What Is (Was) Alchemy?∗

A serious scientific journal seems to be the wrong place for a paper on alchemy. However, we believe that the history of science includes knowledge of the complex relations between specific scientific disciplines and what is called the “world-view” (Weltanschauung): the image of the world corresponding to a given stage of cultural development. The world-view, born of the “marriage” of Aristotle’s philosophy with Christian theology, was for many centuries largely predominant in Europe of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance. The “scientific revolution” [1] of the 16–17th centuries: the birth of the “new cosmology” of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler and of the “new mechanics” of Galileo and Newton was limited to the physical science, but its direct consequence was the appearance of the “new philosophy”. The mechanistic, rationalist and empirical philosophy of the enlightenment rejected the magic elements of the medieval world-view. Without actually being directly concerned by new theories or denied by newly discovered facts, a number of disciplines did not survive such changes in the intellectual climate. We will try to show how alchemy, an integral part of the medieval world-view, was doomed to death by the spirit of enlightenment well before its official death which coincided with the appearance of the modern chemistry of Lavoisier and Dalton. Only its phantom is still alive.