Spiritual Alchemy

Abstract This book reclaims the problematic term “spiritual alchemy” as a precisely definable category for historical research and documents for the first time that there was a continuous tradition of spiritual alchemy from around 1600 to 1910. At the turn of the seventeenth century, the confluence of two important currents—German mysticism and alchemical Paracelsianism—led to a new spiritual alchemy of rebirth that entailed the formation of a subtle body within born-again believers that provided the basis for their subsequent resurrection at the Last Judgment. Embryonic forms of spiritual alchemy in pseudepigraphic writings attributed to Valentin Weigel inspired Jacob Boehme’s description of rebirth. Although he initially knew little about alchemy, Boehme developed his own spiritual alchemy in a number of works written between 1619 and 1622. According to Boehme’s understanding, laboratory alchemy was but a lesser, grossly material reflection of spiritual alchemy. All of the later key figures—Abraham von Franckenberg, Georg Lorenz Seidenbecher, Friedrich Breckling, Dionysius Andreas Freher, Mary Anne Atwood (née South)—drew on Boehme’s spiritual alchemy and communicated it to their contemporaries. Drawing extensively on the manuscript record, this book shows that Boehme’s spiritual alchemy came to shape Mrs. Atwood’s Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery and thus had a decisive impact on modern conceptions, such as those of C. G. Jung and Mircea Eliade. Ultimately, spiritual alchemy gave rise to a bewildering variety of spiritual interpretations of alchemy.