Customer Reviews

Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution

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This is an excellent book, and I recommend it particularly for Starkey's time at Harvard- I had no idea how the school operated at the time, nor the tenor of academic science then.

But I was disappointed by two aspects. First was the central portion of the book, which drags the reader through Newman's exegetical analysis of Starkey's various alchemical influences and could have been summarized substantially. The material struck me as somewhat pedantic, standing in to some extent for the mostly absent information on the doings of Starkey himself. Newman's labors of reconstructing the pseudonymous identity of Starkey and the endlessly allusive references of the alchemical literature are truly heroic, however.

More critical is Newman's project to disparage C. G. Jung and his school's psychological approaches to the alchemical literature. Newman works diligently to recover the actual empirical referents of this ornate literature, from the hands of Starkey and from others, and thus to disprove what he presents as Jung's view that this literature was wholly imaginary.

"The Jungian alchemist in some sense literally 'saw' his own unconscious expressing itself in the form of bizarre archetypal images, such as winged dragons and immolated kings."

Newman, in contrast, demonstrates that in numerous cases, the immolated kings, sperma, and the rest of the phantasmagoria were cover-names for real processes and objects like distillation, calcining, the dramatic star regulus of antimony, and the like. Yet the distinction is far less than Newman portrays it. First, Jung and colleagues did not dismiss the alchemical opus as entirely meaningless, since experimental work was carried out, however disconnected from its purported aims. Retorts were duly filled with all manner of materials, and fired, with results ranging from putrefactio to somewhat less so.

But none resulted in anything remotely resembling the perennially stated yearnings of the discipline- the liquor alchahest, the universal elixir, or the philosopher's stone. These were entirely chimerical concepts which truly owed more to the psychological fixations of the practitioners (and their employers, and indeed all people seeking health and wealth) than to any empirical data.

The more detailed alchemical theories, which Newman sets out at some length, are poignant in their tortured logic and occasional foreshadowing of the future science (foremost being corpuscularism). But they simply didn't make sense, even on their own terms. Each one was constructed out of a glint of empirical observation, with the bulk imported from either the theorist's own imagination or those of his alchemical forebears, whether Aristotle, the great Muslim alchemist Geber/Jabir, or later theorists like von Helmont.

All scientific theory is a mix of fantasy in advance of true and thorough knowledge, but the ratio of fantasy in the alchemical opus was unusually high. Even Newman at one point is at a loss:

"And only the Helmontian high priest may preside over this chemical wedding, closed to the vulgar solicitations of grate-crashing alchemists. For this is the donum dei sought by all and found by few, the hidden mystery imparted only to the sons of the art. Lest we surprise these ardent lovers in their bed, let us quickly pass to the other leitmotiv of Starkey's iatrochemical works, the making of the alchahest."

Lastly, the language is full of projection and psychological themes, whether describing actual operations in the lab or not (Newman admits that some writers were freely associating, as it were, rather than describing actual lab procedures). Alchemists came up with ornate self-justifications for all this indirection and grandiloqy, including the lack of a patent system to protect their discoveries, the threat of powerful people apprehending and imprisoning the practitioner if word got out about the true power of what they were doing, and the necessarily esoteric and intellectual nature of the work. Yet they also had a need to publish- to establish authority and to document the work in some form.

I'm afraid this doesn't really wash, however. Military arts were well advanced by this time, and its treateses must have been easily as significant as those of alchemy, but not clothed in a cloud of psycho-arcana. The reason why the literature remained so flowery was precisely because it never accomplished any concrete goals. This is common to every shamanic tradition, which has much procedure but no result (apart from the power of placebo). Much atmosphere and suggestion, but no definitive test.

That alchemy, through its concrete procedures and better practitioners (Boyle, Newton) eventually transitioned to real chemistry by giving up its clouds of psychological projection is a great historical story, but that doesn't mean that psychologists don't have a lot of incisive things to say about its earlier incarnations.

This book changed my view of the evolution of alchemy. With all the current emphasis on the spiritual and psychological value of the art, it's important to remember that it was also a practical science -- and a vital stage in the development of modern chemistry. An important addition to any alchemical library.