Alchemy and Alchemical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century New England A thesis presented by Frederick Kyle Satterstrom to The Department of the History of Science in partial fulfillment for an honors degree in Chemistry & Physics and History & Science Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts March 2004 Abstract and Keywords Abstract By focusing on Gershom Bulkeley, John Winthrop, Jr., and other practitioners of alchemy in seventeenth-century New England, I argue that the colonies were home to a vibrant community of alchemical practitioners for whom alchemy significantly overlapped with medicine. These learned men drew from a long historical tradition of alchemical thought, both in the form of scholastic matter theory and also their contemporaries’ works. Knowledge of alchemy was transmitted from England to the colonies and back across a complex network of strong and weak personal connections. Alchemical thought pervaded the intellectual landscape of the seventeenth century, and an understanding of New England’s alchemical practitioners and their practices will fill a gap in the current history of alchemy.
Keywords Alchemy Gershom Bulkeley Iatrochemistry Knowledge transmission Medicine New England Seventeenth century i Acknowledgements I owe thanks to my advisor Elly Truitt, who is at least as responsible for the existence of this work as I am; to Bill Newman, for taking the time to meet with me while in Cambridge and pointing out Gershom Bulkeley as a possible figure of study; to John Murdoch, for arranging the meeting; to the helpful staff of the Harvard University Archives; to Peter J. Knapp and the kind librarians at Watkinson Library, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut; and to the staff of the Hartford Medical Society, for letting me use their manuscript collection and for offering me food. iii Table of Contents INTRODUCTION. 3 CHAPTER 1: ALCHEMY IN THE NEW ENGLAND COLONIES.
13 Paracelsus and Iatrochemistry. 22 Bulkeley’s Vade Mecum. 27 CHAPTER 2: COLONIAL ALCHEMISTS IN CONTEXT. 35 Physics at Harvard in the Mid-Seventeenth Century.
35 Leonard Hoar, Alchemical Visionary. 41 Charles Morton and Harvard Curriculum. 46 Morton’s Compendium Physicae. 47 CHAPTER 3: THE TRANSMISSION OF ALCHEMICAL KNOWLEDGE IN THE 17TH CENTURY.
53 The Formation of Scientific Knowledge. 53 Networks and Intelligencers. 57 Intelligencer as Model for the Colonies. 61 Bulkeley as Important Node.
63 Connection to Chauncy. 67 The Chauncy Family. 77 v Introduction Alchemy is familiar to many through the book Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. The story portrays the Stone as a magical item sought by the evil Lord Voldemort for its capacity to generate unlimited quantities of gold and infinitely prolong life.1 In this context, similar to its depiction in many other works of popular culture, alchemy is a dark and mystical practice.
Although entertaining as fiction, such a picture is dangerous – the casual reader may be led to place the whole of alchemical history under this modern stereotype. The stereotype is a great misconception, for any attempt to sum up alchemy in one idea, or as one static entity, will necessarily overlook its rich and nuanced history. Alchemy was far from static over its lifespan of several millennia. To gain an understanding of it, we must consider individual time periods.
The focus of this work is seventeenth-century New England, where the practice of alchemy significantly overlapped with medicine. Examining individual practitioners reveals that alchemy meant different things even to those practitioners who were in close communication with one another, depending on which alchemical texts they chose to work from. This pragmatic character of alchemy, with its focus on the preparation of chemical medicines, is far different from the magic found in popular stories like Harry Potter. I have focused on four alchemical practitioners to help illuminate the intellectual activity of alchemists in the New England colonies.
John Winthrop, Jr., spent significant time in the colonies and was taken quite seriously in alchemical matters. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (London: Bloomsbury, 1997). The ostensibly less knowledgeable American audience received Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. 1 exhibited a considerable degree of interest in alchemical medicines, and George Starkey stands out for his influence on prominent English practitioners of the art.
Gershom Bulkeley, meanwhile, shows that even a colonial doctor in the seeming backwater of seventeenth-century Connecticut could attain a comprehensive knowledge of alchemical matters. He felt sufficient mastery of the subject to put forth his own written work of natural philosophy and chemical preparations. Taken together, these men prove that the colonies were a vibrant, active community of alchemists who were familiar with current alchemical literature as well as alchemical practice. This lively community of alchemists drew from, and fit within, a larger context of alchemical tradition.
During their time at Harvard, men such as Allin, Starkey, and Bulkeley were exposed via scholastic physics to elements of the same matter theory that lay beneath seventeenth-century theories of alchemy. The alchemical practice resulting from such theories was within reach for many private practitioners with their own chemical libraries and experimental apparatus – although not for Harvard President Leonard Hoar, whose alchemical vision for the College never came to pass. When Charles Morton and his natural philosophy arrived in Massachusetts, though, Harvard students finally attained an explicitly alchemical facet of their education to better ground them in alchemical tradition. New England’s community of alchemists was also constantly sharing information,2 and I posit a model for the transmission of alchemical knowledge in the seventeenth century.
Knowledge came to be accepted through social factors such as 2 Typical notions of alchemical secrecy apply mainly to preventing knowledge from falling into the hands of non-alchemists rather than any prohibition of sharing knowledge with a fellow alchemist. In this way, alchemical knowledge has been likened to trade secrets; see Lawrence M. Principe, “Apparatus and Reproducibility in Alchemy,” in Instruments and Experimentation in the History of Chemistry, ed. Holmes and Trevor H.
2 one’s class, which was thought to indicate trustworthiness; it was then transmitted through a complex network of both weak and strong social ties. This network consisted of hubs of differing sizes, and the men who were the nodes with the most connections have been termed intelligencers. The Englishman Samuel Hartlib is the prototypical intelligencer, and I will demonstrate that the term may also be applied to John Winthrop, Jr., in the colonies. I will further show the complexity and activity of the network by examining the alchemical ties of Gershom Bulkeley.
By corresponding with physicians and alchemists in the colonies and abroad, and receiving texts from his brother-in-law in London, he was part of a network which brought him the latest in alchemical knowledge. Historiography Examining the approaches past historians have taken when discussing the nature of alchemy allows one to think about the ways in which these attempts influenced subsequent – and continue to influence present – alchemical scholarship. Such influences have been quite strong, especially during the Enlightenment and the later Romantic reaction against Newtonian science. In dividing and naming these influences and their impact on alchemical history, I am indebted to the excellent essay by Lawrence M.
Principe and William R. Newman, “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy,” whose outline of historiographical approaches I have modified only slightly.3 The first important development in the historiography of alchemy stems from the eighteenth century. Prior to this time, the terms “alchemy” and “chemistry” had been 3 Lawrence M. Principe and William R.
Newman, “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy,” in Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, ed. Newman and Grafton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 385-431. 3 employed synonymously, and the discipline referred to by both words included the entire range of an alchemist’s possible actions. During the eighteenth century, however, Enlightenment writers imposed a gulf between the two fields, making the terms “alchemy” and “chemistry” distinct.4 These writers restricted the domain of alchemy to include only those tenets that were being discredited, such as the transmutation of metals, leaving accepted knowledge and new developments under the blanket of chemistry.
In this manner, writers were able to portray alchemy as “synonymous with gold making and fraud,”5 a marginalization which they could use as a counterpoint in their attempts to legitimize the newer aspects of chemistry. Their forcible rhetoric has long led historians to mistakenly see a distinction between the two disciplines in the seventeenth century or even before.6 Due to its association with fraud, alchemy came to be grouped together with other “occult” practices such as magic and witchcraft that had been discredited by the Enlightenment reason of the eighteenth century. For example, Francis Barrett touted his 1801 work The Magus as a complete system of occult philosophy,7 and he grouped alchemy with such topics as natural magic, talismans, numerology, and astrology. This association of alchemy with the occult remains in many popular works to the present day.8 Juxtaposed thusly, alchemy took on a more mystical air, and it appealed to the 4 For a good review, see William R.
Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, “Alchemy vs. Chemistry: The Etymological Origins of a Historiographic Mistake,” Early Science and Medicine 3 (1998): 32-65. 5 Principe and Newman, “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy,” 386.
6 Newman and Principe, “Alchemy vs. 7 Francis Barrett, The Magus (London: Lackington, Allen, and Co. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1967), i. 8 For example, Harry Potter.
Rachleff, The Occult Conceit: A New Look at Astrology, Witchcraft, and Sorcery (Chicago: Cowles, 1971), 90-91, calls alchemy a “stepchild of sorcery” and asserts that its practitioners were merely out to dupe “impoverished aristocrats or greedy kings.” Ronald Pearsall, The Alchemists (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976) includes an entire chapter entitled “Dupes and Charlatans.” Even less shy is J. Finley Hurley, Sorcery (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 198-204, 4 same Romantic audiences that enjoyed practices like Mesmerism, wherein an intangible fluid-filled space acted as a medium for transmission of gravity and animal magnetism.9 In the hands of such Romantics, alchemy’s apparent mystical side surpassed its chemical side in attention and importance. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the occultists generated the influential “spiritual” interpretation of alchemy. This interpretation, only a step past Barrett or Mesmerism, holds that alchemical texts speak entirely in metaphors.
They are supposed to actually deal with spiritual processes, expressed in metallurgic terms. Read in this manner, transmutation of base metal is in fact purification and enlightenment of the soul of the alchemist. Perhaps the strongest and fullest explication of the spiritual interpretation belongs to Mary Anne Atwood (1817-1910), whose A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery asks rhetorically, “Man then, shall we conclude at length, is the true laboratory… his life the subject, the grand distillatory, the thing distilled, and Self-Knowledge to be at the root of all Alchemical tradition?”10 Atwood had grown up studying occult literature, and she completed her Suggestive Inquiry in 1850.11 At Atwood’s request, few copies circulated during her lifetime, but the work was published in 1918. It circulated widely thereafter.
While Atwood introduced the spiritual interpretation to England, Ethan Allen Hitchcock (1798-1870) introduced a spiritual interpretation of his own to America. Hitchcock, a general in the United States Army, also believed that “Man is the subject who likens the Philosopher’s Stone to UFOs, believes in the existence of both, and argues for a small cadre of Adepts who secretly rule the world. 9 Principe and Newman, “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy,” 388. For an interesting work on Mesmerism – which nevertheless takes the view of alchemy as occult pseudoscience – see Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968).
10 Mary Anne Atwood, A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery (Belfast: William Tait, 1918), 162. Wilmshurst, introduction to Atwood, Suggestive Inquiry, 6. 5 upon which the Alchemists employ themselves.”12 He published his Alchemy and the Alchemists in 1857, in which he takes a Christian viewpoint that “the knowledge of God lies in the nature of man.
