Consequently, it took a long time to distinguish between the ‘old’ alchemy and the ‘new’ chemistry, and this was achieved—more or less, as we will see—only in the eighteenth century. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, we encounter only a few scholars who tried to write an unbiased history of alchemy; Karl Christoph Schmieder is one of them, and it comes as no surprise that his book (Schmieder 1832), comprising more than 600 pages, was republished as a ‘classic’ in 1997 by the biologist Wolfgang Roller in his Esoterischer Verlag Wolfgang Roller, along with an invitation to the reader to report any practical alchemical work to Roller himself.

But in general, at the end of the eighteenth century the domain of alchemy was restricted to gold making or transmutational alchemy (alchemia transmuta-toria or “chrysopoeia” in technical parlance). “Indeed, for most writers and thinkers of the eighteenth century, alchemy was synonymous with gold making and fraud. […] These Enlightenment writers drew heavily on metaphors of light and darkness to describe the dawning of chemistry out of the misty obscurity of the medieval delusion of alchemy” (Principe and Newman 2001, 386). This disjunctive strategy has led to a problematic historiographical framework of analysis that ultimately distorted the many links between empirical research into nature and metaphysical interpretations that both had been the characteristics of so-called “alchemy” before it was ‘pushed away’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One may think of Brian Vickers’ remark that “some of the occult sciences—alchemy and astrology, for example—made a partial use of observational techniques, but the results were then subordinated to some preformed interpretative model, often magical or mystical, which was neither derived from reality nor testable by it” (1988, 266). As I will make clear in what follows, things became even more complicated—and discursively entangled—when psychological interpretations focused on “transformational alchemy;” Carl Gustav Jung is the most influential author here, but Mircea Eliade also had his share in this reconfiguration. In a parallel development of astrological and alchemical discourse, the negative understanding of the term was positively charged by these scholars as a metaphor of spiritual development—the disjunction turned into a positive earmark.

Recent scholarship has critically revisited our knowledge of alchemy and the emergence of contemporary chemistry in the context of the history of science and religion. In fact, “[r]evisionary interpretations of works of persons who previously were not readily admitted to have had alchemical interests are some of the proudest achievements of scholarship of the last few decades” (Linden 2007, xi). This also changed the attribution of meaning to the emergence of ‘scientific chemistry,’ further legitimated in dispositive changes through the launching of new scholarly journals—“the best journals appear to welcome alchemical and Hermetic submissions for publication consideration, as long as they fit the journal’s criteria and are of high quality. This was not always the case!” (Linden 2007, xii)

Being part of this revisionist movement in the history of science, Lawrence M. Principe and William R. Newman attempt to overcome the dichotomy between religious or pseudo-scientific alchemy on the one hand and empiric-scientific chemistry on the other. They (re-)introduced the term “chymistry” to refer to a scholarly engagement of the natural world that was not yet ‘dichotomized’ by post-Enlightenment discourse (Newman and Principe 1998) or embraced in a positive way by psychological and esoteric readings of the twentieth century. From a discursive point of view, such a distinction makes perfect sense. CHYMISTRY can be regarded as a discourse that includes various and quite different subfields. Besides scholars who were entirely focused on processes within the natural world (natura naturata), there were others who saw the natural world as revelation of and interacting with transcendent levels of reality and subsequently searched for the power behind these processes (natura naturans). Leading alchemists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries applied both scientific-empirical strategies and metaphysical ones, such as communicating with angels and superior beings or directly addressing the divine. Notable examples are John Dee (Clucas 2006; von Stuckrad 2010a, 146–155) and Robert Boyle (Principe 1998; Newman and Principe 2002). William R. Newman has recently demonstrated that it was not the newly established dominance of physics and mathematics that led to the scientific change of paradigm in the seventeenth century but rather the experiments of early modern “chymists” who elaborated medieval corpuscular theory (Newman 2006; see particularly pp. 1– 20 on “The Problematic Position of Alchemy in the Scientific Revolution”).

In general, recent research has made it clear that the lines demarcating chemistry from alchemy, and ‘real science’ from ‘pseudo-science,’ are much fuzzier than had long been assumed. The issue is not only that chymists of the seventeenth century helped develop new scientific paradigms; the polemical discussion about the differentiation between good science and bad science itself is much older than has often been assumed (as, e. g., in McKnight 1992; see the editor’s introduction on p. vii). Over against this assumption, Ute Frietsch points out that “certain forms of alchemy already in the early modern period were evaluated as ‘pseudo.’ In the context of Paracelsian medical alchemy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the buzzword ‘pseudo’ was put forward in various combinations” (2008, 51–52; see also Moran 2005, 67–98). The seventeenth-century debate about Paracelsian medical alchemy, denoted by Libavius and others as ‘chymiatry,’ created the model that served to disavow competing forms of knowledge using the Latin term pseudo-scientia. Even Galileo’s laws of falling bodies were in 1645 attacked as pseudo-scientia. “Thus, in the 1640s, the new alchemical medical doctrine and the new physics found themselves stigmatized with the same ‘pseudo’-label” (Frietsch 2008, 54; see also Schmitt-Biggemann 1996, 497). Institutional developments mirror this complex discursive configuration: Paracelsian medicine was introduced in several European university curricula around 1600, for instance at the Universities of Montpellier, Valencia, or Wittenberg. But the real shock for Libavius and other critics came when the University of Marburg in 1609, at the instigation of the German prince Moritz of Hesse-Kassel, hired Johannes Hartmann as professor of chymiatria. Hartmann “embraced divine mysteries and used a magical symbol as his personal letter seal. This was the shocking part of Hartmann’s appointment. A Paracelsian was going to teach chymia with the university. […] Regardless of the ridicule, Hartmann’s instruction in the art of chymiatry (chemical medicine) was one of the earliest examples of laboratory-based chemical teaching within a university curriculum” (Moran 2005, 108).

In general, when it comes to ‘pseudo-science,’ Roger Cooter notes that the “eighteenth century had understood quackery as blatant fraud (especially in relation to medicine) but lacked a developed concept of pseudo-science. For the stuff of belief (religion) and the stuff of experiment and analysis (science or natural philosophy) had not yet undergone their rhetorical separation and ranking” (2003, 683). Cooter draws the only feasible conclusion: “From the history of phrenology and other such pseudo-sciences, it is clear there is more to be lost than gained historically by seeking retrospectively to draw sharp distinctions between the ‘real’ and the ‘pseudo’ in science” (2003, 684). As a consequence of this conceptual thicket, I will avoid the terms ‘alchemy’ and ‘chemistry’ as generic analytical concepts, and rather will look at their respective configurations in scientific, philosophical, and religious discourse (for similar suggestions, see Cooter 2003). If we disassemble the discourse strands that constitute ALCHEMY (or CHYMISTRY) and do the same with CHEMISTRY, we will be able to see the transformations of meaning that have taken place since the eighteenth century. We can then also identify at which point certain elements of this discourse have adopted new meanings and in which form they perhaps have been continued in contemporary science.

In this regard, the turn of the nineteenth century was an important break. One of the major shifts in the evaluation of alchemy was the move away from its understanding of the nature of matter. While alchemy had been linked to the idea that the elements can be reduced to a proto hyle—prima materia or primary matter—now chemists held that the smallest particles were atoms (Keller 1983, 9–10). John Dalton set the new tone in his New System of Chemical Philosophy, which was published in two parts between 1808 and 1810. Interestingly enough, the work originated from “Lectures on Natural Philosophy” at the Royal Institution in London. “The author has ever since been occasionally urged by several of his philosophical friends to lose no time in communicating the results of his enquiries to the public, alledging [sic], that the interests in science, and his own reputation, might suffer by delay” (1808/1810, v–vi). Dalton still referred to his scholarship as “natural philosophy,” and throughout his book he spoke of “philosophical chemists,” “philosophers,” “experimental philosophy” (already in the title), etc. At the same time, it is characteristic that the terms ‘alchemy,’ ‘chymistry,’ ‘transmutation,’ ‘god,’ and related concepts were completely absent in Dalton’s work. The new configurations were ‘atom,’ ‘elementary bodies,’ and the material basis of ‘chemical science’ (see, e. g., page 474). Not surprisingly, then, Dalton dedicated the second part to Humphry Davy and William Henry “as a testimony to their distinguished merit in the promotion of chemical science.” Dalton also introduced the genre of chemical tables: “Nothing of the kind has been published to my knowledge; yet, such tables appear to me so necessary to the practice of chemical enquiries, that I have wondered how the science could be so long cultivated without them” (496). This new aesthetic device changed the way the ‘systematization’ of chemical knowledge was (and still is) legitimized. Like tables of historical epochs (on which see Steiner 2008), this dispositive stabilized the new order of knowledge.

The author points out in his introduction to the second part that it took him so long to write the almost 600 pages because he decided to rely as little as possible on other chemists’ work and instead to use his own experiments to test the new theories. In order “to convey a knowledge of chemical facts and experience,” he begins with the most simple elements, subsequently looking at the combination of two and then three simple elements. “By elementary principles, or simple bodies,” Dalton explains, “we mean such as have not been decomposed, but are found to enter into combination with other bodies. We do not know that any one of the bodies denominated elementary, is absolutely inde-composable; but it ought to be called simple, till it can be analyzed” (1808/ 1810, 221– 222).

The new ideas about the nature of matter and the new vocabulary that found expression in works such as Dalton’s—with a total lack of terms that had been related to ALCHEMY, while retaining the link between SCIENCE and PHILOSO PHY—paved the way for the new understanding of alchemy as the ‘other’ of scientific chemistry. It was the same period that saw the general introduction of the English terms pseudo-science and pseudo-scientist. After William Whewell had coined the term scientist in 1840 (see Ross 1962; Yeo 1993), the term pseudo-science gained in popularity and was used to critique, e. g., Samuel Hahnemann’s homeopathy or Gustave Le Bon’s mass psychology (Hagner 2008, 24). But most scientists, like Dalton, simply neglected the older vocabulary, and it was the job of nineteenth-century historians to make the shift visible in explicit wordings. When Heinrich Wilhelm Schaefer in 1887 defined alchemy as “the art of transforming ignoble metal into silver and particularly into gold” (1887, 1), he expressed the now-common understanding of alchemy as something distinct from modern science. For these authors, alchemy only continues to be interesting from an historical point of view, for those who want to understand the psychology of human folly and the achievements of contemporary science.

In Schaefer’s account, representative of the understanding of alchemy in his time (other examples would include Kopp 1886 and von Lippmann 1919, who repeatedly referred to Kopp), this discipline is historically distinct from science, although maybe in some parts a forerunner of modern scientific chemistry and physics. Schaefer is at pains to identify the Egyptian-Greek Hermes Trismegistus as the imagined origin of alchemical thinking (1887, 2–12), which also links alchemy to its superstitious sister, astrology (p. 11). Terms that belong to the field of RELIGION, MYSTICISM, and METAPHYSICS, combined with discourse strands such as ‘fraud,’ ‘trick,’ ‘superstition,’ or ‘credulity,’ legitimized the ‘modern’ contempt of alchemy as a counter-concept of modern science.

Yet, although Schaefer noted that in the nineteenth century no serious alchemical practice could be observed anymore (1887, 33–34), he reminded his readers of one structural parallel of modern chemistry with alchemical endeavors, because the chemical search for the smallest atoms offered the possibility to recombine elementary particles and thus create new metals. As an example of this ‘transmutational quest,’ he referred to the British physicist Norman Lockyer who, eight years earlier, had thought that he had transformed copper into calcium and nickel into cobalt with the use of electricity (1887, 34).

Sir Norman Lockyer’s spectroscopic studies of stars and his hypothesis that the chemical elements were compound bodies, which he explained in a lecture on 12 December 1878 at the Royal Society, had a mixed reception and were considered very controversial; it is characteristic of the discursive configuration of the day that Lockyer was ridiculed as an “alchemist” by the popular press and some colleagues (Brock 1985, 189). But Lockyer’s studies are also an indication that the neat distinction between alchemy and chemistry was not always easy to maintain in the light of emerging theories of the nature of matter.

VITALISM: A Ménage-a-Trois of Life, Spirit, and Matter

The discursive reconfiguration that has taken place since the eighteenth century can also be framed as a conflict between Aristotelian philosophical tradition and Greek atomic, corpuscular philosophy. The new development dramatically challenged the Aristotelian interpretation of material change that was common until the seventeenth century, explaining alterations of chemical properties or substances by the addition or subtraction of ‘forms.’ As mentioned above, underlying these processes was a speculative substrate of matter, called the proto hyle or prima materia, that remained unchanged throughout the process. Linked to the forms or qualities of wet, dry, hot, and cold, the proto hyle produced the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water, which in turn could be mixed to generate the material substances that the chemists examined. Over against this Aristotelian theory, the Greek corpuscular philosophy gained influence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, speculating about atoms being the smallest units of material substances, which may or may not be understood as unsplittable. However, as William H. Brock aptly remarks,

For many, however, giving up the idea of a simple and unifying principle that underlies the processes of nature was too high a price to pay for scientific progress (cf. also the detailed discussion in Asprem 2013, Chapters 4 and 5). One of these was William Prout (1785–1850), who in 1816 put forward his hypothesis that all of the elements and their constituent atoms were in fact compounds of one basic homogeneous material. He coined the term protyle for this speculative basis, which he then identified with hydrogen, the lightest known element. Prout became known for a second hypothesis as well, namely the idea that if we accept that expression of the atomic weight of hydrogen as a unity, the relative atomic weights of all the known elements are whole numbers. Consequently, hydrogen came to be regarded as the primary matter from which all of the elements were composed. What was subsequently discussed as “Prout’s hypothesis” had an influence on nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories of matter that should not be underestimated. William H. Brock, who wrote a fascinating account of this hypothesis, following its reception all the way into the second half of the twentieth century, points out that “[a]s a tantalizing and attractive simplifying view of matter it was to be a continuous source of inspiration to chemists and physicists until the work of F W Aston on isotopes in the 1920s” (1985, viii).

Relevant to our analysis here is also the fact that the protyle became a favorite topic in Theosophical and occult discourse at the end of the nineteenth century. For instance, Wynn W. Westcott, a founding figure of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and a noted authority on alchemy, in 1893 published a pamphlet under his Golden Dawn pseudonym “Sapere Aude” on The Science of Alchymy: Spiritual and Material. He argued that alchemy “must be regarded as a science uniting ancient chemistry with a religious basis” (1893, 4). But while he, like Heinrich Wilhelm Schaefer and others, drew the historical line from ancient and medieval alchemy to modern chemistry (1893, 5), he did not support the triumphant self-esteem of modern chemists. “No modern science has shown more intolerance towards its ancestors than the chemistry of our era has shown to the discoveries of those Egyptian, Arabian and Mediæval sages who were the founders of chemistry in the dim and distant past” (1893, 8). In his attempt to reconcile alchemy with the most modern chemical findings, Westcott referred to Prout’s protyle as evidence of the unified quality of matter, or the prima materia of the alchemists. He found support from the leading chemist Sir William Crookes. In history books of modern science, it is usually not mentioned that Crookes also was a member of the Theosophical Society and secretly a Golden Dawn initiate (see Morrisson 2007, 39–40).

By the end of the nineteenth century, Theosophists and scientists, partly in collaboration, developed a new entanglement of discourse strands. Indeed, as Morrisson points out:

Along the same line of argumentation, what I call VITALISM here is a collection of discourse strands that are linked to the historical tradition of vitalism but not limited to it. When it comes to historical vitalism—a movement with many different branches in different countries—we can identify as a common denominator the critical attitude toward Newtonian mechanics, which is complemented by the idea of a ‘life force’ that explains the nature of living things. In this general form, “[v]italism seems to belong to the very origins of alchemy” (Dobbs 1992, 58). Already part of scientific discourse in the eighteenth century (Rey 2000; Reill 2005; on the Scottish Enlightenment, see Packham 2012), the search for the vital powers of nature in the nineteenth century was linked to the concept of natura naturans (as in Schelling’s philosophy of nature), to ‘animal magnetism’ (as in Franz Anton Mesmer’s theories and experiments), and later to the concept of ‘ether.’ It is the entanglement of these strands that constitute the discursive knot of VITALISM.

The form of scientific and philosophical vitalism that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century took on features from various new disciplines. Hans Driesch (1867–1941), the German biologist noted for his early experimental work in embryology and one of the first to perform the cloning of an animal in the 1880s, is certainly the best-known representative of what he himself called neo-vitalism (Driesch 1922, 167). In various publications he positioned himself against materialistic philosophies of science, particularly Darwinism. And he made explicit what we see many times in the present study—the emergence of psychology as an integrating factor between religion, philosophy, and science: “As is well known,” writes Driesch, “the problem of vitalism is expanded considerably when we include in it the question of the relations between the ‘inner life’ [‘Seelenleben’] and nature.” Against this background, Driesch is surprised that psychologists do not really engage the issue: “almost nobody has seen the close relation between the body/mind problem and vitalism as such in its actual sharpness; indeed, it is strange that not even physiologists such as Pflüger and Goltz have seen the close link that is operative here” (1922, 157).

It is through psychology that Driesch also endorsed the work of another famous vitalist—Henri Bergson (1859–1941; see Burwick and Douglass 2010). Both scholars fought against mechanistic and ‘finalistic’ philosophies of science, even though their conclusions differed in some ways (Driesch 1922, 178–180). Driesch was convinced of the relevance of occultism and psychology for the emergence of a new understanding of science, and he used the label ‘para’ for these sciences without the pejorative charging that this label assumes in other contexts.

Statements like these make it clear how closely this discourse is linked to the discourse of MONISM, which I will discuss in the next chapter. Even if we should keep in mind that Driesch’s notion of entelechy was ultimately a dualistic concept, which makes the discursive knot more complex, we can see the link between those discourses in what Monika Fick calls the “sensualization of the spiritual” (Versinnlichung des Geistigen) and the “spiritualization of the physical” (Beseelung des Physischen); at the end of her study of fin de siècle literature, in which Gustav Theodor Fechner and other Romantic authors were positively received and linked to spiritualism as a “biology of the beyond,” she draws the conclusion that we can even speak of (literary) “modernity as a monistic movement” (Fick 1993, 354–365). It is noteworthy in this regard that Fechner had decisive influence on Sigmund Freud and on psychoanalysis in general. “A large part of the theoretical framework of psychoanalysis would hardly have come into being without the speculations of the man whom Freud called the great Fechner” (Ellenberger 1970, 218). In a parallel dynamic, “vitalism has powerfully inflected the literary sensibility of the last two centuries, and these cultural effects were empowered by the residual prestige vitalism enjoyed from its discursive apprenticeship in the scientific academy. The transition of vitalism from science, to a scientific ideology, to a social ideology shows this complex historical dynamic in action” (Clarke 1996, 28).

To be sure, in order to clearly see these discursive links we need to broaden our perspective from historical monism and vitalism to MONISM and VITALISM; we can then see how influential this discourse indeed was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. William Prout can also be addressed as a vitalist, since he argued that living systems also contained ‘vital principles.’ With this thesis, Prout was part of a heated debate among chemists of his generation (Brock 1985, 70–80), long before occultists and Theosophists jumped on the bandwagon and both spiritualized the ‘life force’ and ‘scientificized’ spirituality. Hence, there are different forms of vitalist theory, and it is important to remember

But despite these differences, the contribution of Prout and his chemical colleagues introduced the relevant terms to VITALISM that prepared the discursive changes. When we look at German Romanticism, we encounter many more driving forces of this discursive change. In critical conversation with German idealism and particularly with Schelling’s philosophy of nature, Romantic concepts of nature and matter were picking up vitalist ideas and reconfiguring them with spiritual overtones. This can already be seen in Goethe’s understanding of science, which Jeremy Naydler aptly summarizes: “If we allow intuitive thinking, feeling and imagination a place in our scientific method, then—providing these are deployed in conjunction with exact observation and clear thought, and providing they are trained as thoroughly as our powers of observation and thinking—then a much fuller and more complete experience of nature will become possible” (Naydler 1996, 115; on Goethe’s pantheistic philosophy of nature see Naydler 1996, 110–114).

An example from Romanticism is Carl Gustav Carus, the influential scholar, physician, and painter. In his Zwölf Briefe über das Erdleben (“Twelve Letters on the Life of the Earth,” 1841), and then in his main work Natur und Idee oder das Werdende und sein Gesetz (“Nature and Idea, or: The Becoming and Its Law,” 1861), Carus attempted to overcome the materialist tendencies of contemporary science that alienated the human being from nature. That is the reason why he—although not embracing the practice of table-turning—could interpret the spiritualist séances of his time as one of the most important chapters of physiology and a desideratum of scholarly research. In this endeavor, he did not stand alone.

Carus was an early representative of this development. He contributed to the discussion by aestheticizing and psychologizing philosophical as well as scientific concepts of nature in a discourse of Empfindsamkeit (“sensitivity”). As Robert Matthias Erdbeer demonstrated (2010, 167–255), these works were a major contribution to a discursive change that prepared what the author calls “the esoteric modern.” However, when Erdbeer describes these contributions judgmentally as “strategic dilettantism” (see the title of his chapter, and passim), he strips such discourses of their scientific legitimacy and thus adopts uncritically the dichot-omizing structure that he is analyzing. That people like Carus were active both as scientists and authors of popular works not only marks their discursive impact (Erdbeer 2010, 170); it also reminds us of the fact that the world of scientists and that of a popular audience are not so far apart as labels like ‘dilettantism’ and ‘amateurism’ vis-à-vis ‘exact science’ seem to suggest.

In this regard, the situation in England was not fundamentally different. People from various backgrounds responded to the Victorian crisis of faith and reassembled discourses of VITALISM and others (on this topic see also the material presented in Renk 2012, even though her analysis is unfortunately too uncritical). Critique of scientific naturalism was one of the driving forces behind these activities, as Frank Miller Turner (1974) demonstrated. Henry Sidgwick and James Ward, both Cambridge philosophers; Alfred Russel Wallace and George John Romanes, both scientists; Frederic W. H. Myers, the poet, classicist, and founding figure of the Society for Psychical Research; and Samuel Butler, the novelist—they were all united in their quest to link emotion and religion to scientific endeavors. In his introduction to Phantasms of the Living, Myers put it thus:

What in German discourse was called Empfindsamkeit, or sensitivity, in British discourse was discussed as “feelings” and “aspirations” and was linked to “religion.” Another term that we encounter in this discursive knot is “spiritual.” Turner correctly notes that the “word spiritual is one of the most difficult and important terms in late nineteenth-century thought” (1974, 3), and he refers to Harald Victor Routh, who already in 1937 gave a precise definition of its meaning for the nineteenth century:

Routh remarked that the problem with the terms ‘spirit’ and ‘spiritual’ is that all people use them but “[n]one of them has explained what he means by the expression, but all use it as frequently and consistently as if they had privately agreed on its significance” (Routh 1937, 4). Indeed, this could have been written at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The same is true for his comparison of spirituality and religion:

We see here the emergence of a new discourse of SPIRITUALITY that became highly influential in the 1960s and remains so today. For the discourse of RELIGION and SCIENCE as well, this reconfiguration of discourse strands is informative. Without dismissing science and progress as something useless, the new configuration embraced science and linked it to aspirations, emotions, imagination, self-expression, and vitality. The last term also makes clear why these discourse strands belong to the knot of VITALISM.

Rearrangements in the Twentieth Century

If we want to understand the ambivalent role that alchemical discourse played in the twentieth century—wavering between rejection and fascination—again we will have to include psychology in our analysis. And again, it is the intellectual relationship between Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Gustav Jung that is particularly indicative of the discursive reconfiguration of alchemy between psychology and modern science. This conversation had a lot of impact: “Jung ultimately set the terms of a psychological interpretation of alchemy for much of the rest of the century” (Morrisson 2007, 190). Jung was interested in alchemy early on, after he had encountered this field through the works of Herbert Silberer in 1914; but his fascination with alchemy fully blossomed only later, at the end of the 1920s, when he started to link the mandala symbolism to alchemical motives (Ellenberger 1970, 719–723; Gieser 2005, 198–200; Miller 2009, 47–50; see Jung 1980, 118–260). Jung presented a lecture at the Eranos meeting, published in the Eranos-Jahrbuch 1936 under the title “Die Erlösungsvorstellungen in der Alchemie” (“The Redemption Motives in Alchemy”). This lecture was integrated, although in a completely new form, as one part of Jung’s monograph Psychologie und Alchemie (“Psychology and Alchemy”), which was first published in 1944, but of which a second edition was already necessary in 1952, much to the astonishment of the author (see his 1951 preface to the second edition in Jung 1980).

Jung was interested in alchemy particularly because he was struck by the apparent similarity between alchemical symbolism and the dreams of modern individuals. In a fairly eclectic way, Jung immersed himself seriously in the history of alchemical literature and ideas, which led him to the construction of alchemy as a tradition that is mainly interested in psychological and spiritual dimensions (Jung 1980, 282–331). According to Jung, alchemical symbolism is concerned with an evolutionary process that strives to attain its highest form. The ‘maturing’ of the metals can be compared to the ‘individuation’ of the human psyche in its passing through various stages of purification. The Philosopher’s Stone was essentially the psychological process of individuation (McLynn 1996, 428–432). The ‘Great Work’ (opus) is the combination of conflicting forces into a new and unified harmony. “The basis of the opus is the materia prima, which is one of the most famous secrets of alchemy,” Jung noted (1980, 364, emphasis added; see the entire chapter on prima materia in Jung 1980, 364–394). Jung described the prima materia as a universal category that is characterized by ubiquity: “we can have it always and everywhere; i.e., the projection can take place all the time and everywhere” (Jung 1980, 371). The speculation about a primary matter that underlies physical and spiritual processes is a reconfiguration of discourse strands that belong to the fields of science and psychology. The “procedure of disintegration and reconstruction has its equivalent in purely experimental science and also in therapeutic work” (Gieser 2005, 200). And this is where Wolfgang Pauli enters the stage.

Pauli encountered alchemy as a powerful symbolism in his own dreams, and he discussed the theory of alchemy and its implication with Jung in his own analysis and also in extended conversation that we know of from their letters (see the very good analysis in Gieser 2005, 198–211). Pauli thought that there must be a ‘fine structure’ (a recurring motif in his dreams) and a ‘neutral language’ underlying the principles of both physics and psychology (see also Jung’s approval of the term “neutral language” in Jung and Pauli 1952, 99). In his essay “Science and Western Thought” he asked whether modern science would now “be able to realise, on a higher plane, alchemy’s old dream of a psycho-physical unity, by the creation of a unified conceptual foundation for the scientific comprehension of the physical as well as the psychical” (Pauli 1994, 146). Pauli referred to Kepler as an antagonist of Fludd, Goethe’s “Faust” as an antagonist of Newton, as well as to Jung and the traditions of Hermeticism and Rosicrucianism (ibid.). In this short question, which Pauli regarded as “vital for contemporary science” (ibid.), the discursive combination of ‘psyche/psychology,’ ‘physics,’ ‘science,’ and ‘alchemy’ materializes in a nutshell. What is more, Pauli’s unified language is nothing other than the ‘language of nature’ that is known from European intellectual history (Gieser 2005, 207, with reference to Pauli’s letter to Fierz, dating 21 August 1948). Suzanne Gieser’s conclusion is to the point:

It is no surprise that this reconfiguration of psychology and physics in a quest for universal patterns of the cosmos was also of high interest to representatives of occultist or magical discourse. An influential example is Israel Regardie (1907–1985), who had a solid knowledge of Jungian psychoanalysis, which he combined with his immersion in Golden Dawn and Enochian magic traditions. In 1937, Regardie published his The Philosopher’s Stone: A Modern Comparative Approach to Alchemy from the Psychological and Magical Points of View, followed by a major publication entitled The Middle Pillar: The Balance between Mind and Magic (1938). The author claimed that there is an intrinsic relation between ritual magic and psychology, which finds expression in the alchemical work and the Philosopher’s Stone, “a symbol for spiritual illumination and expanded consciousness” (quoted from Morrisson 2007, 191). He even recommended that psychotherapists should use the Lesser Banishing Ritual and the Middle Pillar exercise from the Golden Dawn in their sessions (Morrisson 2007, 191).

This interpretation is not far from Eliade’s construction of alchemy. Only a few years after Regardie, Eliade published The Forge and the Crucible (French original appeared in 1956). In his foreword he leaves no doubt about his real interests:

All of the ingredients of the new discursive constellation are clearly visible here; Eliade, the professor of religion, lends authority to the combination of RELIGION, SCIENCE, NATURE, MAGIC, EXPERIENCE, MOTHER EARTH, VITALISM, TRANSMUTATION, and ALCHEMY. Eliade’s book is not without academic bloopers, such as using the “distillation of sperm” as a link between spiritual alchemy, biology, and what today is known as ‘cognitive science of religion’:

In his preface to the 1978 Phoenix Edition, Eliade expressed his thanks to historians of science who received his book favorably, among them A.G. Debus, J. Needham, and W.-E. Peuckert (Eliade 1978a, 16). And indeed, the spiritual interpretation of alchemy was still en vogue in academic literature of the 1980s (see Hoheisel 1986 as an example).

Another materialization of this discursive knot can be mentioned here—the merging of occultist and psychological interpretations with NEW AGE and psychedelic discourses.²⁸ From Helena P. Blavatsky to Arthur Machen and Alan Watts, psychedelic experiences with drugs have repeatedly been linked to interpretations of alchemical processes (Morrisson 2007, 191–193; see also Hanegraaff 2013), and ‘psychedelic alchemy’ is a recurring keyword on the Internet today. Mark S. Morrisson notes:

This is only partly true, however. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, ALCHEMY still resonates in the work of physicists and philosophers. One prominent example is David Deutsch, mentioned already in the last chapter. Deutsch pioneered the field of quantum computation by formulating a description for a quantum Turing machine as well as specifying an algorithm designed to run on a quantum computer. But more importantly for us, he is one of the leading intellectuals who are interested in the links between quantum mechanics and philosophy. Being an advocate of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, Deutsch writes about the general implications of this theory, including time travel (Deutsch 1997, 289 – 320) and other things that appear counter-intuitive but are in accordance with the theories discussed by physicists today. In The Beginning of Infinity, the author seeks to find the basis of progress in human development. He describes this progress in very optimistic ways and argues that from all fields of science and philosophy

The subtitle of this book is Explanations that Transform the World. The discourse strand of ‘transformation’ is not by chance woven into the author’s narrative. Deutsch explicitly links his project to the alchemical quest, though in a modernized form. He explains that the stars shine because they are powered by the nuclear energy that is released by transmutation, i. e., the conversion of one chemical element (mainly hydrogen) into another (mainly helium). There are some forms of transmutation that happen on earth, such as the decay of radioactive elements. Scientifically demonstrated for radioactivity only in 1901, the concept of transmutation, however, “was ancient. Alchemists had dreamed for centuries of transmuting ‘base metals’, such as iron or lead, into gold. They never came close to understanding what it would take to achieve that, so they never did so. But scientists in the twentieth century did” (Deutsch 2012, 1). With his narrative of a general transformation of the entire world and the quest for complete understanding of the human being, Deutsch participates in the “Dreams of a Final Theory” (Weinberg 1992), but he also stands in a long tradition of esoteric discourse—from the Further Reformation of the seventeenth century (von Stuckrad 2010a, 178–179) to the ‘New Age movement’ speculating about the breakthrough of human consciousness—that has been reactivated by contemporary scientists.

Deutsch is very critical about the limits of reductionist approaches in physics and the natural sciences, but he is as critical of their opposite, i.e., holism (Deutsch 1997, 20–21). Perhaps this is what makes his contribution to ALCHEMY typical of the twenty-first century. With an awareness of the limits of science, he nonetheless retains an ideology of progress and perfect knowledge. The universal laws are adopted and integrated into physical laws in the nascent ‘Theory of Everything.’ He argues that “if we understand knowledge and adaptation as structure which extends across large numbers of universes, then we expect the principles of epistemology and evolution to be expressed directly as laws about the structure of the multiverse. That is, they are physical laws, but at an emergent level” (Deutsch 1997, 345, emphasis original). Weaving together epistemology and physics—or ‘knowledge’ and ‘transmutation’—in a Fabric of Reality (the title of his 1997 book), he reassembles the discourse strands of ALCHEMY in a creative way. For instance, he links the natural conditions “to create an open-ended stream of explanatory knowledge” (Deutsch 2012, 60) to the laws of physics, since “many of the necessary transformations require energy: something must power conjectures and scientific experiments and all those manufacturing processes” (Deutsch 2012, 61, emphasis original)—‘energy’ here is the concept as it is used in theoretical physics, but at the same time it is a general metaphor of ‘powering’ the progress of knowledge accumulation in the evolution of the multiverse. As we will see in the next chapter, the term ‘energy’ plays a significant role in monistic discourse as well.