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Modern Alchemy, Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory

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Modern Alchemy, Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory MARK MORRISSON MODERN ALCHEMY, OCCULTISM AND THE EMERGENCE OF ATOMIC THEORY INTRODUCTION 1. FROM THE GOLDEN DAWN TO THE ALCHEMICAL SOCIETY 2. OCCULT CHEMISTRY, INSTRUMENTATION, AND THE THEOSOPHICAL SCIENCE OF DIRECT PERCEPTION 3. CHEMISTRY IN THE BORDERLAND 4. ATOMIC ALCHEMY AND THE GOLD STANDARD EPILOGUE APPENDIX BIBLIOGRAPHY INTRODUCTION STORIES OF THE BIRTH OF MODERN ALCHEMY For many in the twenty-first century, the word “alchemy” conjures up images of medieval zealots rummaging through ancient books and scrolls in dark hot basements, seeking the secrets of transmutation in the dim firelight of brick furnaces and archaic laboratory equipment with strange names—athanor, horn of Hermes, cucurbite. The occult wisdom forged by these alchemists was intended to bring them immense wealth, great longevity, and spiritual purification. In spite of Enlightenment attacks upon alchemy as unscientific superstition, or merely the foolish pursuit of the self-deluded, it is now clear that alchemy was a scientifically and spiritually serious pursuit from antiquity through the Middle Ages, with roots in Egyptian metallurgy, Aristotelian philosophy of matter and form, and Jewish, Arabic, early Christian, and Hermetic sources. Alchemy was not a monolithic practice, but virtually all versions of it involved destroying the nature of a “base” metal—lead or mercury, for instance—thus reducing it to a prima materia without the specific characteristics of any element. Then, the powder of the prized “Philosopher's Stone” or some other process would instill a “nobler” essence into the substance, transmuting it into gold or silver. The physical processes of alchemy involved several stages in which the base metal would be altered through heating, distilling, and the addition of various chemicals (saltpeter, alcohol, nitric acid, and sulphuric acid, for example). These stages were often known by specific colors that would appear during their successful execution. An intricate and seemingly mysterious set of images and symbols emerged, too, in the Greek, Arabic, and medieval literatures of alchemy. These included the tail-eating serpent, Ouroboros, symbolizing the unity of the cosmos, and various images representing the stages of the “Great Work” of alchemy (e.g., the black raven for the nigredo stage or the white dove for the albedo). Alchemy moved in pharmacological directions as well, using the logic of the purification of matter to seek chemical cures for ailments—and even for aging, which would be vanquished by the fabled Elixir of Life. Just as alchemy represented the chemistry of the Middle Ages, figures such as Paracelsus (1493–1541) helped direct alchemical thinking toward the practice of medicine. By the eighteenth century, though, alchemy was under assault and largely dismissed by those supporting the rigorous scientific method and new ways of understanding matter that laid the groundwork for modern chemistry. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientists pronounced alchemy's methods of reasoning and experimentation nonscientific. But, perhaps most important, they rejected alchemy's understanding of the nature of matter. Alchemy held that all the elements could be reduced to a prima materia, and then transmuted into other elements. But modern chemistry, as it emerged during the Enlightenment, came to the opposite view of the nature of matter. Culminating in John Dalton's field-defining 1808 treatise, A New System of Chemical Philosophy, modern chemistry held that atoms were the smallest particles, both indivisible and unalterable. An atom of each element was a fundamental, distinct particle (Keller 1983, 9–10). The material basis for alchemy was thus seen as nothing more than a long-held intellectual mistake, now relegated to the realm of superstition and pseudoscience. Alchemy was to reassert itself with a vengeance, though, in a most unanticipated arena at the beginning of the twentieth century. In an often quoted exchange between chemist Frederick Soddy (1877–1956) and physicist Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) in their lab at Canada's McGill University in 1901, when they discovered that radioactive thorium was transforming into an inert gas, “Soddy recalled, ‘I was overwhelmed with something greater than joy—I cannot very well express it—a kind of exaltation.’ He blurted out, ‘Rutherford, this is transmutation!’ ‘For Mike's sake, Soddy,’ his companion shot back, ‘don't call it transmutation. They'll have our heads off as alchemists’ ” (Weart 1988, 5–6). Indeed, within a decade of the 1896 discovery of radiation by French physicist Henri Becquerel (1852–1908), the newly emerging science of radioactivity routinely generated comparisons to alchemy. The transformation that radioactive elements underwent into other elements—Rutherford and Soddy's discovery—was frequently figured as alchemical transmutation. Some even imagined the highly radioactive element radium, only discovered in 1898 by the Curies, to be a modern-day Philosopher's Stone. Moreover, the little understood effects of mysterious radiation on living tissue evoked the alchemical Elixir of Life for many. By the 1920s, atomic physics and radiochemistry were regularly called “modern alchemy” in the press. Multiple textbooks on the new subject took that name. 1 Though Rutherford was initially wary of alchemical comparisons, as the above conversation attests, even he titled his last book The Newer Alchemy (1937). But what were the origins of this alchemical emphasis? Why would rigorously trained scientists such as Soddy, Sir William Ramsay, and others, working in the most modern laboratories available to chemistry and physics, have so quickly turned to alchemy to imagine the nature and implications of the changes they witnessed in radioactive elements? Investigating why the latest in cutting-edge science was cast in terms of a discredited earlier knowledge, one seemingly reduced to the status of a pre-Enlightenment occult relic, offers fascinating insights into the boundaries between science, religion, and other areas of culture at the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed, to understand how the science of radioactivity came to be so tied to alchemical tropes and images, we must turn to an apparently unscientific phenomenon: the major fin-de-siиcle revival of interest in alchemy and esoteric religion. Stunning landmarks of atomic science occurred alongside an efflorescence of occultism that ascribed deep significance to questions about the nature of matter and energy. And perhaps more surprisingly, the broad alchemical revival had an impact on the way some scientists understood and portrayed their research programs. 2 This book will explore the ways in which the alchemical revival in occult circles obliquely helped inform, and was in turn profoundly shaped by, the emerging science of radioactivity and radioactive transformation. STORIES OF MODERN ALCHEMY But how should we tell such a story? As with most narratives, the history of the birth of modern atomic science could be told in any number of ways. Historians of science generally tell it by chronicling key discoveries and the experiments and theoretical imperatives that produced them. Such an account tends to emphasize theoretical breakthroughs and laboratory triumphs, and, in outline, would unfold something like this. In November 1895, while passing electric current through a cathode ray tube (a glass tube evacuated of most of its air) shielded by heavy black cardboard, German physicist Wilhelm Rцntgen (1845–1923) discovers mysterious rays that can pass through flesh and wood, even producing photographic images of the bones inside his wife's hand. He names them “X-rays” because of their unknown nature. A few months later, in February 1896, Becquerel finds, quite by chance, that the uranium potassium sulphate crystals that he had placed on photographic plates in a drawer give off rays of their own. Marie Curie (1867–1934) soon names this phenomenon “radioactivity.” Marie and her husband Pierre Curie (1859–1906) show that thorium, too, is radioactive, and go on to discover new radioactive elements—including the highly radioactive radium in 1898. Becquerel and the Curies share the Nobel Prize in physics in 1903, initiating a long series of Nobel Prizes to be awarded to the pioneers of atomic physics. In 1897, at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, British physicist J. J. Thomson (1856–1940) seeks to explain the workings of those cathode ray tubes that preoccupied Rцntgen and several other physicists. Thomson shows that the mysterious cathode rays are, in fact, made of negatively charged particles, for which he uses a name coined by physicist Johnstone Stoney: electrons. In February 1897 before his colleagues at Cambridge, and in April before the Royal Institution of Great Britain (the oldest independent research institution in the world), Thomson strikingly argues against the Daltonian understanding of atoms of each element as fundamental particles. Atoms are not indivisible, but, he argues, have negatively charged particles, called electrons, that can be torn from them. These particles all have the same mass and charge, and they have less than a thousandth of the mass of a hydrogen atom, the least massive atom. In 1904, Thomson goes on to propose his “plum pudding” model of the atom, in which negatively charged electrons dwell in a positively charged fluid orb. Meanwhile, in a lab at Canada's McGill University, Rutherford, who had studied with Thomson at Cambridge, and Soddy, a young Oxford-trained chemist, reveal
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