How could this happen? The youthful Newton was coming to believe in a vegetative spirit—a subtle and tiny spark of the divine that, when diffused through brute mechanical matter, animated it with non-mechanical life. But how did God introduce this vegetative spirit, this divine spark, into dead and putrefying bodies and rouse them to put forth other forms of life?
Young Newton strode forward quickly and, suddenly crowded against the curving belly of a young woman as pretty and bright as a new farthing—and knowing from the way she lowered her eyes that she was not stout but pregnant—asked himself, as he darted along the sidewalk milling with Londoners, Why is it that conception doesn’t really take at conception, but some time later, when the male and female semen, having immediately mingled, have undergone putrefaction to the point of becoming a neutralized sexless mass1—after which the vegetative spirit slips into this undifferentiated mass and is somehow transformed into a foetus? How had the vegetative spirit been able to cross the chasm that separates the world of the wholly divine from the world of the entirely physical?
A closed sedan chair swayed by in the street, conveyed by four sweating liveried servants. He peered in the window and saw what looked shockingly for a moment like a heap of bones wrapped in a velvet shroud. The sedan chair lurched forward: it was a man as old as Methuselah, wearing a frock coat as young as the morning. The chair suddenly sped up, as if trying to deny that ultimately it was bearing its passenger to his death; and Newton, falling back, wondered: Why does this man have to die at all, be he ever so old? Why is it that the vegetative spirit, having performed that tremendous miracle of leaping the gap between the eternal and the temporal, must ever have to leave the body? Roger Bacon said that it might be possible for the human body to live forever since the soul is immortal. Hadn’t Methuselah lived to 969, and Noah to 370? A mixture of the steady heat of a hot sun, abstemiousness, and perpetual piety had enabled the desert monk Saint Anthony and the Stoic leader Cleanthes to live to 105, and this despite the fact that the perpetual piety of Anthony had been directed at the perpetually evil doctrine of the Trinity.
With these captivating and concerning questions on his mind, young Newton arrived at the borough of Little Britain, which was his destination—and immediately stumbled against a two-foot high rock that stood sentinel-like on one side of the city gate. He immediately flopped down on the rock, and, rubbing his shin, asked himself thoughtfully: How does the vegetative spirit enter soulless ore?
If the rock he was sitting on was filled with ores, why did these metals die when the rock was taken from the earth? For it was well known that metals flourished alive in the Earth’s womb and that they grew like plants and animals. They grew until, after a thousand years, or two thousand years, or twenty thousand—nobody knew—they were transmuted into gold. What made this happen? How had the vegetative spirit been introduced into the dead matter of the incipient ores? Was it possible to grow metals in a laboratory furnace and, controlling their growth, observing them minutely—manipulating them—discover how it was that the spirit of life animated that which had once been so brutally mechanical?
Newton got up suddenly and, navigating energetically the first narrow, twisting streets of the borough, found himself before the door of the Pelican, which was his destination and whose proprietor was William Cooper, a man (to quote a later source) “of impeccable reputation but also a dealer in illegal and highly-sought after manuscripts.”2
Newton rang. The door opened. He was smoothly and hurriedly pulled inside by a hand stained black with tobacco. Inside, there was the glitter of large lamps (the windows were shuttered), smoke everywhere, dimly lit bookcases, and several men gesticulating, sitting and standing in the light that seemed like a twilight. The tobacco-stained hand belonged to a bewhiskered man who peered at him carefully and then said: “Yes! The Cambridge don. Precisely on time! Of course. I’m Cooper! Come, let us enter the inner sanctum.”
He was ushered into a small room at the back, occupied by a young man of vigilant foxlike appearance with a pistol stuck in his belt, seated on a small, narrow chair, and reading a ragged book. There was a small table in the room, and another chair; Cooper sat Newton down and then withdrew from a large locked wardrobe, one after another, seven leather-bound volumes that he placed on the table in front of Newton.
“My assistant,” said Cooper, nodding toward the other chair, “will help, if wanted. Just call.” The proprietor of the Pelican slipped out of the room. Newton bent forward and opened the first volume.
If the vigilant foxlike man—who was there to make sure nothing happened to the books—had gotten up at that moment, crossed the brief space of floor, and looked over Newton’s shoulder, he would have been instantly convinced that this young Cambridge don (for so Mr. Cooper had identified him) was a vile and thuggish creature who was hopelessly mired in the Bogs and Swamps of Everlasting Sin. Graphically visible on the opened page were the words, “THE MENSTRUAL BLOOD OF THE SORDID WHORE,” and below was a dark Gothic wood-cut of a naked crone holding up a dripping goblet. If the young man hadn’t turned his eyes away quickly he would have glimpsed other bizarre phrases, not as dark but bewildering, like “Green Lion,” “Doves of Diana,” and “Jove’s Eagle”—and many more.
But the young man didn’t get up, for he was engrossed in a book more salacious than anything in front of Newton, and Isaac Newton spent an hour looking carefully through the volumes, called for William Cooper, and paid him a quantity of bright new guineas for the books and to have them sent by stagecoach to Cambridge in September.
Those six volumes were the Theatrum Chemicum of Elias Ashmole, published in 1652. They contained poems about alchemy by many famous English poets, including Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and John Tyler, and many other phrases, such as “Green Lion,” which were a part of the enigmatic “riddling” language making up an alchemical recipe.
Isaac Newton was becoming an alchemist. He would undertake the care of his own furnaces and try to discover how the vegetative spirit entered nonliving matter and fired it with life. This would be the first focus of his daunting alchemical project. There would soon be other foci; Newton would seek to penetrate to the primal elements of the universe and understand their true relationship to the framing, forming activities of God. Some of this would happen under the rubric of alchemy. But the first question Newton would put to the muse of alchemy was, What is the active unifying celestial principle necessary for life?3
He spent the entire month of August in London. The only thing we know for sure, apart from his visit to the Pelican, is that he purchased a seven-shilling tin furnace, an eight-shilling iron furnace, a variety of glass equipment (such as beakers and crucibles), and a multiplicity of chemicals (such as antimony and sulphur) for a total of £10.4 All this material, Newton took back with him when he returned to Trinity College at the end of August. The tin and iron furnaces would be replaced in two years by two brick furnaces that Newton “made and altered himself, without troubling a bricklayer,”5 placing them against the wall of his garden that abutted Trinity Chapel.
There is no doubt that in that month of August 1669 young Isaac Newton became a member of a clandestine network of alchemists that had been extending its tentacles all across Europe for many centuries now.6 This network had to be clandestine, because practicing alchemy was against the law in England. In 1404, Britain’s Parliament, fearing that alchemically produced gold would flood the market, debase the currency, and probably sink the economy,*48 had passed the Act Against Multipliers (“multipliers” of gold), which made the practice of alchemy illegal. The law was still in force in Newton’s time. It would be repealed only in 1696 due to the forceful lobbying of Robert Boyle, who was not only the founder of modern chemistry but an enthusiastic alchemist.
In 1317, Pope John XII—an entirely immoral pope—issued a decree condemning to death all alchemists who practiced the crime of “falsification.” Alchemists caught passing off “false or adulterate” or “alchemic” met
al as real gold or silver would have to pay the public treasury an equivalent amount in gold or silver. If they could not, they were prosecuted as criminals. For some time to come, John XII’s edict provided great lords with an excuse for hanging alchemists who had promised them the Philosophers’ Stone but hadn’t produced it. Sometimes the executions took place on gold-painted gibbets; other times (to make the public spectacle even grander), the miscreants were hanged wearing tinsel suits so that they glittered brightly while swaying in the wind. 7
So Isaac Newton as an alchemist had to conduct himself with as much caution as he deployed when writing or talking about Arianism. Apart from the alchemical experiments he began to carry out in his rooms, the only change in his lifestyle was that he increasingly received in the mail mysterious letters and packages signed off by individuals with odd-sounding names like “W.S.,” or “Mr. F.,” or “Fran,” or “Meheux,” or “hee.” These letters and packages contained alchemical recipes and books and powders; the names were the pseudonyms of those involved. Newton sent materials in exchange, following the age-old alchemical practice; one of his alchemist’s pseudonyms was Jeova Sanctus Unus, or “One Holy God,” which was based on an anagram of the Latinized version of his name, Isaacus Neuutonius. From time to time Newton also had brief visits, often at night with strangers whose faces he couldn’t always see and who stopped by solely to hand him the bulkier alchemy-related materials he had requested.
There were, however, distinguished men and women with whom he could discuss alchemy. In the early part of the seventeenth century, that clandestine circle of alchemists who rendezvoused at William Cooper’s Pelican came to be associated with another, larger, circle known as the Invisible College. This latter, developing slowly over the years, was the brainchild of Samuel Hartlib (ca. 1600–1662), a half-English, half-Polish scholar who came to England in 1630 to acquire all knowledge and to dispense it, as equitably as possible, to everyone.
Versed in science, medicine, alchemy, agriculture, politics, and education, Hartlib was called the Great Intelligencer. Many learned men and women gravitated toward him. There weren’t really any meetings; everyone knew Samuel Hartlib, but they didn’t necessarily know each other. Small “cells,” like that comprising John Milton, Robert Boyle, John Locke, and Samuel Pepys, discoursed freely among themselves but knew little of the other brilliant groups who existed throughout Britain (and on the Continent).
Sometimes several of these “cells” came together casually, almost inadvertently, at the country mansions of the great political and cultural elites of seventeenth-century England. Over the thirty years Newton practiced alchemy, he was often absent from Cambridge; we know little or nothing about where he went or why. But he may have spent some time at the loosely organized gatherings that took place under the unstated aegis of the Invisible College (also called the “Hartlib Circle”).
At these gatherings, discussing alchemy was not only condoned, but it was almost de rigueur. Henry More, the saintly Cambridge Platonist scholar with whom Newton shared impassioned conversations about the Book of Revelation (see chapter 2, “The Newton Code”), was a member of the Invisible College/Hartlib Circle and often spent time at “Ragley”; this was the Warwickshire estate of his student and great friend Anne Finch, the Viscountess Conway. Ragley became a focal point for the growing body of intellectuals interested in alchemy. It seems likely that Newton attended from time to time.*49 So Isaac Newton, when he practiced alchemy, was not entirely alone; he was a member of a sympathetic network of aristocrats who, if they never breathed the name of “alchemy” in public, seized upon the subject when alone among their kind.
But what exactly is alchemy?
The French alchemy scholar Serge Lequeuvre asserts that this science/art “began in the smelting pots of China in the fourth century BC.”8
As far back as then, the Chinese believed that metals were alive; that they were formed by the copulation of male and female metals; and that they were composed of some combination of mercury, which was female, and sulphur, which was male. The offspring of mercury and sulphur was usually a bloodred sulphide, cinnabar, which the ancient Chinese associated with royalty. †7
Alchemy quickly went in three separate ways in ancient China. Using metals, fire, soupçons of other rarer minerals and even admixtures of exotic plants, the Chinese developed (1) aurifaction, transmuting metals into gold; (2) aurifiction, as the name implies, changing living metals into an artifact as beautiful as gold; and (3) the pursuit of the “drug of deathlessness,” or elixir of immortality.
Aurifaction (“making gold”) and aurifiction (“faking gold”) never ceased up through the thirteenth century to be popular in China, but it was the pursuit of alchemically enhanced elixirs of deathlessness from the third century BC to the third century AD that held emperor and serf alike in thrall.
The ancient Chinese believed they were surrounded by invisible sages who had liberated themselves from death and wandered freely, not in heaven or hell or purgatory (there is no afterworld in Chinese thought) but on this Earth, in these skies, in our cosmos. These legions of the weirdly undead, traveling in attenuated wispy versions of their earthly bodies, had achieved through diet, meditation, and often the ingestion of metals a peculiarly Chinese state called hsien, or material immortality. Joseph Needham tells us that in this state “the body was still needed, preserved in however etherealised or ‘lightened’ a form, whether the deathless being remained among the scenic beauties of earth or ascended as a perfected immortal to the ranks of the Administration on high—in either case within the natural world suffused by the Tao of all things.”9
Chinese alchemy was under continuous pressure from its rulers, who sought immortality to develop new drugs of longevity and deathlessness. These were subtle mixtures of cinnabar, sulphur, mercury, gold, even arsenic, and others, that had to be ingested in measured quantities on a regular basis. The resources of the entire nation were ruthlessly mobilized so that a ruler could realize his dream of cheating death. The best minds of the day—scholars, naturalists, alchemists, magicians—were summoned to court (bringing in their wake armies of con men, hangers-on, and lunatics) to join in the vast research project into the nature of hsien.
The “cult of hsien” could be lethal; there may have been emperors who died of mercury poisoning; but the cult became so popular that a mythos emerged. In the earthly paradise of kun-lun (“for holy immortals”), peaches and gems of immortality grew on trees. On sacred islands lost in distant oceans, white and gold were the only colors, and elixirs of immortality sprouted beneath mulberry bushes. In all of these alchemy-oriented places, there were underground substances so refined that only a material immortal could mine them.
Apart from its popularity in China, immortality alchemy did not—or at least not for a long time—travel well outside the country. But Chinese mercury-sulphur theory spread by trade routes to Persia and Arabia. Its precepts mingled with those of Egyptian alchemy that had developed from the need to perfect mummification techniques. These gave rise to proto-scientific arts embraced by the magi of Hellenistic Greece and Rome and particularly Alexandria. Out of this emerged the notion of the “Philosophers’ Stone,” an agent of universal transmutation—a catalytic substance that would drive impurities from metals and return them to their primal state as gold (and also, hoped many, cure people of illnesses). This tangled skein of art and science, making its way from the Middle East across the Roman Empire, became the heart of alchemy as it flourished in Europe in the Middle Ages.
The greater part of Isaac Newton’s alchemy manuscripts, acquired at the Sotheby’s auction of 1936 by John Maynard Keynes and bequeathed to Cambridge when Keynes died in 1946, are housed in the King’s College Library of the university. There are more than one hundred auctioned lots, of all sizes, from thick treatises to sheaves of one or two pages. Altogether, Newton wrote a million words on this divine art. As of 2015, probably no more than 20 percent of his alchemical documents have been read. Newton
was, apparently, not at all original in his alchemical researches; rather, he was the great cataloger and organizer of all the alchemical literature that came before him. He transcribed, he compared, he commented on, and he quoted, other men’s alchemical work.
Newton organized this literature in an ambitious “alphabetical compendium of a hundred and thirteen pages covering the usage of alchemical terms in scores of authors [he] had consulted.”10 This compendium he called the “Index Chemicus”; it contains 879 separate entries and cites 150 different works. There is a list of 47 alchemy axioms, drawn up in a manner similar to the geometry axioms of Euclid. But Newton published only one paper on an alchemy-related topic, “On Acids”; his best-known writings on alchemy are, perhaps, his translations with commentary of the Hermetica and the Emerald Tablet, allegedly by the Egyptian god Hermes. Appendix F of this book consists of Newton’s translation of the Emerald Tablet.
Newton probably conducted thousands of alchemical experiments. These were, and certainly Newton’s were, far more complex and far different from anything we can even imagine today. In the twenty-first century, when we think “alchemist,” we think the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, gamboling around a bubbling cauldron and tossing into it an amazingly unseemly bunch of condiments such as baboon’s blood, the finger of a child strangled at birth, a dragon’s scale, a Turk’s nose, the liver of a blaspheming Jew, a Tartar’s lips, a witch’s mummy—and so on and so forth—in order to conjure up “a charm of powerful trouble” that “like a Hell broth [will] boil and bubble” (4.1.5–37).
Alchemy was actually a subtle, complex, and delicate process reminiscent more suggestive of the rearranging of DNA and gene structures by geneticists than the machinations of bloodthirsty witches. Genetics concerns itself with living tissue; so did alchemy, since metals were thought to be alive. Just as fetuses grow in wombs, minerals grew in the womb of the Earth and then in the furnaces of alchemists, in their own inscrutable way, which it was the alchemist’s passion to understand, to manipulate, and to accelerate. The basic ores of alchemy had to be “putrified”—artificially made to rot, decomposed, melted down slowly in the alchemist’s furnace until they had become the primal matter that underlay all matter; then they were “regenerated,” or recomposed to attain the desired effect. This could take months, even years; there were innumerable stages of distillation; exquisite care had to be taken in adding the precise chemicals and minerals, weighed out in minute amounts, to the fermenting mass.
The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton Page 32