Darkness Visible: Part I Sir Isaac Newton, Preface

In 1669 Francis Aston was about to take the grand tour.  As a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, he decided to consult one of Trinity’s rising stars, the 27 year old Isaac Newton.  As a travel agent, Newton was a queer choice: The sum total of his travel experience was a brief trip to London.  Nonetheless, the young scientist took time away from his research to compose Aston a letter full of good advice worthy of a Polonius.  Suit your behavior to the company, he tells him, and be careful not to give away your feelings. This is what we might expect from such a man.  Although he was for years consumed by vindictive passions, Newton was generally a cold fish.  He had no friends, no wife, not even a known mistress.

From this letter, it is not difficult to see why Isaac Newton had no friends: He did not want them, but he was not without worldly desires.  Newton also tells Aston to observe everything in Europe carefully—how they carry on trade and the arts, defense, how they manage their class structure and legal system, and 

“observe the products of nature in several places especially in mines with the circumstances of extracting metals or minerals out of their ore and refining them, and if you met with any transmutation out of one species into another (as out of iron into copper, out of any metal into quicksilver, or out of one salt into another or into an insipid body, etc.) those above all other will be worth your noting being the most luciferous and many times lucriferous experiments too in philosophy.  

Although scholars frequently insist that Newton did not study alchemy in the hope of gain, he was, like many another Renaissance man, as much interested in lucrum as in lux.

Newton instructs Aston to look up one Giuseppe Francesco Borri, an alchemist whose writings Newton is known to have studied.  Unfortunately, Borri, an alchemist and spiritualist with messianic pretensions, was soon to fall into the hands of the Inquisition.  Borri’s career was, even for a period saturated with the occult, unusual.  Expelled from seminary, he turned to alchemy and mysticism.  He proclaimed the Virgin Mary divine and equal to her son and, although a heretic, posed as the great defender of the Catholic faith against Protestant heretics with an hysterical tone reminiscent of many uneducated Traditional Catholics in recent years.  For a time he was supported by the exiled Queen Christina of Sweden, but he was caught trying to leave Germany for Turkey and he died in jail.

Newton, who only took up alchemy seriously in his mid-20’s, was busily purchasing alchemical tracts in the late 1660’s, starting with the basics—Lazarus Zetzner’s Theatrum Chemicum, Elias Ashmole’s Theatrum Chemicum Brittanicum—and moving on to works by Johann Becher (Oedipum Chemicum? 1653), Samuel Hartlib, Sir Kenelm Digby, Geber, Raymond Lull, in addition to  his two favorite experts on alchemy: Michael Maier, a great name in mystical alchemy, and his contemporary, the American-born George Starkey.  Before his gold-making experiments ruined him, Starkey and his colleague Robert Boyle were the leading lights of British alchemy.  To carry this name-dropping one step further, let us remember that Robert Boyle is considered the father of modern chemistry.

Newton also collected unpublished manuscripts from which he took copious notes in his own thousands and thousands of pages of unpublished alchemical writings.  None of Newton’s alchemical writings were included in the initial edition of his works published by Dr. Thomas Pellet, though there were a million pages of writings and notes.  His researches were concealed throughout the 19^th century by pious biographers who shuddered at the thought that the greatest of scientists might be lumped together with a magician like John Dee—also a great mathematician from Trinity College! 

The fraud ended in 1936, when John Maynard Keynes fortuitously came upon a cache of Newton’s papers and books, which he acquired from a bookseller. The collection included a large bundle of Sir Isaac’s unpublished writings on alchemy.  Keynes’s conclusion, that Newton was, apart from everything else, one of the last great alchemists, is still disputed by the great man’s admirers who claim he was more interested in experiments to dissolve gold than to create it, but dissolving gold in Mercury and deriving Mercury from the compounds they introduced into the crucible were standard alchemical procedures that deceived them into thinking they had achieved results.  

To claim that Newton and Boyle were only proto-chemists when they practiced alchemy is to claim that so-called white witches are only practicing proto-medicine.  Although a speculative interest in alchemical theory might be harmless enough, the goal of the practicing alchemist is always to force the elements of the universe, with or without demonic assistance, to yield up their secrets and their power, and this goal has never been far from the minds of modern scientists, who, as Goethe complained, tortured nature.  

Now, some alchemical research was truly scientific, but if we consider the ancient scientists like Aristotle and Strato or Medieval researchers like Albertus Magnus, all of whom engaged in a humble pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, and then compare them with boasting alchemists who claimed supernatural and even divine powers, we can almost smell the difference.

Then to which category does Newton belong?  A glance at his alchemical manuscripts—with their mythical references to dragons and green lions—should be enough to convince any fair-minded reader that Newton was working in the tradition of Paracelsus and Michael Maier, not the tradition of Aristotle and Albertus.   And as we shall see, like most alchemists Newton was vain, jealous and self-seeking.  If anything, Newton is more troubling than the great Michael Maier.  Like Maier and other alchemists, Newton often wrote in code and symbols, and the name he gave himself was: Jeova Sanctus unus: This terrible blasphemy is obviously an anagram on his own name but also indicative both of megalomania and Unitarianism.