Oxford Seminar in the History of Alchemy and Chemistry

Chair: Ellen Hausner (Oxford)

Charles Burnett (The Warburg Institute, London)

Alchemy as Divination

Michael Scot, in the early thirteenth century, regarded alchemy as one of the arts of divination (artes divinandi). This presentation will examine how alchemy can be thought of as belonging to the supra-rational or divinatory sciences, in the Arabic and Latin contexts.

Mark Edwards (Christ Church, University of Oxford)

Ancient Alchemy as Philosophy

Modern investigations of the origins of ancient alchemy, turning away from Jung’s psychoanalytic interpretation, have often stressed socio-economic rather than religious or philosophical factors. Nevertheless, the most famous of the Greek alchemists, Zosimus of Panopolis (c. 300 A.D.), promises through his recipes the same inward freedom from the nexus of fate which was the goal of philosophy, while the highly technical works ascribed to Democritus (c. 420 B.C.) evidently saw some relevance in this philosopher’s atomistic physics and his pharmacological studies. The philosophical pretensions of pseudo-Democritus seem to be accepted by the author of a commentary on his work in the form of a dialogue, one speaker in which is sometimes identified as the Neoplatonist Synesius of Cyrene (c. 400 A.D.). The work of Peter Kingsley on Empedocles (arguably the first “historical” Pythagorean) suggests that the link between alchemy and philosophy is not wholly fanciful.

Convenors: Ellen Hausner (Oxford), Sergei Zotov (Warburg), and Jo Hedesan (Oxford)