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"Alchemy Influence."
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Newton the alchemist : science, enigma, and the quest for nature's \secret fire\
\"When Isaac Newton's alchemical papers surfaced at a Sotheby's auction in 1936, the quantity and seeming incoherence of the manuscripts was shocking. No longer the exemplar of Enlightenment rationality, the legendary physicist suddenly became \"the last of the magicians.\" Newton the Alchemist unlocks the secrets of Newton's alchemical quest, providing a radically new understanding of the uncommon genius who probed nature at its deepest levels in pursuit of empirical knowledge. In this evocative and superbly written book, William Newman blends in-depth analysis of newly available texts with laboratory replications of Newton's actual experiments in alchemy. He does not justify Newton's alchemical research as part of a religious search for God in the physical world, nor does he argue that Newton studied alchemy to learn about gravitational attraction. Newman traces the evolution of Newton's alchemical ideas and practices over a span of more than three decades, showing how they proved fruitful in diverse scientific fields. A precise experimenter in the realm of \"chymistry,\" Newton put the riddles of alchemy to the test in his lab. He also used ideas drawn from the alchemical texts to great effect in his optical experimentation. In his hands, alchemy was a tool for attaining the material benefits associated with the philosopher's stone and an instrument for acquiring scientific knowledge of the most sophisticated kind\"-- Provided by publisher .
BOOK
Alchemist of the avant-garde : the case of Marcel Duchamp
Acknowledged as the “Artist of the Century,” Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) left a legacy that dominates the art world to this day. Inventing the ironically dégagé attitude of “ready-made” art-making, Duchamp heralded the postmodern era and replaced Pablo Picasso as the role model for avant-garde artists. John F. Moffitt challenges commonly accepted interpretations of Duchamp’s art and persona by showing that his mature art, after 1910, is largely drawn from the influence of the occult traditions. Moffitt demonstrates that the key to understanding the cryptic meaning of Duchamp’s diverse artworks and writings is alchemy, the most pictorial of all the occult philosophies and sciences.
eBook
Compound Remedies
Compound Remedies examines the equipment, books, and
remedies of colonial Mexico City's Herrera pharmacy-natural
substances with known healing powers that formed part of the basis
for modern-day healing traditions and home remedies in Mexico.
Paula S. De Vos traces the evolution of the Galenic pharmaceutical
tradition from its foundations in ancient Greece to the
physician-philosophers of medieval Islamic empires and the Latin
West and eventually through the Spanish Empire to Mexico, offering
a global history of the transmission of these materials,
knowledges, and techniques. Her detailed inventory of the Herrera
pharmacy reveals the many layers of this tradition and how it
developed over centuries, providing new perspectives and insight
into the development of Western science and medicine: its varied
origins, its engagement with and inclusion of multiple knowledge
traditions, the ways in which these traditions moved and circulated
in relation to imperialism, and its long-term continuities and
dramatic transformations. De Vos ultimately reveals the great
significance of pharmacy, and of artisanal pursuits more generally,
as a cornerstone of ancient, medieval, and early modern
epistemologies and philosophies of nature.
eBook
Transmuting Words into Gold: Writing Failure in the Discovery of Guiana
Sir Walter Ralegh’s quest for El Dorado and gold mines in Guiana famously ended in failure. Yet his chronicle, The Discoverie of Guiana , and supporting works by George Chapman and Lawrence Keymis became quintessential texts of English imperialism, sustaining interest in colonization after decades of setbacks. This article considers how alchemical discourse reframed failure as a productive deferral of England’s imperial destiny. Drawing on English sericonian alchemy, Ralegh, Chapman, and Keymis envisioned empire transforming dissolute adventurers into virtuous and industrious men who would advance the state’s objectives and redeem Amerindians through good governance and Christianity. Metaphors of the chemical wedding downplayed Native dispossession by conceptualizing conquest and colonization as a benevolent, if initially violent, amalgamation of England and Guiana into a single polity. They urged Queen Elizabeth to fulfill providential history by accepting her role as alchemist of the imperial state. Though Ralegh could not transmute failure into success, the Guiana texts contributed to England’s “White Legend” and legitimized the eventual profits of empire as just compensation for spreading Protestantism and benefitting the commonwealth.
Journal Article
The Westward Spread of Eastern Learning: Jung’s Integration and Adaptation of Religious Daoism
The impact and influence that a religious tradition can have amongst culturally out-group populations can be quite unexpected and can even “boomerang” back home in equally unpredictable ways. This article explores one example of a Chinese religion’s unexpected cultural influence within the Western psychiatric community using religious Daoism and its appropriation by analytical psychologist Carl Jung. Although elements of religious Daoism, such as Daoist Internal Alchemy or the Yijing, integrated into a system of psychiatric practices, its influence was not straightforward. It will be argued that Jungian ideas such as active imagination, individuation, and synchronicity were directly influenced or inspired by Jung’s exposure to religious Daoism through Richard Wilhelm, Daoist texts, and his own adoption of Daoist Internal Alchemy techniques, an influence which would reverberate through both Western and Chinese popular culture.
Journal Article
Elixir atque fermentum: New Investigations about the Link between Pseudo-Avicenna's Alchemical De anima and Roger Bacon: Alchemical and Medical Doctrines
Between 1994 and 1997, William Newman published three articles in which, for the first time, a profound connection between Roger Bacon's doctrine and Ps.-Avicenna's alchemical De anima was pointed out. These studies were a major step in understanding Roger Bacon's elemental physics, alchemy, and alchemical medicine, as well as his prolongatio vitae theory. By a thorough study of the physical, alchemical, and medical doctrine of the Jābirian treatises via Ps.-Avicenna's De anima, in comparison with Bacon's texts, I will continue the work initiated by Newman and draw some new conclusions. I will specifically focus on some principal differences between Roger Bacon and his favorite alchemical source, which allow us to understand the originality and innovation of the Franciscan. In addition to the De anima, a specific aspect of the alchemy of the Ps.-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum will also be studied here, being another of Bacon's major sources.
Journal Article
Asia in the Making of Europe, Volume II: A Century of Wonder. Book 3
Praised for its scope and depth, Asia in the Making of Europe is the first comprehensive study of Asian influences on Western culture. For volumes I and II, the author has sifted through virtually every European reference to Asia published in the sixteenth-century; he surveys a vast array of writings describing Asian life and society, the images of Asia that emerge from those writings, and, in turn, the reflections of those images in European literature and art. This monumental achievement reveals profound and pervasive influences of Asian societies on developing Western culture; in doing so, it provides a perspective necessary for a balanced view of world history.
Volume I: The Century of Discovery brings together \"everything that a European could know of India, Southeast Asia, China, and Japan, from printed books, missionary reports, traders' accounts and maps\" (The New York Review of Books). Volume II: A Century of Wonder examines the influence of that vast new body of information about Asia on the arts, institutions, literatures, and ideas of sixteenth-century Europe.
eBook
From the Bloody Chamber to the Cabinet de Curiosités: Angela Carter's Curious Alices Through the Looking Glass of Languages
Angela Carter's entire oeuvre, I believe, was indeed shaped by a translational and transcreative dynamic that underpins the development of literature worldwide, although this phenomenon is often obscured by national canons, monolingual scholarship, and ideological agendas. Examining Carter's work from a cross-linguistic, transnational, and transcultural perspective therefore questions traditional conceptions of the fairy tale as either universal invariant or reified expression of national culture and instead brings out the complex web of interconnections, mutual borrowings and exchanges, translations, responses, and reinventions out of which it developed. In this essay I link Carter's encounter with foreign languages and cultures to her lifelong engagement with Lewis Carroll's Alice books and the nonsense tradition, including its legacy in the surrealist movement. Specifically, I focus on the fictional possibilities opened up by the linguistic and literary resonances of the word cabinet, which Carter drew on to celebrate curiosity in The Bloody Chamber and beyond.
Journal Article
Turning Nothing into Something
Starting from the incongruous juxtaposition of victory, the novel's title, and nothing, the word on which it ends, this article explores the contradictions that characterize Conrad's novel, be it in its polarized critical reception, or in its stylistic and thematic makeup, to show that this tension is seminal to the work's value. Using a Lacanian perspective, it starts with an analysis of Heyst's negative inheritance to move on to Lena's enigmatic portrayal and the images of the void that are associated with her. Whereas Heyst's nothingness, as it crystallizes, becomes paralyzing, Lena's remains a fluid Otherness that escapes definition. As the empty center at the heart of the novel, Lena represents the void essential to creation.
Journal Article
The Salt of the Earth: Natural Philosophy, Medicine, and Chymistry in England, 1650-1750
Consisting of a series of case studies, this book is devoted to the concept and uses of salt in early modern science, which have played a crucial role in the evolution of matter theory from Aristotelian concepts of the elements to Newtonian chymistry.
eBook