Generated American “Homunculi” (Sepúlveda’S Paracelsian Term, P

H-Environment McCormick on Bauer, 'The Alchemy of Conquest: Science, Religion, and the Secrets of the New World'

Review published on Thursday, April 29, 2021

Ralph Bauer. The Alchemy of Conquest: Science, Religion, and the Secrets of the New World. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. 670 pp. $79.50 (cloth),ISBN 978-0-8139-4254-4;

$39.50 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8139-4256-8.

Reviewed by Ted McCormick (Concordia University) Published on H-Environment (April, 2021) Commissioned by Daniella McCahey (Texas Tech University)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=55859

For its early modern European advocates, empire promised transformation: economic, political, spiritual, natural-philosophical. Colonial expansion across the Atlantic—so argued proponents of conquest—would turn waste into wealth, idleness into industry, barbarism into civility, sin into salvation. Like the Philosophers’ Stone, empire transmuted. Ralph Bauer is not the first to notice the alchemical aspects of imperial apologetics, but The Alchemy of Conquest is the first thorough account of their complex origins and multifaceted development over the course of centuries. In its scope, its richness, and (at nearly 650 pages, including notes) its heft, this is a major work.

Bauer connects the histories of alchemy, cosmography, ethnography, prophecy, theories of conversion, the mendicant orders, competing strains of Aristotelianism, Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, Baconianism, artisanal epistemology, mercantilism, and print, as well as the historical processes of colonial expansion, war, genocide, and enslavement in the Iberian and English Atlantic. Yet the object of the book is, in a sense, straightforward. It is a history of discovery: “discovery” as used in phrases like “the Age of Discovery,” and as an element in narratives of scientific advance, but discovery too in the context of the “Doctrine of Discovery” as a legal and rhetorical justification of conquest and expropriation. These were intertwined: “It was … the conquest of America that legitimated the modern idea of discovery by underwriting it with a salvific and even millenarian reason that forged an unprecedented synthesis of science, religion, and state power” (p. 11). Rather than a condition of empire, discovery was a product of it—specifically, of defenses of colonial domination and expropriation rooted in “the medieval cultural nexus between crusade and the transmission of Aristotelian science, especially alchemy” (p. 13).

The book’s many moving parts move together well thanks to its neat division into four sections of three chapters each, and the author’s merciful habit of revisiting key details at strategic points. A survey of the whole underlines the wide interest the book should find and gives some idea of its nuance and ambition. Part 1 braids together a series of medieval traditions and debates. One is the divergence within Scholastic Aristotelianism between a realist metaphysics (associated with Thomas Aquinas) that lent weight to the idea of universal natural law, and a Franciscan nominalism that privileged the sovereignty of the divine (and, by analogy, monarchical) will. Another is the transmutation of alchemy—via the writings of pseudo-Geber (Paul of Taranto), Roger Bacon, John of

Rupescissa, Arnald of Villanova, and both genuine and spurious works attributed to Ramón Llull—from an empirical practice into an esoteric pursuit of material transformation and bodily rejuvenation that yoked nonhylomorphic matter theory to an apocalyptic project of holy war. It was above all in Franciscan circles that this nexus formed and flourished; among Thomists and Dominicans, by contrast, imperial and alchemical adventures found important critics.

Part 2 traces the legacies of these traditions in arguments for Spanish Atlantic expansion, starting with Christopher Columbus’s fusion of cosmography with prophecies fathered on Joachim of Fiore by the late medieval alchemists met earlier. This “ecstatic materialism” (p. 138) territorialized the pursuit of the elixir while it spiritualized the pursuit of gold, making the “discovery” of the New World an apocalyptic and alchemical process—an urgent and forcible revelation of secrets. Exploring the justification of colonization in terms of “reduction” (beginning, in the papal bullsInter cetera [1493], with that of Indigenous people to Catholicism), Bauer links alchemical ideas to theories of conversion developed during a “Llullian Renaissance” (p. 202) centered in the University of Alcalá under Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros. Perhaps the most compelling case for alchemy’s metaphorical significance to the real and deliberate process of ethnocide follows (pp. 213-264). Here, Bauer examines “reduction” as a policy predicated at once on the painstaking empirical study of Indigenous religion, language, and society (“ethno-demonology,” as he has it) and on the isolation of Indigenous people in reducciones that sought to break them down and destroy—as diabolical impurities—those parts of them inconsistent with the faith.

Part 3 pursues the role of Democritean and Paracelsian matter theories in sixteenth-century representations of Indigenous societies—and vice versa. Accounts of New World cannibalism from Amerigo Vespucci to Theodor de Bry emerge as safe, “heterotopic” (pp. 288-89) spaces for Europeans to explore heterodox ideas about the persistence of matter through successive acts of digestion. The “Great Debate” over the enslavement of Indigenous people, between the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas and the Spanish humanist (and self-styled “second Democritus”) Juan Gines de Sepúlveda, reveals not the triumph of a Thomist idea of natural law but its repudiation in favor of a Christian humanism that combined pre-Socratic atomism, an aggressive version of Aristotle’s idea of “natural slaves,” and an alchemical exaltation of the power of art to argue that the dispossession and enslavement of demonically generated American “homunculi” (Sepúlveda’s Paracelsian term, p. 293) was just. Natural histories from Oviedo in the 1520s to Acosta in the 1590s did to the land what Sepúlveda did to the people of the Americas, portraying “a primeval state of chaos, a prima materia” (p. 346) in need of reduction to order by art. The alchemical hunt for the secrets of nature, the “chemical wedding” (p. 365) of an active Europe to a passive, porous but potentially rich New World, became both a justification and a method of empire.

Part 4 turns from Spanish to English apologetics. Building on the work of Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and other historians of science in the Iberian Atlantic, this section elucidates the continuities as well as the departures involved in erecting a “White Legend” (p. 370) of English scientific-cum-imperial destiny atop the Black Legend of Spanish perfidy. We see the now familiar fusion of alchemy and ethno-demonology translated and secularized in the works of Walter Raleigh on Guiana, Thomas Harriot on Virginia, and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626). The focus of transformation shifts from people to land, the end of empire from apocalyptic crusade to “epistemic mercantilism” (p. 435)—the discovery of nature’s secrets as the basis of power and property—in the interests of the state. A brief coda leaps ahead to consider Alexander von Humboldt’s role in combining a cosmopolitan vision of

Citation: H-Net Reviews. McCormick on Bauer, 'The Alchemy of Conquest: Science, Religion, and the Secrets of the New World'. H- Environment. 04-29-2021. https://networks.h-net.org/node/19397/reviews/7641753/mccormick-bauer-alchemy-conquest-science-religion-and-secrets-new Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Environment scientific community with a clear division between the “temperate man’s” pursuit of natural philosophy and the “tropical man’s” subjection to it. But, perhaps surprisingly, it is really Francis Bacon who marks the emergence of “a modern paradigm of discovery” (p. 433).

To have woven so many themes together coherently in a discussion spanning so vast a period is an extraordinary accomplishment, and the above summary does scant justice to the incisive readings Bauer offers of key texts along the way. Likewise, the overarching account of the concept of “discovery” rests upon a series of sub-themes and -arguments that will be of interest in their own right to specialists. Bauer emphasizes the centrality of religion to the history of science as one such, and while I am not sure that Carl Jung’s alchemical studies are needed to make this case (p. 77), Bauer’s own discussion of Columbus (pp. 135-83) is an admirable case in point. Another key theme carefully developed is the variety within late medieval and early modern “Aristotelianism”—a label that papers over many of the crucial splits Bauer details, from metaphysics to politics to method. (Bauer’s excursus on the interpretation and reinterpretation of “natural slavery” [pp. 315-31] is a particularly interesting sub-example.) The entanglement of genuine and spurious texts in prophetic and alchemical traditions alike—the cases of Llull and Joachim resurface repeatedly—is a third. The book adds a wealth of alchemical material to growing literatures on the late medieval preconditions of early modern (and hence modern) science, as well as on the importance of Spanish imperial knowledge and experience to the British Empire. Above all, it shows specific and consequential implications of alchemical aspirations, thinking, and metaphor (as distinct from simple thirst for gold) in colonial contexts. This is plainest in the discussion of missionary towns (e.g., p. 238). But it underlies the whole idea of “discovery” that justified Spanish and then English colonialism not only in the rhetorical flights of their promoters but also in the legal judgments of the authorities they set up—which is to say, the authority on which settler colonialism still rests.

A large argument makes gaps inevitable; some stones remain unturned, some work unconsulted. The book’s concern is with origins, but seventeenth- and eighteenth-century specialists might selfishly wish it said more about consequences. Given Bauer’s meticulous disentangling of discovery’s premodern roots, Francis Bacon’s continued ability to stand alone as its modern representative is doubtful. Even in the seventeenth century, Bacon’s witting heirs (notably in the Hartlib Circle) employed alchemy in a variety of concrete and metaphorical ways to problems of empire, and while Bauer furnishes invaluable context for situating this in a long-term chronology, he does not mention or explore it. In this light, the jump from Bacon to Humboldt—eliding the proliferation of scientific institutions and the explosion of the slave trade—looks like a missed opportunity. Similarly, the focus on Spain and England as successive seats of Atlantic domination raises the question of where other European states and empires, and other theorists of scientific and political conquest writing (such as Giovanni Botero or Jakob Bornitz, who figure alongside Bacon in Vera Keller’s recent work) might fit. The proliferation of alchemies—literal and metaphorical (p. 11), physical and spiritual, linguistic and textual—may frustrate some readers. Others will ask how (or whether) alchemical vocabulary related to alchemical work in any given colonial setting.

The singular status of the New World raises a different set of questions. What bearing do justifications of domination in terms of discovery have on colonization in the Old World? How can we make sense of alchemical projects of social engineering applied to people whose humanity was not necessarily “homunculized”? It’s not clear how far Bauer’s account takes us toward answers. Early on, we learn that the celebrated alchemist Robert Boyle was bound to “English colonial enterprise”

(p. 32) through his personal participation in the East India Company and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. But Boyle was a child of empire, too, being the younger son of the first Earl of Cork—a colonial land-grabber if ever there was one, only in Ireland rather than America; and his circle sought to “transmute” or “digest” the Irish even as it displaced Indigenous people in Virginia and New England. Did the Franciscan reduction of Indigenous cultures to minima naturalia feed into European thinking about subject populations in general? Did it shape thinking about race in the context of the enslavement of Africans? How did an alchemical defense of empire in the Americas become (if it did) a modern view of what it is to know and to govern?

These questions are not gaps in the book so much as the defects of its virtues—for it keeps its focus tight even as the argument draws on an astonishing range of subjects and literatures. Importantly, too, they are opportunities for discussion and research, across periods and specializations, that Bauer has opened up rather than closed off. The Alchemy of Conquest should change the questions we ask about the meaning of discovery, about the relations between science, religion, and colonialism, and about the ties between esoteric medieval traditions and central aspects of the modern world. It will be a point of departure for a long time to come.

Citation: Ted McCormick. Review of Bauer, Ralph, The Alchemy of Conquest: Science, Religion, and the Secrets of the New World. H-Environment, H-Net Reviews. April, 2021.URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55859

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.