Sir Isaac Newton - Master of Alchemy »
Posted By gamahuche 11 months, 1 week ago in Science & TechnologyIt is little known that Sir Isaac was a secret master of the art of Alchemy. In fact, Newton's personal library contained over a hundred alchemical texts, including a significant work by Nicolas Flamel, which Newton laboriously copied by hand.
Read Full Story at mania.com »
575 Views Share Story 7 Comments Report
Submitted By:
gamahuche
"I would rather be a square peg than fit in a pigeon hole" -
an essay which won me the "Lamb Essay Prize" at the Religious ...
Who Also Submitted:
RSS Join the Discussion
+ Add CommentComments So Far: 16 (view all)
-
100%
gamahuche11 months, 1 week ago
This comment is below the standard viewing threshold View It »
The reason that Newton is in the news today is because he was born on Christmas Day but his birthdate changed.. This had to do with Britain being out of synch with the rest of Europe, as explained thoroughly here: http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/26/opinion/edj...
Reply
This is the summary of that info:
He was born in England on Christmas Day 1642 according to the Julian calendar - the calendar in use in England at the time. But by the 1640s, much of the rest of Europe was using the Gregorian calendar (the one in general use today); according to this one, Newton was born on Jan. 4, 1643. -
100%
gamahuche11 months, 1 week ago
This comment is below the standard viewing threshold View It »
Far more interesting and arcane was Newton's interest in Alchemy, which while well-known and hardly surprising considering the period in which he lived, when alchemy was the state of the art [Boyle was another famous alchemist, for example]. The odd thing is that officialdom, especially academic and "scientific" entities tried to keep Newton's interest in alchemy hidden till very recently, perhaps fearing that their own [frequently far more absurd] ideas would not be taken seriously if they were "tainted" by what CAN be interpreted as a bunch of hocus pocus.
Reply
One recent reason for a perceptual shift was a large international conference held in Philadelphia under the auspices of the Chemical Heritage Foundation which while it DID significantly help to bring alchemy "in from the cold" and numbered some heavy hitters, rather over-hyped itself by claiming to be the first conference on alchemy in modern times - or words to that effect..
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/01/science/01alch.h...
In fact alchemy has NEVER ceased to be a topic of immense fascination for a considerable number of people - the JK Rowling Harry Potter books being just one popularisation [which of course bring shudders to people with any serious interest or knowledge of the topic]. As for Conferences there have been MANY serious ones - not including one a couple of years ago in Las Vegas, including 3 international ones sponsored by the New York Open Center here in the Czech lands, starting in 1995. And numerous domestic ones. Alchemy is not considered a bizarre topic here, a country with an alchemical history second to none in Europe.
This is due in large part to the fascination with alchemy of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II who had a lifetime fascianetion with alchemy, employed upward of 100 alchemists at a time and made Bohemia the world centre of alchemy in its most active period - though the history of alchemy can be traced back to many centuries earlier.
The single best on-line resource for alchemy is Adam Mcleans website: http://www.levity.com/alchemy
generously sponsored by Dan Levy of NYC.
As far as Newton's interest and contribution I'll add some more later. One interesting text that he translated into English is considered as THE basic text of alchemy and is known as the "Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistos".
Hermes is known in Egyptian as Thoth, and his Latin name was Mercurius. Newton's translation can be found here on this page which gives a good overview of Newton and alchemy:
http://www.alchemylab.com/isaac_newton.htm
Its a click-on on the left side. I believe that I've used up my ration of www's for this post.. -
-
-
-
100%
gamahuche11 months ago
This comment is below the standard viewing threshold View It »
He came a bit later..
Reply
Alistair Crowley, who liked to use 666 and "The Great Beast" as identifiers, believed himself to be the re-incarnation of Edward Kelley, a strange and confusing character, frequently dismissed as a charlatan but who apparently did have some success - if not as an alchemist as a processor of ores - and was also the "creator" of some extraordinary texts, dictated in trance, which comprise a huge body of information on magic. The latter were recorded by John Dee, a scholar of incredible renown, who graduated from Cambridge at the age of 17 and when he was 21 was lecturing at the Sorbonne, with people trying to listen by climbing up to the windows. He had an enormous library, unmatched in England at the time and was a familiar of Queen Elizabeth's, choosing the date for her Coronation, based on astrological significances. He reached a point where he believed that he had learnt everything that it was possible to learn through "normal sources" and that therefore the only way that he could learn more would be by communicating directly with G_d. In order to do this would require some form of seance - and this was a relatively-speaking a "known" practice of the time. Dee was always a highly devout Christian and therefore he was concerned that any spirits who were summoned up should be the "good guys" and not the diabolical kind. Dee was unnable to see anything himself in the "shew stone" made of obsidian, but the equivalent of the crystal ball, later favoured by fortune-tellers.He was therefore dependent on a "scryer" also a "profession" of the time, basically a professional seer. This was Edward Kelley - though he first
appeared at Dee's door in Mortlake bearing the surname Talbot... Just one of the mysteries about him.
This work continued over a period of several years and was an obsessive activity. The results of these sessions were all written down by Dee, from Kelley's dictation and form a truly extraordinary body of work which "holds together' remarkably coherently. Much of it is also dictated in a styrange lanuage which became known as Enochian. [At this moment I don't recall whether that name was used at the time or if it was a later addition]. It survived in a text which was also Dee's diary of their journeys in Poland and Bohemia - whither they were drawn by the Emperor Rudolf's fascination with Alchemy, and survived almost intact. It was being used to line pie-crusts [!] when someone spotted it and thought that Elias Ashmole [Ashmolean Library in Oxford is named after him] might be interested in it. He was!
The greater part of it was published in printed form, in 1659, edited by Meric Casaubon and is still available to this day in facsimile editions.
-
More News
Science Daily
Amphibians as environmental omen disputed
Two-pronged protein attack could be source of SARS virulence
Molecular architecture of Treponema pallidum, bacterium that causes syphilis
New molecule implicated in diabetes-associated blindness
Climate change in Kuwait Bay: Higher temperatures having profound effects
Add a Comment
Sign In With Your Propeller Account
Please keep your comments relevant to this story.
To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br /> tags.