ambix, Vol. 60 No.

4, November, 2013, 311322

INTRODUCTION

Alchemy and Religion in Christian

Europe
Tara Nummedal
Department of History, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

In his musings on the Last Days, printed posthumously in Table Talk, Martin Luther
turned to the subject of alchemy. The science of alchymy I like well, and, indeed, tis
the philosophy of the ancients, he reportedly told his companions. While Luther
welcomed the profits it brings in melting metals, in decocting, preparing, extract-
ing, and distilling herbs, [and] roots, he was drawn to it in the context of his
faith as well. I like it also for the sake of the allegory and secret signification,
which is exceedingly fine, touching the resurrection of the dead at the last day,
he observed.

For, as in a furnace the fire extracts and separates from a substance the other portions,
and carries upward the spirit, the life, the sap, the strength, while the unclean matter, the
dregs, remain at the bottom, like a dead and worthless carcass; even so God, at the day of
judgment, will separate all things through fire, the righteous from the ungodly. The
Christians and righteous shall ascend upward into heaven, and there live everlastingly,
but the wicked and the ungodly, as the dross and filth, shall remain in hell, and there
be damned.1

Martin Luther was not an alchemist, of course, but the reformers allusion to
alchemy in discussing the Day of Judgment hints at how broadly the art resonated
as a way of engaging religion in sixteenth-century Europe.
Indeed, from the moment alchemical texts and ideas began to circulate in Euro-
pean scholarly circles in the twelfth century, alchemists and theologians alike
explored numerous connections between alchemy and Christianity. Like Luther,
some drew on alchemy as a way of explicating theological concepts (or vice
versa), while others drew analogies between the creation and operation of alchem-
ical materials and Biblical passages, or considered the effects of alchemical medicines
on the body in relation to the bodies of extraordinary figures like Adam, the Virgin
Mary, or the saints. Still others pondered whether and how alchemists skills might
1
Martin Luther, Of the Resurrection, Book DCCLX, The Table-Talk of Martin Luther, trans. William Hazlitt
(London: George Bell and Sons, 1878), 826. For the Latin original, see Martin Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke:
kritische Gesamtausgabe [Abt. 2]. Vol. 1, Tischreden (Weimar: H. Bhlaus Nachfolger, 19121921), 1149.

Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry 2013 DOI 10.1179/0002698013Z.00000000036
312 TARA NUMMEDAL

be useful during the End Times, or drew on exegetical techniques developed to

understand Scripture in order to parse difficult alchemical texts. It is certainly poss-
ible to identify points of tension between alchemists and institutional churches, and
it is undoubtedly the case that some alchemists saw only a superficial connection
between their art and their faith. Nevertheless, many individuals clearly sought to
integrate their faith with their work in the laboratory or library, understanding
alchemy and Christianity as interlocking methods of exploring the human, divine,
and natural worlds.2
Scholars have debated whether alchemy was somehow more closely linked to reli-
gion than other branches of natural knowledge in medieval and early modern
Europe.3 In the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, figures such as Margaret
Atwood, Ethan Allen Hitchcock, and Arthur Waite interpreted all alchemy as intrin-
sically and uniquely spiritual. More recently, Lawrence M. Principe and William
R. Newman have articulated a powerful critique of this spiritual interpretation
of alchemy as simply unsustainable in light of the historical record.4 As they put it
in their oft-cited 2001 essay, Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy,

it goes without question that alchemy and religion (or spirituality of various kinds) inter-
penetrated one another in the medieval and early modern periods, and that each bor-
rowed terms and concepts from the other. This fact is not, however, remarkable in
itself, nor is such interpenetration with religion unique to alchemy.5

Although their arguments did not go entirely uncontested, Principe and Newman
cleared the way for more rigorous, historical scholarship, and in the past decade
scholars have sought to construct a more subtle and nuanced understanding of
the complex relationship between alchemy and religion.6 Clearly many European
alchemistsjust like their fellow naturalists, physicians, and astronomerssaw
profound links between the divine order and their manipulations of nature. If it is
unsurprising that alchemists were engaged with religion (or, conversely, that theolo-
gians were interested in alchemy), the four essays in this issue invite us to consider in
more detail precisely how these two traditions intersected in medieval and early
modern Christian Europe. The essays span the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries,
consider Catholic, Protestant, and even Jewish perspectives, and incorporate alche-
mists scholarly, medical, and transmutational aspirations. Each author examines a
2
For a general overview, see Zachary Matus, Alchemy and Christianity in the Middle Ages, History Compass 10,
no. 2 (2012): 93445, and Lawrence M. Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2012), 6162, 190206.
3
Lawrence M. Principe and William R. Newman, for instance, have rejected this claim repeatedly. See, for example,
Principe and Newman, Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy, in Secrets of Nature: Astrology and
Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, ed. William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press,
2001), 400; Principe, Alchemy Restored, Isis 102, no. 2 (2011): 311, and The Secrets of Alchemy, 205.
4
Principe and Newman, Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy, especially 396401.
5
Principe and Newman, Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy, 400.
6
For two critiques of Newman and Principes claims, see Leah DeVun, Human Heaven: John of Rupescissas
Alchemy at the End of the World, in History in the Comic Mode, ed. Bruce Holsinger and Rachel Fulton
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 25161, and Bruce Janacek, Alchemical Belief: Occultism in the Reli-
gious Culture of Early Modern England (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 1314.
 ALCHEMY AND RELIGION IN CHRISTIAN EUROPE 313

particular moment in the evolving relationship between alchemy and religion in

Christian Europe, whether powerful alchemical interpretations of particular biblical
passages or theological concepts, the new exegetical potential of cabala for under-
standing alchemical texts, or alchemys insights about the imminence of the Last
Days. Together, however, the essays propose that alchemyparticularly its textual
practices and its promise of longevity and the perfection of matterresonated
with medieval and early modern religious culture in ways that were distinctive.
This task has its challenges, to be sure. Above all, it requires bridging fields
(history of science and the history of medieval Christianity, for example) that each
have their own vocabularies and sometimes operate in different professional
orbits today.7 The contributors to this volume rise to the challenge by reaching
across the scholarly and disciplinary boundaries of our own era to recover earlier
and very different earlier maps of knowledge. An additional difficulty is that it is
impossible to generalize about either alchemy or religion, given how dynamic
and contested each was in late medieval and early modern Europe. In fact, one of
the important lessons of recent work in the history of alchemy has been that
alchemy encompassed a huge variety of ideas, practices, and participants, while
the cultural spaces it has occupied have changed enormously over time, rendering
it nearly meaningless to speak of alchemy as if it were a timeless, coherent
entity.8 The same can be said of Christianity, of course, most obviously during the
Reformation, but before and after as well. Neither alchemy nor Christianity, in
other words, was monolithic or static. These four essays, therefore, rightly resist gen-
eralizations, drawing attention instead to some particularly fruitful and focused
examples of places where the intersection of alchemy and Christianity might yield
insight into both. It is my hope that these essays may serve as models for future
work on this topic.
In focusing on the relationships between alchemy and religion, the four contribu-
tors to this issue depart in some ways from recent work in the history of alchemy,
which has emphasized the revisionist project of rescuing the subject from the
realm of pseudoscience by demonstrating its historical importance to the develop-
ment of modern science and medicine. In light of this work, it is now clear that med-
ieval and early modern European alchemy addressed not only intellectual problems,
such as matter theory, but also practical concerns such as mining, medicine, com-
merce, and the limits of technology. As several recent review essays and synthetic
works on the history of alchemy make clear, alchemy has now been restored to

7
There are innumerable works on the topic of science and religion, however. For a point of entry into this broad
topic, see John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge and New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1991); Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, paperback
ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), and The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cam-
bridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Kevin Killeen and Peter J. Forshaw, eds., The Word
and the World: Biblical Exegesis and Early Modern Science (Basingstoke, England, and New York: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2007).
8
Tara Nummedal, Words and Works in the History of Alchemy, Isis 102, no. 2 (2011): 33037; Lawrence
M. Principe, Alchemy Restored, 310.
314 TARA NUMMEDAL

its rightful place in the history of science or medicine; in other words, historians have
shown that alchemy is related to the study of matter, experiment, vitalism, and print
culture, all of which lie at the heart of early modern science.9 Resituating alchemy as
central to the history of science and medicine has been crucial to demonstrating its
broad significance in medieval and early modern culture. In the process of detaching
alchemy from the occult, however, many of us have minimized or neglected
alchemys religious dimension.10 This issue, therefore, highlights innovative work
that seeks to integrate our increasingly sophisticated understanding of alchemy as
science and medicine with new insights into alchemys contributions to and reliance
on theology, eschatology, hagiography, and exegetical techniques in Christian
Europe. Bringing these four essays together also provides an opportunity to draw
attention to some of the excellent scholarship that laid the groundwork for this
task by establishing some central areas of inquiry and providing important and
detailed studies of key figures and themes.
The most obvious and well-known locus for exploring the question of alchemy
and religion has been alchemical metaphor and imagery, which both drew on Chris-
tianity to articulate laboratory processes and concepts, and also offered medieval
and early modern Europeans rich material for depicting, understanding, and
proving the truths of Christianity. Perhaps the most potent analogy was that
between the life of Christ and the stages of the philosophers stone. Just as Christ
had to be crucified in order to redeem humanity, the logic went, so too must the
alchemists materials undergo similar torments, even death and resurrection,
before they could in turn redeem base metals as the philosophers stone. The
fourteenth-century Franciscan John of Rupescissa offers only one example from
this rich tradition.11 In his striking interpretation of an earlier alchemical author,
pseudo-Arnald of Villanova, Rupescissa likens the third stage of the philosophers
stone, a distillation, to the crucifixion. Observing the digestion of alchemical
mercury and the ascent of its vapours to the head of the alembic, Rupescissa saw
Christs ascension on the cross: mercury is placed in the bottom of the vessel for
dissolution, he wrote, because what ascends from there is pure and spiritual,
and converted into powdery air and exalted in the cross of the head of the
alembic just like Christ, as master Arnald [of Villanova] says.12 Likewise, the
alchemical vessel that enclosed the final stage of the red stone resembled Christ
inside the sepulcher. Once the flames had brought out the internal redness of the

9
See, for example, the essays by Bruce Moran, Lawrence M. Principe, William R. Newman, Ku-ming (Kevin) Chang,
and Tara Nummedal in the Focus section on Alchemy and the History of Science, Isis 102, no. 2 (2011): 30037;
Marcos Martinn-Torres, Some Recent Developments in the Historiography of Alchemy, Ambix 58, no. 3 (2011):
21537; Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy, especially ch. 4; Bruce T. Moran, Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chem-
istry, and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
10
It is noteworthy, for instance, that the subject of alchemy and religion does not really feature at all in Marcos
Martinn-Torress fine 2011 review essay, Some Recent Developments.
11
Leah DeVun, Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time: John of Rupescissa in the Late Middle Ages (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2009), 10916.
12
John of Rupescissa, Liber lucis, as cited and translated in DeVun, Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time, 113
(hereafter Liber lucis).
 ALCHEMY AND RELIGION IN CHRISTIAN EUROPE 315

stone, the alchemist was to remove the red stone from its vessel so that it would
ascend from the sepulcher of the Most Excellent King, shining and glorious, resus-
citated from the dead and wearing a red diadem, just as Master Arnald has
attested.13 Although Rupescissa spun out this analogy in words, it appeared in
image as well, for example, in the successful Rosarium philosophorum, which
appeared in print in 1550 as the second volume of a compendium of alchemical texts.14
As Lean DeVun has argued particularly cogently, analogies such as that between
Christ and the philosophers stone were not just artefacts of the colourful religious
language of the Middle Ages: Christian imagery offered a tool for both structuring
and communicating alchemical concepts.15 Rupescissas emphasis on red in this
passagethe red stone, Christs red diademsuggested that the analogy between
Christ and the philosophers stone extended to Christs blood and the fecund,
redemptive powers it was commonly understood to bear as well. As DeVun
described this logic, The creation of the stone through alchemy reenacts the narra-
tive of the passion; hence, the stone may reenact the curative and salvific powers of
Christ.16 Just as Christ could cleanse the soul, Rupescissa implied, so too could the
philosophers stone cleanse metals, absolving them of their impurities and trans-
forming them into the noble metals, silver and gold. Several centuries later, the
sixteenth-century German Lutheran alchemist Anna Zieglerin drew on the
meaning of Christs blood elaborated around late medieval blood relics to commu-
nicate the nature of her own golden elixir, which she (not accidentally) called the
lions blood. Like Christs blood, the lions blood was vivifying, abundant, and gen-
erative, capable of generating mineral, vegetable, and even human life; it was also
redemptive. Just as late medieval devotional writers emphasized the power of
Christs blood to wash, cleanse, restore, and cure both bodily and spiritual afflic-
tions, so too could Anna Zieglerins lions blood cure leprosy in humans and
metals alike. Such metaphors and analogies, in other words, were never mere
language, but constitutive of alchemy itself.17
Zachary Matuss essay in this issue demonstrates that Christianity offered alchem-
ical authors a great deal more than analogy or metaphor, however. Examining the
alchemical writings of Roger Bacon (ca. 12141294), Matus locates the deep
roots of the Franciscan friars ideas about the prolongation of life via the alchemical
elixir in contemporary understanding of the resurrected body. Bacon believed that
the elixir could restore the bodys health by balancing its complexion and harnessing

13
Liber lucis, 118.
14
Cyriacus Jacob, ed., De alchimia opuscula complura veterum philosophorum, quorum catalogum sequens pagella
indicabit. Cum gratia & privilegio Caesareo., 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1550). For a modern facsimile, with
German translation and commentary, see Joachim Telle, Rosarium philosophorum: Ein alchemisches Florilegium
des Sptmittelalters. Faksimile der illustrierten Erstausgabe Frankfurt 1550, trans. Lutz Claren und Joachim
Huber, 2 vols. (Weinheim: VCH Verlagsgesellschaft, 1992).
15
DeVun, Metaphor and Alchemy, ch. 6 in Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time, and DeVun, Human
Heaven.
16
DeVun, Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time, 118.
17
Tara Nummedal, Anna Zieglerins Alchemical Revelations, in Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, ed.
Elaine Yuen Tien Leong and Alisha Rankin (Aldershot, England, and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 12541.
316 TARA NUMMEDAL

the celestial quality of incorruptibility. Interestingly, Bacon also argued that the elixir
could improve the individuals moral qualities and instil superior cognitive powers in
the soul. In order to articulate these qualities of the alchemical body, Matus argues,
Bacon turned not only to natural philosophy and medicine, as we might expect, but
also to formal theology and hagiography that touched on the soul and the bodies of
the resurrected dead.
If, as Matus shows, Christianity could inspire the development of new alchemical
concepts and practices, then the reverse was true as well. That is to say, alchemy
could also offer medieval and early modern Europeans a tool for structuring, com-
municating, and confirming religious (particularly eschatological) concepts. Again,
Rupescissa offers an excellent example. Among historians of science, Rupescissa is
perhaps best known for his treatise on the quintessence (De quinta essentia). He
referred to the quintessence, essentially alcohol produced by distilling wine, as
human heaven (caelum), which, as DeVun has noted, had the dual meaning of
the sky and heaven in a theological sense. Accordingly, Rupescissas distilled quintes-
sence was analogous to the fifth element from which, according to Aristotle, the
celestial sphere was composed, and that Rupescissa argued could balance the
human complexion and thus preserve the human body. However, it was also an
extract of theological heaven, in the sense that the quintessence could grant
certain humans the incorruptibility that they would otherwise only obtain after
death and resurrection. The point of this, for Rupescissa, was to allow elect evan-
gelical men the strength to battle Antichrist and withstand the ordeals of the Last
Days before the end of time. In other words, DeVun has argued, certain men
would obtain the post-resurrection body, the reward of the next world, before the
Last Day, in earths final moments. The point, according to DeVun, is that it was
in part an alchemical technology, distillation, which allowed Rupescissa to
develop and articulate his innovative theology of a millennium on earth in which
the boundary between heaven and earth would give way on the brink of the
eschaton.18
Medieval and early modern alchemists found many other analogies between their
alchemy and their Christianity. Spirits, bodies, redemption, crucifixion, resurrection,
and incarnation all resonated deeply both in alchemical and soteriological or escha-
tological contexts, and therefore it is not difficult to find alchemical imagery (rhe-
torical and visual) in religious writings and, conversely, religious imagery in
alchemical writings.19 Textual intersections between alchemy and Christianity
also extended to the practice of biblical exegesis. Genesis offered a particularly com-
pelling site of potential concordance between alchemy and scripture because it

18
DeVun, Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time, and Human Heaven. See also DeVun, The Jesus Hermaph-
rodite: Science and Sex Difference in Premodern Europe, Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 2 (2008): 193218,
which argues that the alchemical rebis stimulated new thinking about Christs divinity.
19
See, for example, Chiara Crisciani, The Conception of Alchemy as Expressed in the Pretiosa margarita novella of
Petrus Bonus of Ferrara, Ambix 20, no. 3 (1973): 17879; Barbara Obrist, Les dbuts de limagerie alchimique:
XIVe-XVe sicles (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1982); Joachim Telle, Sol und Luna: Literar- und alchemiegeschichtliche
Studien zu einem altdeutschen Bildgedicht. Mit Text- und Bildanhang (Hrtgenwald: Guido Pressler Verlag, 1980).
 ALCHEMY AND RELIGION IN CHRISTIAN EUROPE 317

described Gods creation of the world as a process of separationlight from dark-

ness, the division of the waters, and so onall out of a primordial chaos. This
process could be understood in terms of the central operation of alchemical separ-
ation or Scheidung.20 Zachary Matus and Georgiana D. Hedesan, however, direct
our attention to another part of the Bible that engaged alchemists energies. As
Matus notes, Roger Bacon pointed to the biblical example of Adam, whose body
was perfectly balanced (and thus whose life was prolonged) by the Tree of Life, as
a model for the elixir-enhanced alchemical body. Hedesan shows that serious
exploration of the link between the biblical Tree of Life and the alchemical elixir
was by no means merely a medieval phenomenon, but continued to engage alche-
mists well into the seventeenth century. If Bacon looked to one set of extraordinary
bodies as models for the alchemical bodynamely, the resurrected deadthen the
seventeenth-century authors Hedesan examines looked to another: Adam and the
long-lived Patriarchs. Early modern alchemists took seriously the claim that
Adams longevity depended on the Tree of Life, she shows, and proposed methods
to reproduce its effects alchemically in the post lapsarian world.
As Peter Forshaw notes in his contribution to this issue, some alchemists also
seized on one of the more novel exegetical techniques that emerged in the Renais-
sance, namely Cabala, a Christian reworking of the Jewish mystical tradition of
Kabbalah developed by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Johannes Reuchlin.
Alchemical authors (particularly, although not exclusively, Paracelsians) deployed
innovative cabalistic exegetical techniques in some surprising and creative ways,
both to unravel familiar alchemical texts in new ways and to craft new ones. Cabal-
chemical scholars attributed numerical values to words, thus revealing hidden links
to other words or, as in one instance, insight into the weights, proportions of sub-
stances in laboratory procedures. They constructed complicated Cabalistic etymol-
ogies, emblems, and layered alchemical words, drew on Cabalas image as
knowledge handed down from Moses to bolster alchemical claims to access divine
secrets, or deployed Cabala and alchemy simultaneously as complementary means
of exploring Gods revelations. In detailing a wide range of ways in which
alchemy and Cabala (even, in one instance, Jewish Kabbalah) intersected in early
modern Europe, Forshaws piece serves as an important caveat. In the wake of
Enlightenment and later efforts to frame alchemy as inherently mystical, it may
seem natural to us today that alchemists would gravitate to Cabala, or vice versa.
What Forshaw demonstrates, however, is that this connection was never inevitable.
Rather, it was forged in the Renaissance only with great effort and through the extra-
ordinary creativity of authors who were willing to experiment with novel methods in
order to reach ever greater insights into nature and scripture.21

20
Peter Forshaw, Vitriolic Reactions: Orthodox Responses to the Alchemical Exegesis of Genesis, in The Word and
the World: Biblical Exegesis and Early Modern Science, ed. Kevin Killeen and Peter J. Forshaw (Basingstoke,
England, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). See also Janacek, Alchemical Belief, and Michael Thomson
Walton, Genesis and the Chemical Philosophy: True Christian Science in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,
AMS Studies in the Renaissance (Brooklyn, NY: AMS Press, 2011).
318 TARA NUMMEDAL

While theoretical texts offered a particularly rich site of interaction between

alchemy and Christianity, practitioners found the laboratory a point of connection
as well. As Luthers comments, or Rupescissas vision of Christ on the cross in a
digestion of mercury, suggest, laboratory work could re-enact or commemorate
some of the central events in sacred historyChrists life, for instance, or the incar-
nation. We should be careful not to trivialize this kind of alchemical commemora-
tion. It was not incidentala beneficial side effect of producing goldbut
integral. Parallels between alchemical processes and sacred events granted long
and complicated laboratory operations structure and dramatic narratives. They
also reinforced the profound connections between nature and scripture, assuring
the alchemist that the book of nature was indeed a source of divine revelation
with as much to say as scripture. In this sense, alchemy could also function as a con-
firmation of faith. If the philosophers stone could be likened to Christ (and vice
versa), then, by implication, the entire alchemical opusthe process of making
and using the philosophers stonewas, in some sense, soteriological. Working
with the bodies and souls of metals, perfecting nature and matter, the alchemist
touches a fundamental truth of faith, its promise of salvation.22 As Chiara Crisciani
has argued, moreover, alchemy could be defined as a concrete and operative pro-
phecy. It is an announcement of truth and salvation because it attains them in oper-
ations and facts, in the verified transformations which the alchemist produces
through his doctrine, experientia and industria manuum. By re-enacting sacred
history in the laboratory, in other words, the alchemist also announced Christianitys
truths, serving as a kind of prophet: the prophets words come true both in the real
history of Christ and in the material process of the elixir, the saviour of matter, Cris-
ciani writes. Therefore, the events of the Son of God explain and orientate the
material phases of opus.23
Donna Bilaks essay demonstrates that alchemy could function as confirmation of
millenarian prophecy as well. She examines the seventeenth-century Puritan alche-
mist John Allin (16231683), who assiduously collected and read both alchemical
books and scriptural commentaries of a decidedly millenarian bent. Allin also prac-
ticed as a minister in Rye, England, and later in Woodbridge, New Jersey, and col-
laborated on alchemical projects with his close friends in Rye as well as the members
of an alchemical clubb in London. Allins pursuit of the philosophers stone, Bilak
argues, was tightly linked to his Puritan eschatology, in the sense that he viewed
success in the laboratory as yet another sign (and evidently Allin and his friends
had already noted numerous others) that the Second Coming was at hand. In par-
ticular, Bilak shows, Allin saw the successful completion of the stone as part of a
broader restoration of knowledge signalling the return of the prophet Elias and

21
Paracelsus was particularly influential in this connection by emphasizing Gods double revelation in the mutually
revelatory books of nature and scripture. Forshaw, Vitriolic Reactions, 112.
22
Nummedal, Anna Zieglerins Alchemical Revelations; Chiara Crisciani, Opus and sermo: The Relationship
between Alchemy and Prophecy (12th14th Centuries), Early Science and Medicine 13 (2008): 424.
23
Crisciani, Opus and sermo, 22, 21.
 ALCHEMY AND RELIGION IN CHRISTIAN EUROPE 319

the coming of the Day of Judgment. In the late Middle Ages and especially in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Europeans conviction that the Last
Days were at hand led them to scour the books of Nature and Scripture for signs
of Gods plan, alchemists ability to confirm prophecy through their laboratory oper-
ations was no trifling matter.24 Of course alchemists promoted the practical uses of
their art during the End Times as well. Rupescissas elixir would restore the bodies of
the evangelical men in their final battles with Antichrist, while the lions blood of
the sixteenth-century Lutheran, Anna Zieglerin, promised to help to restore the
lost fecundity of the post-lapsarian world, contributing to a rejuvenation of
nature in the earths final moments.25 The connection between alchemy and escha-
tology appears to have been particularly powerful: alchemy not only confirmed bib-
lical and other prophecies about the operations of nature and the unfolding of
earthly time, but also offered true Christians tools with which to engage the immi-
nent Last Days, either by withstanding the tribulations of the End Times, or by
restoring the world in its final moments. Even Martin Luther appreciated the way
in which alchemical work could, in a sense, ratify prophecies about the fate of the
world.26
As these examples show, individual practitioners found a wide range of pro-
ductive synergies among the ideas, practices, and techniques that constituted their
religious and alchemical work. While these connections are perhaps most obvious
after what some scholars have termed the religious turn in fourteenth-century
alchemy, when texts such as Petrus Bonuss Margarita pretiosa novella (New Pearl
of Great Price), Aurora consurgens (The Rising Dawn), and Buch der Heiligen Drei-
faltigkeit (The Book of the Holy Trinity) increasingly presented alchemy as a kind of
divine knowledge or donum dei,27 these essays make it clear that alchemists, clerics,
theologians, and others also located powerful connections both before and after this
moment. Indeed, the continuities that run through these four essays beg the question
of whether it is possible to identify any particular turning points in the history of
alchemy in Christian Europe.
Given the impact of the sixteenth-century Reformation, for example, we might
ask whether it changed anything about the relationship between alchemy and Chris-
tianity. Certainly one can find both Protestants and Catholics pursuing alchemy after
the Reformation, so it would be far too simple to map alchemy crudely onto confes-
sion. Nevertheless, efforts to locate concordances between Christianity and alchemy
seem to have become particularly controversial in the wake of the Reformations of

24
Robin Bruce Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the German Reformation (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1988); Herbert Breger, Elias ArtistaA Precursor of the Messiah in Natural Science, in
Nineteen Eighty-Four: Science between Utopia and Dystopia, ed. Everett Mendelsohn and Helga Novotny (Dor-
drecht and Boston: D. Reidell Publishing Company, 1984); Walter Pagel, The Paracelsian Elias Artista and the
Alchemical Tradition, Medizinhistorisches Journal 16 (1981): 619.
25
DeVun, Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time and Nummedal, Anna Zieglerins Alchemical Revelations.
26
See n. 1.
27
Crisciani, The Conception of Alchemy; William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to
Perfect Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 8297.
320 TARA NUMMEDAL

the sixteenth century, which placed the interpretation of Scripture at centre stage.
The always contentious Lutheran Andreas Libavius, for example, objected to
those (such as the Paracelsians Oswald Croll and Gerard Dorn) who,

are advanced to such a degree of impiety that they have applied to the Stone the highest
benefits of the Son of God, his birth, passion, death, resurrection, the symbols of the
Christian faith, [from the] chapters of Genesis and other parts of the heavenly
teaching, as if the foundation of all wisdom were in the Stone.28

The Catholic Mersenne likewise rejected overly enthusiastic interpretations of

Genesis as a description of alchemical processes. Clearly, attempted alchemical
interpretations of Genesis were stimulating but also increasingly contested in the
wake of the Reformation. As Peter Forshaw observes elsewhere, The mosaical
account of creation in Genesis was evidently an extremely precarious tightrope
between Gods Word and Works, not that this seems to have deterred the Paracel-
sians from their adroit negotiation of his two books.29
Moreover, the implication of the Reformation for alchemy also might have to do
with the establishment of new orthodoxies, whether Protestant or Catholic. Jole
Shackelford, for example, has argued that the fortunes of Paracelsianism in
Denmark were linked to Lutheran factionalism in the late sixteenth and early seven-
teenth century. Paracelsianism, he argues, fell out of favour with the decline of the
more moderate Philippist (for followers of Philipp Melanchthon) party and the
ascendancy of a more orthodox (Gnesio) form of Lutheranism and, as he puts it,
the sharpening doctrinal distinctions of orthodoxy and the authorities acquisition
of the legal means of enforcing conformity to them. Beyond this, Shackelford has
suggested that the Paracelsian worldview, which offered a way to unify philoso-
phical and theological worldviews, appealed to people who for one reason or
another dissented from strict Lutheran dogma.30 As Shackelford has noted, Para-
celsianism is a particularly complicated point of entry into the question of the reli-
gious affinities among alchemists, since Paracelsus himself was as much a lay
theologian as he was physician or natural philosopher, to say nothing of his compli-
cated relationship to chrysopoeia or transmutational alchemy.31 Still, the fortunes of
Paracelsian alchemy (and maybe alchemy in general) in Denmark suggest that alche-
mists outsider status was as much (if not more) a function of confessionalization
and social discipline in the wake of the Reformation as it was rooted in alchemys
inherent appeal to heterodox religious groups. Once confessional lines were
28
Andreas Libavius, Syntagmatis Arcanorum et Commentationum Chymicarum (Frankfurt: Ammonius & Serlinus,
1660), 269, as cited and translated in Forshaw, Vitriolic Reactions, 12425.
29
Forshaw, Vitriolic Reactions, 127.
30
Jole Shackelford, Unification and the Chemistry of the Reformation, in Infinite Boundaries: Order, Disorder, and
Reorder in Early Modern German Culture, ed. Max Reinhart (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers,
1998), 312.
31
Shackelford, Unification and the Chemistry of the Reformation, 292. The literature on Paracelsus is vast, but for
good points of entry on the role of religion in his and his followers work, see Didier Kahn, Alchimie et paracelsisme
en France la fin de la Renaissance (15671625) (Geneva: Droz, 2007), and Charles Webster, Paracelsus: Medicine,
Magic and Mission at the End of Time (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2008).
 ALCHEMY AND RELIGION IN CHRISTIAN EUROPE 321

sharpened, in other words, religious orthodoxy could impose intellectual ortho-

doxies as well.
It is important to underscore that this was not just a Protestant issue. As Reforma-
tion historians have shown, confessionalization and social discipline, broadly, were
cross-confessional processes.32 As the work of Martha Baldwin, Margaret Garber,
and Sylvain Matton has shown, for example, post-Tridentine Catholicism could
impose limits on alchemical speculation as well. Jesuits in general were cautious
about alchemy, fearing that the desire for gold could easily imperil alchemists
souls, even leading them to call upon the help of demons for help in the laboratory.
They also worried about the implications of transmutation and matter theory for the
Eucharist, particularly in connection with the issue of seminal principles. Some
Jesuits, including Athanasius Kircher, managed to show a certain openness to
some alchemical ideas and practices, while other Catholics, notably the seventeenth-
century Dean of Medicine at the University of Prague, J. Marcus Marci, found a way
to reconcile Catholicism with his theory of seminal principles, which was grounded
in his knowledge of transmutation. This openness may have receded when it came to
theological ideas (such as transubstantiation) that were at the heart of confessional
identity, however.33
The relationship between alchemy and institutionalized religion had certainly
been strained before,34 and it may have become even more tense after the sixteenth
century. Nevertheless, individual alchemists and theologians found potent synergies
between alchemical imagery and the central events in sacred history, including the
formation of the world in Genesis, the life of Christ, or the Last Days. They explored
these connections as scholars through biblical exegesis and as practitioners by
drawing parallels between laboratory operations and the crucifixion or incarnation.
Alchemy could be deployed not only as analogy, but also literally, as a means to
prepare medicines that would protect the elect during the tribulations of the End
Times or to redeem a fallen natural world. These connections between alchemy
and Christianity were not trivial or incidental, as they could structure, communicate,
and even prove fundamental truths. While Protestant biblical literalism might have

32
R. Po-Chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the German Reformation: Central Europe 15501750 (London and New York:
Routledge, 1989).
33
Martha Baldwin, Alchemy and the Society of Jesus in the Seventeenth Century: Strange Bedfellows?, Ambix 40,
no. 2 (1993): 4164; Margaret D. Garber, Transitioning from Transubstantiation to Transmutation: Catholic
Anxieties over Chymical Matter Theory at the University of Prague, in Chymists and Chymistry: Studies in the
History of Alchemy and Early Modern Chemistry, ed. Lawrence Principe (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History
Publications/USA, 2007), 6376. Sylvain Mattons Philosophie et alchimie la Renaissance et lge classique,
vol. I, Scolastique et alchimie (XVI e-XVII e sicles) (Paris: S..H.A; Milan: Arch, 2009) contains numeous texts
that touch on these questions; see especially 1225 for Jesuit texts related to alchemy.
34
The fourteenth century, for example, saw an increasingly tense relationship between alchemists and the institutional
church. Several orders banned their members from studying or practicing alchemy, and Pope John XXII (13161334)
condemned the art in his well-known 1317 decretal, Spondent quas non exhibent. These condemnations derived in
part from a concern with counterfeiting, but also out of a worry that alchemists who viewed alchemy as a type of
divine revelation were skirting heterodoxy. See Crisciani, The Conception of Alchemy; Crisciani and Guglielmo
Fabri, Il Papa e lalchimia: Felice V, Guglielmo Fabri e lelixir (Roma: Viella, 2002), 4546; William R. Newman,
Technology and Alchemical Debate in the Late Middle Ages, Isis 80 (1989): 33941, and Newman, Alchemy
and the Art-Nature Debate, chap. 2 in Promethean Ambitions.
322 TARA NUMMEDAL

encouraged alchemists to find ever more elaborate concordances between nature

and scripture, alchemical analogy and exegesis flourished both before and after
the Reformation. Where the Reformation might have been pivotal for alchemy,
however, is in creating new orthodoxies (both Protestant and Catholic) that may
have reined inor at least pushed into the category of heterodoxysome of the
more extravagant attempts to align alchemy with Christianity.
The significance of the Reformation, clearly, awaits further investigation, as do
many other dimensions of the problems outlined here. One final caveat is worth
underscoring. It is very easy to free associate when reading alchemical texts, for
they are often highly metaphorical, and easy points of connection quickly suggest
themselves: transmutation/transubstantiation, alchemical redemption of matter/the
redemptive power of the crucifixion, and so on. The four essays in this volume
remind us to take seriously not only the religious language, but also the religious
practices and contexts of alchemy, so that we can understand how they shaped
the intellectual, social, and political nature of alchemists work. Most of all,
however, these contributions underscore the importance of anchoring these kinds
of connections in the words and works of individual alchemists and the specific reli-
gious contexts in which they operated. This precision is particularly important,
given how complex and fluid both alchemy and religion were (and are). It is only
through such careful, focused work that we can avoid vague and anachronistic gen-
eralizations about alchemy being somehow intrinsically or uniquely religious,
spiritual, or mystical, and come to understand, instead, precisely how and why
alchemists, exegetes, and theologians worked so hard to forge connections
between their alchemical and religious endeavours in medieval and early modern
Christian Europe.

Acknowledgements
My thanks to Jennifer Rampling for inviting me to guest edit this issue of Ambix,
and for her innumerable consultations and contributions along the way.

Notes on contributor
Tara Nummedal is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Science and
Technology Studies Program at Brown University. She is the author of Alchemy
and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (Chicago University Press, 2007) and is
currently completing The Lions Blood: Alchemy, Gender, and Apocalypse in
Reformation Germany. Address: Department of History, Box N, Brown University,
Providence, RI 02912, USA; E-mail: nummedal@brown.edu