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Modern Alchemy : Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory / Mark S Modern Alchemy This page intentionally left blank Modern Alchemy Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory mark s. morrisson 1 2007 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright # 2007 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Morrisson, Mark S. Modern alchemy : occultism and the emergence of atomic theory / Mark S. Morrisson. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-19-530696-5 1. Alchemy—History. 2. Occultism—History. 3. Nuclear chemistry. 4. Alchemy in literature. I. Title. QD13.M67 2007 540.1'12—dc22 2006029629 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper To Laura, Devin, and Ciara, Marilyn and Clovis Morrisson, and Mary von Ahnen—again This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments Several scholars and institutions have been instrumental in helping me launch and research this project. I am especially grateful to Philip Jenkins, without whose encouragement, support, and voluminous knowledge of the world of occultism this book would not have realized its full potential, and to Cynthia Read, my editor at Oxford Univer- sity Press, for her unflagging support of a project that crosses so many disciplinary lines. I owe an immense debt of gratitude to Linda Dalrymple Henderson, whose constant encouragement and detailed research on the intersections between science and occultism in the modernist period have inspired much of my work. M. E. Warlick’s vast knowledge of alchemy and its twentieth-century manifestations in the arts has likewise moved my thinking along at several sessions of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. Indeed, the project benefited greatly from the cross-disciplinary testing ground pro- vided by the SLSA. Susan Squier, Wenda Bauchspies, and other members of the science studies reading group at Penn State Univer- sity helped clarify the aims of this project in its early stages. I am grateful to Michael Gordin, whose meticulous reading of my manu- script challenged me to reconsider some of my assumptions and deepened my knowledge of occult appropriations of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century science. I am also greatly indebted to the anonymous second reader of the manuscript for a number of key suggestions that enhanced the final project. I also wish to thank Lynn Allan Kauppi for his careful yet speedy copyediting. viii acknowledgments I also wish to thank the Bodleian Library at Oxford University for permis- sion to do research in the Frederick Soddy Papers in their Modern Manuscripts collections, and the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford University, for permission to work with Soddy’s lecture notes and papers in their archives. I thank University College London, Special Collections, for permission to do research in the Sir William Ramsay Papers. I also thank the special collections librarians at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, for access to H. G. Wells’s papers, and the University of Texas at Austin Harry Ransom Human- ities Research Center for access to Edith Sitwell’s papers. Frances Soar of the Geographical Association, the administrators of the Frederick Soddy Trust, and Maxwell Wright and Gwen Huntley of Bunkers Solicitors generously helped me in my efforts to track down an estate for Frederick Soddy’s unpublished writ- ings. And I wish to thank Mark Smithells and the Smithells family in New Zealand for permission to quote from Arthur Smithells’s unpublished manu- script in the Frederick Soddy Papers. Penn State University provided me a sabbatical, a Faculty Research Grant from the Research and Graduate Studies Office, and a semester as a Resident Scholar at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities that provided the time away from teaching and administrative duties and the travel support that facilitated the completion of this book. I owe special thanks to my department head, Robert Caserio, for his extraordinary commitment to this project, and Deborah Clarke, Janet Lyon, Robin Schulze, and Sanford Schwartz for help- ing me keep the project moving at crucial stages. My undergraduate research assistants Greg Jones and Elizabeth Parfitt provided invaluable help with their careful exploration of many years of Theosophical and occult periodicals, newspapers, and popular science journals. Likewise, the hardworking Interli- brary Loan staff at the Penn State Pattee Library graciously handled my seem- ingly endless requests for obscure periodicals. Finally, I wish to thank my wife, Laura Reed-Morrisson, for her support and her careful readings and insightful suggestions on every draft of the manuscript, and I thank my son Devin and daughter Ciara for their will- ingness to endure the long hours I spent at work on this project. Contents Introduction, 3 1. From the Golden Dawn to the Alchemical Society, 31 2. Occult Chemistry, Instrumentation, and the Theosophical Science of Direct Perception, 65 3. Chemistry in the Borderland, 97 4. Atomic Alchemy and the Gold Standard, 135 Epilogue, 185 Appendix A: Boundary-Work, Border Crossings, and Trading Zones, 195 Appendix B: Occult Interest Books by Alchemical Society Members, 205 Appendix C: A Partial List of Alchemical Society Members, 207 Notes, 209 Works Cited, 235 Index, 253 This page intentionally left blank Modern Alchemy This page intentionally left blank 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 transmuta- tion 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 purifica- tion. In spite of Enlightenment attacks upon alchemy as unscien- tific 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 mer- cury, 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 4modernalchemy 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 phar- macological directions as well, using the logic of the purification of matter to seek chemical cures for ailments—and even for aging, which would be van- quished by the fabled Elixir of Life. Just as alchemy represented the chemistry of the Middle Ages, figures such as Paracelsus (1493–1541) helped direct al- chemical 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 trans- muted into other elements. But modern chemistry, as it emerged during the Enlightenment, came to the opposite view of the nature of matter. Culmi- nating 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
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