Alchemy and Alchemists

Alchemy can also be seen to have played a part in the arts and culture. Jonson’s play is no doubt the most celebrated example, and Blackadder the Second the most recent, but alchemical ideas have also found their way into the works of Honoré de Balzac, Thomas Mann, the art of Joseph Beuys and Marcel Duchamp, countless books in the self-help sections of bookshops, and into more recent novels such as Lindsay Clarke’s Whitbread Prize-winning novel The Chymical Wedding, Patrick Harpur’s Mercurius and Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle.

Alchemical books were often profusely illustrated. Anyone familiar with the history of Western art will, however, find the images strangely timeless and possibly a little shocking. There are pictures of people tearing their own hearts out, or of bodies being dismembered. People are shown as cripples, as if to mirror their crippled or limited understanding of the art, or the world (if indeed there is ultimately a difference). Sexual imagery is strong, with the alchemical archetypes of the King and Queen frequently portrayed engaging in sexual intercourse. In others, a man has a tree growing out of his body where his penis should be. Men and women merge, not just in the sexual act, but to become hermaphrodites. It seems clear that these images were to be read or meditated upon, not merely looked at. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung believed that, whatever sort of gold the alchemists were looking for, they had in fact discovered the unconscious, and that their frequently strong, challenging images were portraits of various states of consciousness that could lead us into a greater understanding of ourselves.

Perhaps more interestingly, so did most of the founders of modern science, men such as Jean Baptiste van Helmont, Robert Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton. Bacon discovered the properties of antimony, while the great Arab alchemist Alhazen invented the camera obscura.