MARGINALIA
Meissen Chymistry
Roald Hoffmann
Transmutation
A final comment on alchemy: In the 1968 translation of his
remarkable book Forgerons et Alchemistes, Mircea Eliade
traced the tripartite relationship between metallurgy, alchemy and
religion. In conclusion, he writes:
We must not believe that the triumph of experimental
science reduced to nought the dreams and ideals of the alchemist. On
the contrary, the ideology of the new epoch, crystallized around the
myth of infinite progress and boosted by the experimental sciences
and the progress of industrialization which dominated and inspired
the whole of the nineteenth century, takes up and carries
forward—despite its radical secularization—the
millennary [sic] dreams of the alchemist. It is in the specific
dogma of the nineteenth century, according to which man’s true
mission is to improve upon Nature and become her master, that we
must look for the authentic continuation of the alchemist’s
dream.
You can sense that Eliade will go on to disapprove, not of the
alchemist’s dream, but of modern, industrial society's twisted
reincarnation of that dream. Even as I worry about the hubris
implicit in the ceaseless flaunting of our transformative power, I
don't disdain our present state as much as Mircea Eliade. But I do
think he is essentially right about chemistry: Modern chemists,
screaming to high heaven that they have nothing to do with alchemy,
have fulfilled the alchemist's dream—transmuting sickness into
health and, with superb ingenuity, changing mud (the raw materials
of organic synthesis) into gold (what pharmaceutical companies sell).
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