of white quartz through it—in order to try out some of Elizabeth’s sentences on my tongue. The words conjured her. The dark began to gather outside. It was like lifting the latch and walking into an empty house without an invitation.
Play the word-association game and throw in
alchemy.
Most people, even clever people, will say
gold
first of all, then follow up with phrases like
philosopher’s stone
or
elixir of life.
Most people have this idea that alchemists were all medieval wizards trying to find the philosopher’s stone, a mythical powder that would turn base metals to gold, and that they had some kind of clandestine brotherhood with secret handshakes. But there were important reasons for the secrecy. Alchemists knew that the precious knowledge and formulas the ancients had carved out over hundreds of years, in Babylon, Mesopotamia, China, and Egypt, could only be passed among people who knew what they were doing, the initiated—people who spoke the secret language. Men like Nicolas Flamel, Paracelsus, John Dee, Agrippa, and Agricola. And they believed in the ritual of discovery, thought that every generation coming to these sacred questions had to seek these things out for themselves, as Hermes Trismegistus insisted. The knowledge was dangerous, and its potency would be lost if it were not kept hidden and concentrated. It had to be forever rediscovered.
There are so many different kinds of alchemists and alchemy, across so many cultures and beliefs, it’s almost impossible to say precisely what alchemy was, or is, in any absolute sense. Alchemists, like our scientists today, were trying to uncover nature’s secrets, her patterns and processes, trying to work out how the five elements—earth, fire, water, space, air—transmuted into and out of each other under various astrological conditions to make up all forms of matter. They believed that everything, even those things that
seemed
inert, was actually teeming with spirits and that therefore everything could be raised or provoked into fuller form. They believed that all matter was on the move, moving into and out of everything else, waxing into or waning away from fullness so that lead fell short of gold, just as mortal man fell short of immortality. Under a certain pattern of stars and through fire, any matter (like lead) or spirit (like the human soul) might be “healed” or “killed” or “perfected” or “transmuted” into a greater state. A blooming would take place. It had a rare beauty, this secret hybrid art made up of magic, chemistry, philosophy, hermetic thought, sacred geometry, and cosmology, a beauty in that passion to make things bloom into a fuller being. It made me think of transubstantiation—the wine into blood, the burning bush, Lazarus raised from the dead.
The first words after the title page of
The Alchemist
were not Elizabeth’s. She had set an epigraph on the front page, like an inscription carved over the entrance porch. It was a quotation from Richard Westfall’s definitive Newton biography
Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton,
published in 1980; I found the quotation marked up in Elizabeth’s copy in a footnote on page 21 of Westfall’s book in her library. She’d drawn a pencil ring round it. It may have been only a footnote, but it sat there in the foundations of Westfall’s book like a talisman to ward off bad spirits. A disclaimer. A statement of incredulity.
All the Newton scholars knew that the great man practised alchemy—there was no getting round that. Like hundreds before him, Newton believed that the riddles of the universe were to be found in certain secret papers and traditions handed down by the initiated in an unbroken chain from the time of the great hermetic revelations in ancient Alexandria and China. Richard Westfall—his friends called him Sam—honest and meticulous, confessed in that footnote that he was embarrassed and confounded by Newton’s alchemy. He had to say
Play the word-association game and throw in
alchemy.
Most people, even clever people, will say
gold
first of all, then follow up with phrases like
philosopher’s stone
or
elixir of life.
Most people have this idea that alchemists were all medieval wizards trying to find the philosopher’s stone, a mythical powder that would turn base metals to gold, and that they had some kind of clandestine brotherhood with secret handshakes. But there were important reasons for the secrecy. Alchemists knew that the precious knowledge and formulas the ancients had carved out over hundreds of years, in Babylon, Mesopotamia, China, and Egypt, could only be passed among people who knew what they were doing, the initiated—people who spoke the secret language. Men like Nicolas Flamel, Paracelsus, John Dee, Agrippa, and Agricola. And they believed in the ritual of discovery, thought that every generation coming to these sacred questions had to seek these things out for themselves, as Hermes Trismegistus insisted. The knowledge was dangerous, and its potency would be lost if it were not kept hidden and concentrated. It had to be forever rediscovered.
There are so many different kinds of alchemists and alchemy, across so many cultures and beliefs, it’s almost impossible to say precisely what alchemy was, or is, in any absolute sense. Alchemists, like our scientists today, were trying to uncover nature’s secrets, her patterns and processes, trying to work out how the five elements—earth, fire, water, space, air—transmuted into and out of each other under various astrological conditions to make up all forms of matter. They believed that everything, even those things that
seemed
inert, was actually teeming with spirits and that therefore everything could be raised or provoked into fuller form. They believed that all matter was on the move, moving into and out of everything else, waxing into or waning away from fullness so that lead fell short of gold, just as mortal man fell short of immortality. Under a certain pattern of stars and through fire, any matter (like lead) or spirit (like the human soul) might be “healed” or “killed” or “perfected” or “transmuted” into a greater state. A blooming would take place. It had a rare beauty, this secret hybrid art made up of magic, chemistry, philosophy, hermetic thought, sacred geometry, and cosmology, a beauty in that passion to make things bloom into a fuller being. It made me think of transubstantiation—the wine into blood, the burning bush, Lazarus raised from the dead.
The first words after the title page of
The Alchemist
were not Elizabeth’s. She had set an epigraph on the front page, like an inscription carved over the entrance porch. It was a quotation from Richard Westfall’s definitive Newton biography
Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton,
published in 1980; I found the quotation marked up in Elizabeth’s copy in a footnote on page 21 of Westfall’s book in her library. She’d drawn a pencil ring round it. It may have been only a footnote, but it sat there in the foundations of Westfall’s book like a talisman to ward off bad spirits. A disclaimer. A statement of incredulity.
All the Newton scholars knew that the great man practised alchemy—there was no getting round that. Like hundreds before him, Newton believed that the riddles of the universe were to be found in certain secret papers and traditions handed down by the initiated in an unbroken chain from the time of the great hermetic revelations in ancient Alexandria and China. Richard Westfall—his friends called him Sam—honest and meticulous, confessed in that footnote that he was embarrassed and confounded by Newton’s alchemy. He had to say
Similar Books
