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Comment by jhbadger | Hacker News Reader

"Newton was an alchemist (which isn’t about lead to gold, it’s about the transmutation of the Self)"

Well, maybe not so much. That's kind of a 19th-20th century interpretation. We didn't want to believe that all these smart people really were into stupidity like turning lead into gold. Surely it must be much deeper than that! It must have been metaphors! But maybe not. Maybe they literally were into what they said they were into. It's not unlike how people want to claim that various religious stories weren't "really" about what they claim to be.

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> We didn't want to believe that all these smart people really were into stupidity like turning lead into gold.

Alchemy was not stupid in the 17th century. You have the benefit of three centuries of subsequent scientific advances, to which geniuses like Isaac Newton, and those other smart people, contributed significantly.

Besides alchemy, Newton was deeply immersed in various occult studies. He was also a heretic, being a Unitarian, keeping his religious beliefs secret. Scientific research occupied only a part of his time. The seventeenth century was a time of religious and political turmoil, millenarianism and apocalyptic prophecy abounded. Newton was a man of his time.

Respectfully, Zosimus is one of the earliest Hellenistic writers on alchemy and he speaks of chemistry as a symbol:

“There are two sciences and two wisdoms, that of the Egyptians and that of the Hebrews, which latter is confirmed by divine justice. The science and wisdom of the most excellent dominate the one and the other. Both originate in olden times. Their origin is without a king, autonomous and immaterial; it is not concerned with material and corruptible bodies, it operates, without submitting to strange influences, supported by prayer and divine grace.

The symbol of chemistry is drawn from the creation by its adepts, who cleanse and save the divine soul bound in the elements, and who free the divine spirit from its mixture with the flesh.“

On the other hand we really can understand the chemistry that alchemists were fiddling with -- it wasn't metaphorical -- they really were messing around with chemicals and not souls. We still call some things by the names alchemists called them like "aqua regia" (literally "royal water") which is a nixture of nitric and hydrochloric acid that can dissolve gold and platinum. And which they hoped could therefore make more of it.

That to me is one of the most interesting aspects. Somehow, these people who were deeply spiritual, also were adepts of science, and while we can’t say any of them got it exactly right, the paths intersected enough that their contributions were in some ways foundational.

Psychology and psychiatry are two other fields that traveled the path of spirituality and occultism before becoming what we now term modern.

It speaks to the resonance of being- as above, so below.

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