The Reenchantment of the World

by Morris Berman

  19. CW 12, pt. 2.

  20. Brown, Life Against Death, p. 316.

  21. Of course, barbarism is hardly the prerogative of modern man, although its scale probably is. Jung would conceivably have argued that the creation of a technology necessary to effect the genocide of modern times was itself part of the process of psychic repression.

  22. "Sol et eius umbra perficiunt opus," from a work of 1618, quoted by Dobbs in her study of Newton, p. 31 and n.

  23. The experience has an allegory in "The Fisherman and the Genie" from the Arabian Nights, in which the genie, once released from the bottle, threatens to kill the fisherman and is not easily persuaded to return whence he came. The Western version of this, naturally enough, deals with technology, and is captured in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's gothic novel, Frankenstein.

  24. Actually, this is an incorrect correlate. Psychosis is the attempt to "salvage" the soul; it is only from the viewpoint of Western clinical psychiatry that it is regarded as purely negative. See the concluding pages of Chapter 4.

  25. R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968).

  26. R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965; orig. publ. 1959), pp. 220, 204-5.

  27. Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible, trans. Stephen Corrin (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971; orig. French edition 1956), pp. 7-9, 30-33, 42, 54-57, 101-2.

  28. Titus Burckhardt, Alchemy, trans. William Stoddart (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1971; orig. German edition 1960), p. 25. The discussion of alchemical procedure that follows is taken from this book.

  29. According to Frank Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1968), p. 171, there were a total of twelve basic procedures, which he lists (following the system of Sir George Ripley, 1591) as: calcination, dissolution, separation, conjunction, putrefaction, congelation, cibation, sublimation, fermentation, exaltation, multiplication, and projection. The progress of the work was also charted by the various colors that were produced in the vessel, a type of index with obvious metallurgical roots. The "descent into chaos" of the initial solution was characterized by a blackening, or 'nigredo,' followed by a bleaching, or 'albedo,' and ending up (if all went well) with a reddening, or 'rubedo.' But there was a whole series of intermediate colors also, and hence the term 'cauda pavonis,' or peacock's tail, is frequently employed in the texts. Mercury produced a blackening, sulfur a reddening.

  30. One of the best statements of the alchemical model of the human personality, although it does not refer to alchemy as such, is Luke Rhineharts hilarious novel, The Dice Man (London: Talmy, Franklin Ltd., 1971). The religious and psychoanalytic interpretation can be found in various sources, but I chose to paraphrase the interpretation provided by James Hillman in a lecture given in San Francisco on 11 December 1976. Hillman is editor of Spring and author of a number of works on Jungian psychology. A similar analysis of the nature of personality may be found in Hermann Hesse's brilliant novel Steppenwolf.

  The quotation from Laing is on p. 190 of The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise (Penguin Books, 1967). This book, like The Divided Self, is a profoundly alchemical work.

  31. On Perry's work, see his book, The Far Side of Madness (Englewood Cliffs, N,J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974). The parallels between insanity and alchemy, and premodern thought in general, are discussed briefly at the end of Chapter 4 of the present work.

  32. F. Sherwood Taylor, The Alchemists (New York: Henry Schuman, 1949), pp. 179-89. The testimony of Spinoza occurs in a letter he wrote to Jarrig Jellis in March 1667, reprinted in his Posthumous Works.

  33. On alchemy as the key to nature see the various authors quoted by A. G. Debus in "Renaissance Chemistry and the Work of Robert Fludd," Ambix 14 (1967), 42-59. Agrippa discussed the relations between alchemy and numerous craft processes (see the article by Müller-Jahncke cited in note 15 of this chap.); and its relationship to mining, metallurgy, and pottery is discussed at length by Eliade in The Forge and the Crucible. The relationship between alchemy and medicine is the subject of a large literature, and has been explored in the work of Paracelsus and his followers by Allen Debus and Walter Pagel. Finally, alchemy as a yoga has been discussed by Eliade, Jung, and a host of other writers. Of particular interest are Burckhardt, Alchemy, and Maurice Aniane, "Notes sur l'alchimie, 'Yoga' cosmologique de la chrétiené mediévale," in Jacques Masui, ed., Yoga, science de l'homme intégral (Paris: Cahiers du Sud, 1953),pp. 243-73.

  34. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (New York: Fawcett World Library, 1959). The first three books of the Castaneda tetralogy, The Teachings of Don Juan, A Separate Reality, and Journey to Ixtlan, deal with the animistic world view mostly from the inside. The fourth, Tales of Power, spells out the epistemology of sorcery in exact detail.

  35. Reprinted by permission of G.P. Putnam's Sons from Seeing Castaneda, edited by Daniel Noel, p. 53. Copyright © 1976 by Daniel Noel.

  36. Philip Wheelwright, ed., The Presocratics (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1966), p. 52.

  37. Taylor, The Alchemists, pp. 233-34.

  38. See Chapter 4 for a discussion of Newton's alchemy. Something of a cottage industry has developed among historians of science regarding Newton as an alchemist, and there is by now a good bit of literature on the subject. The interested reader might wish to consult any of the following: Frank Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton; J.E. McGuire and P.M. Rattansi, "Newton and the 'Pipes of Pan'," Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 21 (1966), 108-43; Betty Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy; R.S. Westfall, "The Role of Alchemy in Newton's Career," in M. L. R. Bonelli and W. R. Shea, eds., Reason, Experiment, and Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution (New York: Science History Publications, 1975), pp. 189-232, and also his "Newton and the Hermetic Tradition," in A. G. Debus, ed., Science, Medicine and Society in the Renaissance, 2 vols. (New York: Neale Watson, 1972), 2, 183-98; P.M. Rattansi, "Newton's Alchemical Studies," in the Debus volume, pp. 167-98; and the remarkable essay by David Kubrin, "Newton's Inside Out! Magic, Class Struggle, and the Rise of Mechanism in the West," in Harry Woolf, ed., The Analytic Spirit (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981).

  Christopher Hill provides a brilliant discussion of seventeenth-century radical ideas, including those of the occult sciences, in The World Turned Upside Down (New. York: Viking, 1972).

  39. There is, furthermore, a still existing underground of practical alchemists. See Jacques Sadoul, Alchemists and Gold (London: Neville Spearman, 1972), and Armand Barbault, Gold of a Thousand Mornings, trans. Robin Campbell (London: Neville Spearman, 1975).

  40. Both quotations from Magritte can be found in Eddie Wolfram's Introduction to David Larkin, ed., Magritte (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972). The link between alchemy and surrealism is mentioned briefly by E.R. Chamberlin in Everyday Life in Renaissance Times (New York: Capricorn Books, 1965), p. 175.

  41. See Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic.

  42. Eliade, Forge and Crucible, pp. 172-73. Cf. Brown, Life Against Death, p. 258.

  43. Paolo Rossi, Philosophy, Technology and the Arts in the Early Modern Era, trans. Salvator Attanasio (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970; orig. Italian edition 1962), p. 28. The idea that Hermeticism was a major factor in the rise of the experimental method is now accepted by many historians. In addition to Rossi, several of the authors cited in note 38 talk in these terms, as does Eliade in Forge and Crucible, Frances A. Yates in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), and Christopher Hill in Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (London: Panther Books, 1972; orig. publ. 1965). See also the Introduction in A. G. Debus, ed., John Dee, The Mathematicall Preface to the Elements of Geometrie of Euclid of Megara, 1570 (New York: Science History Publications, 1975).

  However, Robert S. Westman has seriously questioned the thesis, and J. E. McGuire has significantly distanced himself from his earlier position, in essays published under the title of Hermeticism a
nd the Scientific Revolution (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1977).

  44. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic.

  45. Yates, Giordano Bruno, p. 99.

  46. "Elim" was also an allusion to a biblical place name, mentioned in Exodus 15:27 and 16:1. For a biographical sketch of Delmedigo see the Encyclopaedia Judaica, 5 (1972), 1478-82. The plate from Fludd occurs in the second volume of his book, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, in duo secundum cosmi differentiam divisa.

  47. Rossi, Philosophy, Technology and the Arts, p. 149.

  48. On Dee see Peter J. French, John Dee (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), and the work by Debus cited above, note 43. On Campanella see Yates, Giordano Bruno, passim. The "blurring" of magic and technology can be seen in Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia.

  49. Quoted in Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 149.

  50. On Ficino's astrology, and Bacon's reaction, see Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic.

  51. Erwin F. Lange, "Alchemy and the Sixteenth Century Metallurgists," Ambix 13 (1966), 92-95. Apparently the first of this tradition, the Bergb¨chlein of 1505, contained an equal mixture of the metallurgical and the alchemical (see the discussion in Eliade, Forge and Crucible, pp. 47-49). Biringuccio's work of only thirty-five years later denounced alchemy, although according to Rossi, Philosophy, Technology and the Arts, p. 52n, he was uncertain about his own opinion on the subject. The first edition of Agricola appeared (without illustrations) in 1546, and he was definitely not confused about his attitudes toward alchemy.

  52. Quoted in Rossi, Philosophy, Technology and the Arts, p. 71.

  53. Ibid., pp. 43-55, and the Preface to De Re Metallica, trans. Herbert Clark Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover (New York: Dover Publications, 1950; orig. English trans. 1912).

  54. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, chap. 2.

  55. The following discussion is based on Jung, CW 12 and 14.

  56. Dobbs, Foundations of Newton's Alchemy, pp. 34-36.

  57. The usual symbol for Christ used in this way was the unicorn, and this can be seen, for example, in the famous unicorn tapestry cycle on display at the Cloisters in upper Manhattan.

  58. The discussion below is based on the following sources: Richard H. Popkin, "Father Mersenne's War Against Pyrrhonism," The Modern Schoolman 24 (1957), 61-78; A. R. Hall, The Scientific Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956),pp. 196-97; Robert H. Kergon, Atomism in England from Hariot to Newton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966); Michael Maier, Laws of the Fraternity of the Rosie Cross (Los Angeles: The Philosophical Research Society, 1976, from the English edition of 1656; orig. Latin edition 1618); A. G. Debus, Renaissance Alchemy and the Work of Robert Fludd, The English Paracelsians (London: Oldbourne Book Co., 1965), and "The Chemical Debates of the Seventeenth Century: The Reaction to Robert Fludd and Jean Baptiste van Helmont," in M.L.R. Bonelli and W. R. Shea, Reason, Experiment, and Mysticism, pp. 19-47; and Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy, pp. 53-63. Also useful are Robert Lenoble, Mersenne ou la naissance du mécanisme (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1943), and Francis A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972).

  The French attempt to establish a stable world philosophy based on mechanism, and directly opposed to the dialectical principles of Hermeticism, occurred in the context of growing political absolutism and peasant rebellion, the latter especially frequent from 1623 to 1648. This theme is explored by Carolyn Merchant in The Death of Nature (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), chapter 8, and I am grateful to her for allowing me to read the manuscript version of this part of her work. My own discussion deals primarily with the religious aspects of the attack on Hermeticism, but the reader should be aware that church issues were not separate from issues of state in the minds of the protagonists. Thus my own discussion necessarily follows the line of reasoning developed by Professor Merchant.

  59. In the context of the time, as Robert Kargon points out in Atomism in England, there were significant differences between the various atomists and corpuscularians. Gassendi's idea was that motion was essential to matter, bestowed on it by God at the creation. Hence, his system was based on the views of the ancient atomist Epicurus, but heavily Christianized so as to be acceptable. From the vantage point of the late seventeenth century and after, however, Descartes, Hobbes, and Gassendi had all formulated an impact physics.

  60. A more rational debate than the attack on alchemy, however, was the one between Fludd and Johannes Kepler, which also weakened alchemy publicly and helped to establish the fact-value distinction. Nevertheless, I do not think this debate, which came just before the attack by Mersenne and Gassendi, can be seen apart from the rise of the technological tradition and the religious developments described above. Kepler certainly was (despite his own very extensive Hermeticism) arguing for an empirical, rather than an allegorical, view of the cosmos; but the "conditions enabling that system to be thought" (as Foucault puts it) lay in the exoteric-esoteric split that had been building for more than a century before the debate took place. What we call empiricism, which by definition is an exclusion of occult causes, is precisely the product of the changes described in this chapter.

  An interesting discussion of the Kepler-Fludd debate may be found in W. Pauli, "The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler," in C. G. Jung and W. Pauli, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, trans. Priscilla Silz (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), pp. 151-240.

  61. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, chap. 3.

  62. Ibid., p. 130.

  63. Manuel, Portrait of Isaac Newton, pp. 59, 380.

  64. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, p. 262.

  CHAPTER 4. The Disenchantment of the World (2)

  1. Actually, Newton's interest in alchemy was revealed soon after his death, but as noted below, in the context of eighteenth-century rationalism the priority was to "clear" him of any "charges" of having been an alchemist. L. T. More apparently neglected, or did not have access to, Newton's alchemical and theological manuscripts when he wrote Isaac Newton: A Biography (London: Constable, 1934), and thus did not have to trouble himself too much about integrating the rational and the mystical aspects of the man (a dichotomy which, I hope to show, is spurious in any event).

  2. Quoted in B.J.T. Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 13-14.

  3. Frank E. Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1968). For Kubrin's study see Harry WooIf, ed., The Analytic Spirit (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981). Kubrin's essay is given fuller treatment in an earlier work of his, How Sir Isaac Newton Helped Restore Law 'n Order to the West (Privately printed, 1972), copies of which are on deposit in the Library of Congress.

  4. The following sketch is taken from Manuel, Portrait of Isaac Newton, pp. 23-67. Manuel's model is based on the work of Erik Erikson, who sees in all leading figures of the age (his own studies were of Luther and Gandhi) extreme expressions of trends already present throughout the populace. Manuel was able to develop this theme well in Newton's case because of the existence of four adolescent notebooks that reflect the severe repression and depression of the Puritan mentality.

  On anxiety reactions see N. O. Brown, Life Against Death (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1970; orig. publ. 1959), esp. pp. 114ff.; John Bowlby, Separation (New York: Basic Books, 1973); and Erikson's pioneering work, Childhood and Society, 2d ed., rev. and enl. (New York: Norton, 1963).

  5. Manuel, Portrait of Isaac Newton, p. 380.

  6. Géza Róheim, Magic and Schizophrenia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970; orig. publ. 1955).

  7. D. P. Walker, The Ancient Theology. Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1972).

  8. Cited by Rollo May in John Brockman, ed., About Bateson (New York: Dutton, 1
977), p. 91.

  9. This emerges as an important theme in Betty Dobbs's study, The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy.

  10. Kubrin, "Newton's Inside Out!" The discussion that follows relies heavily on this essay, and I am very grateful to Mr. Kubrin for allowing me to read the unpublished version. On the volume of alchemical publications see also Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 270.