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Beside the codenames and esoteric symbols inherited from Graeco-Egyptian antiquity, the later Arabic alchemical tradition also adopted motifs drawn from the Qur'an: from the blessed olive tree of the famous Light Verse (Q 24.35) to the burning bush and Moses' staff. This interweaving of scripture and alchemical theory is especially noticeable in one of the major works of the post-Jābirian corpus, Shudhūr al-dhahab (Shards of Gold) by the Moroccan poet Ibn Arfaʿ Raʾs (fl. sixth/twelfth century), as well as in Ibn Arfaʿ Raʾs's self-penned commentary, Hall mushkilāt al-Shudhūr (The Solution to the Obscurities in the 'Shards'). But was the use of such motifs simply a literary device or did Ibn Arfaʿ Raʾs claimto discern a hidden alchemical meaning embedded in the qur'anic text? Focusing on this unexplored strand of the Islamic exegetical tradition, this article examines the premises put forward by Ibn Arfaʿ Raʾs in support of an alchemical reading of scripture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article informs about intellectual history of efforts to discern a correspondence between microcosms and macrocosms as histories that trace the origins and fate of the division between mikrokosmos with Plato or Aristotle. Topics include sounding in the religious thought of antiquity, alchemists, and natural philosophy of the sixteenth century; and twentieth-century philosopher George Perrigo Conger, it was scientific revolution that stripped microcosmic theories of miniature solar systems.

The author offers a case study for the history of sorcery in Morocco through a treatise written by a 17th century Moroccan astronomer and alchemist. Topics discussed include the fascination and alienation associated with sorcery, the importance of the occult in understanding premodern Islamicate intellectual history, the relevance of North Africa in appreciating the nature of this importance, and the slippage between sorcery and magic.

As her second and third names suggest, Theresa Kopp Baumann (1856–1944) was the daughter and subsequently the wife of eminent German academic chemists. Her substantial unpublished autobiography, written ca. 1910 and presented here in English translation in an edited and considerably abridged form, provides unique insight from a privileged female perspective into the socio-cultural aspects of German academic science in its period of greatest international reputation and influence. In the two cases-in-point that are vividly recounted there – her life as daughter and then as wife – it also gives shape and colour to the many ways in which gendered domestic roles invisibly condition and assist scientific activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until now, the only known source on a curious incident in Robert Boyle's life was the account of his laboratory assistant Ambrose Godfrey regarding one anonymous "Crosey-Crucian." It survives only in excerpts and paraphrases published in 1858. Based on the recent identification of this adept as Peter Moritz, a German alchemist and religious dissenter, this paper presents his own perspective as expressed in an epistolary document originally addressed to Boyle. It emerges that the stock tale of alchemical fraud dominating Godfrey's account does not do justice to the episode's complexities. Instead, it becomes possible to perceive how the fraud narrative itself – construed as an implicit and increasing scepticism towards the claims of alchemical practitioners – affected events as they unfolded. Boyle initially offered modest support yet soon reduced it, as he observed that Moritz's behaviour did not correspond to that expected of a paid labourer. Despite this, most of the experiments Moritz conducted in London clearly reflected Boyle's long-standing interests. As Godfrey had promised financial assistance without Boyle's backing, Moritz accused the laboratory assistant of embezzling funds and of undermining his livelihood by extracting arcana for payments that were subsequently discounted or withheld altogether. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the late author Willa Cather's depictions of social classes, alchemical symbolism, and the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in her literary works such as "Paul's Case: A Study in Temperament" and "Double Birthday." Skepticism about alchemists and the transmutation of substances is assessed, along with material refinement processes and examinations of various literary characters in Cather's works.

Examples of biological rhythmicity mounted in the first half of the twentieth century, but the nature of biological rhythms – whether they were direct responses to rhythmic environmental stimuli or generated internally by biological clocks or oscillators – remained sharply disputed. When Frank A. Brown Jr. observed precise twenty-four-hour rhythms in the colour changes of fiddler crabs that were isolated from changes in environmental lighting that could synchronise them with the daily cycle, he rejected the internal clock as an explanation, owing to his belief that such a biological mechanism must operate chemically and consequently run faster at higher temperatures (Van't Hoff's rule), which was not borne out by his experiments. Colin Pittendrigh was committed to the idea that the rhythms were generated by unknown, temperature-compensated mechanisms, without offering any explanation for how this might be accomplished. At the core of their dispute, which was aired publicly from 1954 until Brown's death in 1983, was a difference in belief: Brown's fundamental reductionism, which required biological processes to conform to the laws of chemistry, vs. Pittendrigh's trust in the power of evolution to select for such a temperature compensated biological clock, for which no plausible chemical model then existed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While recent historical studies have uncovered the intercontinental reputations of New England alchemists, much still remains to be known about actual attitudes concerning alchemy in the early colonies. Focusing on a corpus of roughly a dozen untranslated, and all but entirely unexamined Latin orations (ca. 200 pages) composed by Harvard College's presidents and students in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, I argue that these new sources reveal the ambivalent, occasionally antagonistic attitude that educated New England men held towards the art of alchemy. Appreciating what they regarded as, in some cases, selfless, Christian efforts to cure diseases, these Harvard elite speakers still worried that alongside pious investigators had cropped up some self-serving charlatans, those who cared not for the communal promises of the art, but only the base financial reward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As portrayed in The Alchemist, Ben Jonson's London grappled with the challenges of a burgeoning urban life and its effects on morality and consumption. While using his authorship as lectern was not unique, Jonson's message, that the order of improving one's status stood to be perverted, was; and in featuring the local preoccupation with alchemy and the apocalypse, he revealed the corrupt and toxic relationship between the city's economic and religious zeal. Martin Luther's sixteenth century idea of a new religion called for man's return to his covenant with God and to simple faith. By Jonson's time however, London faced an additional battle from within, as extreme religion gained ground. Because the play was coterminous with Jonson's audience's lives, they were well-aware that pure-Protestants provoked anxieties to gather believers. In straining to escape their present and to a future marked by heavenly expectations, Jonson's characters evoked his contemporaries' desires to address their own exigencies. By capturing his audience's attention referencing popular current events, Jonson created a stage for his greater concern, that faith in economic as well as religious transcendence exposed his milieu to divisive radicalism and victimization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes approaches at the reconstruction of an alchemical laboratory as depicted in the paintings of old masters. Problem of different indirect sources is outlined, because no original laboratory has survived intact up to the present. There are archeological findings, and, more importantly, written evidence. Works of metallurgists and assayers of the period (V. Biringuccio, G. Agricola, L. Ercker) were consulted, as well as treatises of several outstanding alchemists (Sebald Schwertzer, Mathäus Brandau, Michael Maier, and Heinrich Khunrath). Further sources include accounts for equipment, and correspondence between laboratory owners. The works of the alchemists usually provide recipes, and based on them, we may figure out what kind of equipment was used. Finally, these findings are compared with three works (paintings and engravings) by the masters from 16 and 17th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using previously neglected manuscript sources, this paper sheds light on a puzzling episode in the later life of Robert Boyle and the early career of his laboratory assistant Ambrose Godfrey. Currently, the only account of their disappointing encounter with an unnamed German adept derives from Godfrey's lost manuscript treatise 'An Apology and Letter touching a Crosey- Crucian', excerpts of which were published in 1858. Based on a comparison between that source and the papers of the virtually forgotten chymical practitioner and convicted heretic Peter Moritz (1638-ca. 1700), the authors argue that Godfrey's anonymous 'Crosey- Crucian' was none other than Moritz himself. The first part establishes that various significant and seemingly insignificant details agree precisely and thus corroborate this identification. The second part focuses on those passages among Moritz's papers that contain explicit evidence of his dealings with both Boyle and Godfrey, a sheet of notes and a lengthy epistolary 'Memorial' to an unnamed addressee. The authors contend that Moritz's 'Memorial' is a version of the same document that the adept sought to deliver to Boyle who refused to accept it, according to Godfrey's 'Apology'. For this reason, and on the basis of strong internal evidence, Boyle is identified as the intended recipient of Moritz's 'Memorial'. Taken together, these two identifications solve a long-standing riddle in Boyle scholarship and introduce a significant addition to his extant correspondence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reconsiders a little-known collection of Latin alchemical recipes from the fifteenth century attributed to one "Leonard of Marburg." Preserved today in only one manuscript (MS Latin 14005, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris), these recipes were collected over the course of the narrator's arduous travels ranging from Italy, to Poland, to Armenia—or so Leonard claims. Are we supposed to believe him? Reading this alchemical text alongside other medieval travel narratives, I show how this travel narrative signals its affiliations with that genre and, in so doing, invites us to regard it as a literary experiment rather than a record of a medieval traveling alchemist's alchemical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A scholarly consensus has long held that in redefining alchemy, Paracelsus rejected metallic transmutation. I show here, however, that for most of his career Paracelsus believed that it was possible to change one metal into another, and even late in his short life he did not break with that view. Furthermore, in certain places in his works he also represented himself, occasionally directly and more often obliquely, as a practical transmutationist. Because Paracelsus not only acknowledged that metallic transmutations were theoretically possible but also claimed to have carried them out in practice, we must regard him as (among other things) a transmutational alchemist. As such, he had more in common than historians have generally admitted with both his medieval predecessors and his posthumous followers. The Paracelsian alchemists of the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not wrong to situate Paracelsus within the alchemical tradition, nor to connect their own goldmaking interests to his. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paracelsus was not only a reformer of medicine with a preference for medical alchemy, but also emerged as a radical church reformer. However, he only rarely used the imagery of alchemy as a parable for theological salvation. Fire as the driving force for every alchemical process was also suitable as an image for the purification of souls. A central idea of alchemy, to transfer a substance from its still impure original state into the purified final state, was very much in line with Paracelsus's doctrine of the Last Supper, according to which the mortal human who had descended from Adam is to be brought to a new birth through baptism with the Holy Spirit. As an alchemist, Paracelsus was keenly interested in the transfiguration of Christ, which he first explained alchemically, but later magically, probably according to the model of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As William R. Newman has already shown, the alchemical homunculus described in the pseudo-Paracelsian writing De natura rerum was not the only kind of "homunculus" present in the works of (or attributed to) Paracelsus. Two other important kinds of "homunculi" indeed appeared in other treatises: one in De homunculis et monstris and the other in both Vom langen Leben and the Liber de imaginibus. This article focuses on the latter tract and its relationships with De natura rerum. After discussing the authenticity of the Liber de imaginibus, I will provide a brief analysis of its content and discuss the major topics common to the two treatises: the "signatures of things" and the homunculus. By studying the reception of the latter, I will show how the alchemical conception of the homunculus, as explained in De natura rerum, quickly established itself as the most prominent notion despite the fact that the golem-like version of Vom langen Leben and De imaginibus had nearly as much success at first among Paracelsians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution analyses accounts of the refining of mercury in the printed works of Biringuccio, Agricola, and Barba and in archival documents related to mercury production at Almadén. Similarities in printed texts, coupled with the lack of connections of their authors to significant sites of mercury mining in the early modern world, suggest that these authors developed their accounts not through personal experience or knowledge exchanges with practitioners but through the types of textual borrowings associated with period humanist scholarship. Examination of local archival sources produced at Almadén indicates, moreover, the lack of correspondence between these printed accounts and local practices at the foremost site of mercury production in early modern Europe. These findings indicate the continuing importance of textual forms of scholarship in the production of period technical knowledge and the dangers of using such learned treatises as indicators of actual practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argument: Hans Egede (1686–1758), the famous missionary and natural historian in Greenland, was one of very few known Norwegian alchemists. This article seeks to place Egede's alchemy in the context of the European alchemical tradition by identifying his sources in alchemical literature. Through an analysis of Egede's account of an alchemical experiment performed by him in 1727, Ole Borch, Johann Joachim Becher, and Michael Sendivogius are identified as his main sources. Egede's procedure and choice of materials are shown to be based on texts by these authors. The article argues that Egede's alchemical interest was more pervasive than hitherto understood, through the demonstration of connections between his alchemical studies and his work as a natural historian. Further it is argued that Egede's alchemy was not unique or anachronistic but exemplifies the continued belief in and practice of transmutational alchemy in Denmark-Norway in the early decades of the eighteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with political and educational-cultural situation in Georgia during the reign of King Vakhtang VI (XVIII century). It describes the book on chemistry compiled and published by Vakhtang VI. The methods of chemical experiments highlighted in the book are compared to the methods of early alchemists, such as: Jābir ibn Hayyān, Muhammad ibn Zakariyā Rāzī, Liebau and others. The article summarizes the methods to which Vakhtang VI agreed and also indicates the techniques, slightly differently presented in his records. The paper also points out how the King could get information on chemistry. It gives an assumption that the scientific information most likely was brought by travelers who were close to the king or was accumulated from the early period and was also linked with journeys. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17807/orbital.v8i3.839

Based on four extant letters the famous Polish alchemist Michael Sendivogius wrote to Emperor Rudolf II and his first chamberlain Hans Popp between 1597 and 1602, this paper adds to a growing body of revisionist scholarship on alchemy in Rudolfine Prague. Unlike most of his many rivals - including luminaries such as John Dee and Michael Maier - who hoped for the Emperor's patronage in vain, Sendivogius officially became a courtier at the imperial court in 1594. As such he was in the privileged position of having access to the Emperor and his close advisors. The surviving correspondence shows how the Pole successfully balanced his alchemical promises against Rudolf's expectations for a number of years. The fact that even Sendivogius found it difficult to translate imperial patronage into ready money suggests that Emperor Rudolf II was considerably more circumspect and less gullible than the widespread cliché suggests. Fully contextualised by all available sources on Sendivogius' early career, the four letters emerge as important documents regarding the Polish adept and alchemical patronage in Rudolfine Prague. They also shed new light on the circumstances which led to the writing and publication of Sendivogius' famous treatise De lapide philosophorum (Novum lumen chymicum). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the modern-day alchemy, citing a survey of transmutation experimentalists which defines as a medieval chemical science. It cites on the philosophy that aimed to achieve the transmutation of the base metals into gold. The article also discusses many academics that were destroyed which make historical interpretation difficult.

Old Anatolian Turkish, belonging to the Oghuz group of Turkic languages, was a written literary language used from the beginning of the thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth century in and around Anatolia. Many works in prose and verse as original, adaptation or translation were produced on various subjects with diverse literary genres and forms in both Old Anatolian Turkish and its descendant, Ottoman Turkish. Astronomy, geography, physics, agriculture, medicine, and alchemy are among the most common topics of the non-literary works drawn up during and after this period. Alchemy, which also forms the subject of this paper, is identified as the transmutation of the base metals into precious ones, such as gold and silver. Based on the critical edition and translation of Risāle-i Kimyā ("The treatise on alchemy") written by "ĀĢıḳ PaĢa (b. 670/1272, d. KırĢehir 732/1333), this paper aims to introduce the treatise in question. As far as it can be determined, Risāle-i Kimyā survives in three manuscript copies, one of which is in the Süleymaniye Manuscript Library in Istanbul. The second one is in the Atatürk Library of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality and the third one is in the Hasan PaĢa Public Library in Çorum, Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series contains numerous references to alchemy. On a symbolic level, both Harry Potter and his archenemy Voldemort can be read as rival alchemists, one pursuing alchemy as a spiritual discipline and the other engaged in a purely material quest for physical immortality. Voldemort's eventual defeat can be interpreted in light of his flawed understanding of the moral and spiritual side of the alchemical work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the latter half of the sixteenth century the Roman Inquisition developed criteria to prosecute a series of operative arts, including various forms of divination and magic. Its officials had little interest in alchemy. During that period the Roman Inquisition tried few people for practising alchemy, and it was rarely discussed in official documents. Justifications for prosecuting alchemists did exist, however. In his influential handbook, Directorium inquisitorum, the fourteenth-century inquisitor Nicholas Eymerich had developed a clear rationale for the investigation and prosecution of alchemists as heretics. His position was endorsed in the 1570s by Francisco Peña in his commentary on Eymerich’s handbook. In this article I explore the reasons why alchemy held this ambiguous status. I argue that members of the Dominican Order developed two traditions of thinking about alchemy from Aquinas’s thought. The first, and closest to Aquinas’s own belief, held that alchemy was a natural art that posed no danger to the Christian faith. The second, developed by Eymerich from a selective reading of Aquinas’s writings, indicated specific circumstances in which alchemists could be investigated. The Roman Inquisition’s response to alchemy vacillated between the positions advocated by Aquinas and Eymerich. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to clarify the role played by the alchemist Georg Friedrich Johnssen (c.1726-1775) in the emergence of the notion that Freemasonry and other secret societies in the second half of the eighteenth-century were ruled by figures whose identity was a secret and who came to be described as unknown superiors. Although Johnssen’s interest in alchemy might seem to be a source of this notion of secret authority, a more probing inquiry reveals that the unknown superiors arose as a result of a historical (and not an esoteric) conception of the secret of Freemasonry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates the importance of alchemical symbolism in Victorian fairy tales. Contrary to Jungian analysts who conceived alchemy as forgotten knowledge, this study shows the vivid tradition of alchemical symbolism in Victorian literature. This work takes the readers through the first stage of the alchemical opus reflected in fairy tale symbols, explains the psychological and spiritual purposes of alchemy and helps them to understand the Victorian visions of mystical transformation. It emphasises the importance of spirituality in Victorian times and accounts for the similarity between Victorian and alchemical paths of transformation of the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]