Unlike most other studies of alchemy and literature, which focus on
alchemical imagery in poetry of specific periods or writers, this
book traces the figure of the alchemist in Western literature from
its first appearance in the Eighth Circle of Dante's Inferno down
to the present. From the beginning alchemy has had two aspects:
exoteric or operative (the transmutation of baser metals into gold)
and esoteric or speculative (the spiritual transformation of the
alchemist himself). From Dante to Ben Jonson, during the centuries
when the belief in exoteric alchemy was still strong and exploited
by many charlatans to deceive the gullible, writers in major works
of many literatures treated alchemists with ridicule in an effort
to expose their tricks. From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment,
as that belief weakened, the figure of the alchemist disappeared,
even though Protestant poets in England and Germany were still fond
of alchemical images. But when eighteenth-century science almost
wholly undermined alchemy, the figure of the alchemist began to
emerge again in literature-now as a humanitarian hero or as a
spirit striving for sublimation. Following these esoteric
romanticizations, as scholarly interest in alchemy intensified,
writers were attracted to the figure of the alchemist and his quest
for power. The fin-de-siecle saw a further transformation as poets
saw in the alchemist a symbol for the poet per se and others,
influenced by the prevailing spiritism, as a manifestation of the
religious spirit. During the interwar years, as writers sought
surrogates for the widespread loss of religious faith, esoteric
alchemy underwent a pronounced revival, and many writers turned to
the figure of the alchemist as a spiritual model or, in the case of
Paracelsus in Germany, as a national figurehead. This tendency,
theorized by C. G. Jung in several major studies, inspired after
World War II a vast popularization of the figure in
novels-historical, set in the present, or juxtaposing past and
present- in England, France, Germany, Italy, Brazil, and the United
States. The inevitable result of this popularization was the
trivialization of the figure in advertisements for healing and
cooking or in articles about scientists and economists. In sum: the
figure of the alchemist in literature provides a seismograph for
major shifts in intellectual and cultural history.
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