On the Secrets of Alchemy

I stumbled on this book thanks to Reddit: someone had asked which works were the best introductions to alchemy, and Principe’s was the most popular answer. It’s easy to see why. The Secrets of Alchemy was written for a popular audience at a moment of real ferment in the scholarship — for a long time Western esotericism wasn’t recognized as a serious field, but some significant works were published and attitudes shifted dramatically. It covers the history of alchemy from its origins in Roman Egypt (possibly as early as the Hellenistic period), but gives the most attention to the Early Modern period, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.

Its greatest strength is its treatment of alchemy as a material discipline. So much is made of alchemy’s religious, spiritual, and esoteric side that we tend to write it off as entirely unscientific, which Principe argues is wrong-headed: alchemy was deeply tied to spiritual practice, but no more so than other disciplines of the time, and the view of it as pseudoscience owes as much to frauds chasing patronage and to later occult revivals as to the actual state of the inquiry. The alchemists really did engage with the material world, and they weren’t dilettantes — they were highly theoretical, building on Aristotle, Galen, and later Arab and Persian thinkers, and they really could transform some metals into others; they never made lead into gold, but their ability to counterfeit money threatened currency crises in the premodern period. Part of their limitation was the belief that there were only seven metals — gold, silver, copper (which, I learned, is etymologically related to “Cyprus”), tin, iron, lead, and quicksilver — each named for its ruling planet, which is why we still call quicksilver “Mercury,” and why you might just as well call copper “Venus,” iron “Mars,” or lead “Saturn.” On the traditional view, every metal had a body (always quicksilver) and a spirit (the elemental qualities of gaseous sulfur), and the sulfur imbued the Mercury with its qualities and allowed one metal to become another.

The best part is that Principe has himself dabbled with these recipes: we learn that one metal changed into another not by the process he’d outlined but because he’d used iron utensils, and we join him in deciphering the esoteric texts and witness his successes along the way, which brings alchemy to life not as woo but as a meaningful practice. The book is rich with insight into how the premodern world thought in fundamentally different terms than we do — including that “inspiration” once meant tapping into the source of all creativity, the Spirit. It’s so good, and well worth the time.