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The Angelic Stone in English Alchemy Dan Merkur A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery, anonymously published in London in 1850, claimed that alchemists had never been so foolish as to attempt to make gold through chemical processes, but had always and only used coded language to discuss transformations that were spiritual.1 In Remarks on Alchemy and the Alchemists, Ethan Allen Hitchcock brought a similar thesis to public attention in the United States in 1857.2 The English occultist Art

The Angelic Stone in English Alchemy Dan Merkur A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery, anonymously published in London in 1850, claimed that alchemists had never been so foolish as to attempt to make gold through chemical processes, but had always and only used coded language to discuss transformations that were spiritual.1 In Remarks on Alchemy and the Alchemists, Ethan Allen Hitchcock brought a similar thesis to public attention in the United States in 1857.2 The English occultist Arthur Edward Waite, who himself published a work of spiritual alchemy3 and was responsible for republishing A Suggestive Inquiry under the name of its author, Mary Anne Atwood, nevertheless insisted in his pioneering writings on the history of alchemy that the secrets of the Hellenistic, Muslim, and medieval Latin alchemists had been chemical rather than mystical.4 Waite attributed the origin of spiritual alchemy to Henry Khunrath and the anonymous author of the treatise concerning Mary of Alexandria, with a few Rosicrucian philosophers in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century.5 Reviewing Waites Secret Tradition in Alchemy, the historian of chemistry Erik Holmyard wrote: Mr. Waite has, in short, finally and irretrievably demolished the fantastic thesis set up by Mrs. Atwood and others, and has proved beyond refutation that early and medieval alchemy was almost entirely concerned with physics or physic.6 John Read, another historian of chemistry, identified Paracelsus (1493-1541) as the originator of a form of alchemy that had both chemical and spiritual ingredients.7 Citing the example of Jacob Bhme (1575-1624), yet another historian of chemistry, F. Sherwood Taylor, noted that alchemical terminology was used in purely mystical writings as early as the sixteenth century.8 Whether historians defined spiritual alchemy in terms of a spiritual component that was additional to the chemical, or in terms of the later development of an exclusively spiritual concern, they reached a consensus in the mid-1920s that Western spiritual alchemy originated no earlier than the Renaissance. The consensus was abandoned, however, after the analytic psychologist Carl G. Jung began publishing on alchemy in 1929. Jung acknowledged that some alchemists had engaged in chemical activities, but he maintained that a parallel psychic process had been the more important activity.9 The psychic process took the form of mystical visions. While working on his chemical experiments the operator had certain psychic experiences which appeared to him as the particular behaviour of the chemical process.10 During the practical work certain events of an hallucinatory or visionary nature were perceived, which cannot be anything but projections of unconscious contents.11 In Jung's view, the visions were induced while alchemists watched the alchemical processes in their apparatus. Once the visions commenced, the hallucinatory materials obliterated the field of sense perception. The alchemists no longer saw the chemical processes. The symbols that they presented in their writings were products exclusively of their visionary states. On Jungs hypothesis, spiritual concerns were programmaticly to be read into alchemical texts, no matter how exclusively chemical the texts might seem to be. Because the symbolism of many alchemical texts makes them extremely difficult and sometimes impossible to understand, historians of both religion and chemistry were silent in face of the popularity of Jungs hypothesis; and it was not until the rise of academic research on Western esotericism that normative historical methodologies began to be applied to alchemy once again. I have been remarking since 1990 that there is simply no evidence of Western spiritual alchemy in the history of religions prior to the Renaissance.12 I find myself in agreement with a passing remark by Frances A. Yates, who suggested that the revival of Hermeticism in the Renaissance assumed an alchemical form in northern Europe. Yates wrote:Hermes Trismegistus, the secret patron of Renaissance Neoplatonism, was associated with the Egyptian science of alchemy, as the supposed author of alchemical texts.

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The part played by alchemy in the Hermeticism of the Italian Renaissance is not yet clear, but in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in northern Europe alchemy may be said to have been a dominant form of the occultist tradition.13

Approaching the puzzle of spiritual alchemy from their own disciplinary perspective, the historians of alchemy and early chemistry Lawrence M. Principe and William R. Newman have similarly found themselves obliged to insist on the dearth of evidence to support conventional assumptions of the high antiquity of spiritual alchemy. Limiting their discussion to alchemists who worked with chemical substances in laboratory procedures--in contrast with my own interest additionally in spiritual writers who used alchemical imagery-- Principe and Newman have drawn attention to what they call a school of supernatural alchemy that existed in seventeenth-century England. This school held that certain alchemical products had supernatural effects either upon the external world or upon the possessor.14 It is my present claim the English school can be traced back to the Elizabethan period and concerned itself with psychoactive substances. An alchemical manuscript, entitled The Epitome of the Treasure of all Welth, was written in 1562 by Edwardus Generosus Anglicus Innominatus. The text attributed an alchemical teaching to St Dunstan.15 Historically, Dunstan was the abbot of the Benedictine monastery at Glastonbury in Somerset from 940 to 956. He was briefly driven into exile by Eadwig, king of England, only to be persuaded by Edgar, king of Mercia and Northumbria, to return to England in 957. Dunstan was successively bishop of Worster (957) and London (959) and lastly archbishop of Canterbury from 960 until his death in 964. During his exile, he stayed for a time at the monastery of St Peter of Ghent. On returning to England he reorganized English monasticism on the continental model, which included teaching, writing, illuminating and craftwork in addition to prayer and meditation. Dunstan also oversaw extensive fundraising and constructions at Glastonbury.16 Because Dunstan lived two centuries prior to the first translations of alchemy from Arabic into Latin, his reputation as an alchemist lacked historical foundations and may instead be treated as symbolic. Reference to St Dunstan would have reminded anyone familiar with the legends of Glastonbury of several fabulous associations. Glastonbury abbey had been dissolved in 1539, but the site boasted legends that were congenial to the Church of Englands rejection of the authority of Rome. An anonymous life of St Dunstan, written around 1000, had claimed that the first Roman missionaries to England found a church already in place at Glastonbury: the first neophytes of the Catholic law found...an ancient church, built, it is said, by no human skill, but prepared by God for mans salvation, which afterwards the maker of the heavens himself by many stories of miracles and many mysteries of virtues showed that he himself had consecrated it to himself and to the holy Mary, mother of God.17 St Joseph of Arimathea, whom late twelfth and early thirteenth century romances credited with bringing the holy grail to Britain, was said, beginning a few decades later, to have come specifically to Glastonbury,18 which again made Glastonbury the oldest and most authoritative church in England. Beginning in the late fourteenth century, the legend of St Josephs foundation of Glastonbury was cited in international church affairs as grounds for the precedence and independent position of the English church.19 Glastonbury was also connected with Arthurian romance in a second manner. Glastonbury had suffered a fire in 1184, and its reconstruction included the discovery of an ancient graveyard that had been buried by landfill, possibly in St Dunstans era. The excavations enjoyed the patronage of Henry II, who wanted to diminish the importance of Canterbury by aggrandizing Glastonbury; and the project continued despite his death in 1189. The announcement in 1191 that two coffins contained the remains of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere is generally regarded today as a hoax that aimed both to discourage Celtic political hopes in Arthurs return and to raise funds for the abbey through the tourist trade.20 The identification of Arthurs grave was soon taken up by romance writers. Geoffrey of Mon-

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mouth, writing around 1136, had written that Arthur, severely wounded at the Battle of Camlan, was carried by boat to the paradise Isle of Avalon to be cured of his wounds.21 In Vita Merlini, written around 1150, Monmouth had called Avalon the insula pomifera, Isle of Apples,22 presumably deriving the name from Celtic avallo, apple,23 and referring to the fruit of the tree of Eden. It was only after the ostensible exhumation of Arthur at Glastonbury that Gerald of Wales in De instructione principum, written about 1194, added that Avalon was Glastonbury.24 The name Glastonbury presumably derived from the Welsh name for the location, Ynyswitrin, Isle of Glass, which is earliest attested in a charter, no longer extant, that bore the date 601 and was quoted by William of Malmesbury in Gesta regum Anglorum in the early twelfth century.25 In The Spoils of the Otherworld, a Welsh poem of uncertain but pre-Norman date, in which Arthur led an expedition to the otherworld, in order to rescue a prisoner and carry off the otherworlds treasures, one of the epithets of Annwn, the underworld, was the Glass Fort.26 As I have argued elsewhere, the principle plunder was the appropriation of the motifs of the pagan Celtic otherworld for allegorical use in reference to the terrestrial paradise of Celtic Christianity.27 Where the pagan Celtic otherwo