(After Pujo!)
As to the future of this faith in the supernatural, one thing may reasonably be taken for granted; the marvellous will never cease to appeal to the imagination of mankind till the riddle of the universe is solved. To deride it is ridiculous. Occultism is not a menace to progress, but a spur. Its secrets are not to be ridiculed, but to be explained. That is its challenge to modern science, which is at once its offspring and its servant.
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The desire to prolong life, the desire to enjoy life, and the desire to look beyond life are inherent in human nature, and man has sought from time immemorial to realize them. To-day it is to science that we look for the realization of the first two of these great desires of which it is the outcome; while it is only with the third that the marvellous, or what is understood by occultism, is now associated.
Formerly, however, the search for remedies for the irremediable was conducted exclusively in the sphere of the supernatural. The love of life gave rise to the quest for the Fountain of Youth, which still continues under innumerable other forms and names that will occur to every one. The latest, perhaps, is the Menshikov Sour Milk Cure. From the love of ease sprang the search for the “philosopher’s stone,” which was to create wealth by the transmutation of metals into gold. This quest which long captivated the imagination of men is now entirely abandoned, though its object, needless to say, is more furiously desired than ever. While to the curiosity as to the future we owe the pseudo-sciences of astrology, palmistry, fortune-telling, divination, etc.
Those who devoted their lives to these things were divided into three classes—alchemists, astrologers, and the motley tribe of quacks and charlatans, who may be summed up for sake of convenience under the name of sorcerers. These divisions, however, were by no means hard and fast. United by a common idea each class dabbled in the affairs of the others. Thus astrologers and sorcerers were often alchemists, and alchemists seldom confined their attention solely to the search for the elixir vitae and the philosopher’s stone.
As the alchemists, owing to their superior knowledge, and the results they obtained, were more considered than the astrologers and sorcerers, alchemy developed into a science at an early date. The obscurity in which its origin is involved is a sign of its antiquity. Some enthusiasts believe it to be coeval with the creation of man. Vincent de Beauvais was of the opinion that all the antediluvians must have had some knowledge of alchemy, and cites Noah as having been acquainted with the elixir vitae, “otherwise he could not have lived to so prodigious an age and begotten children when upwards of five hundred.” Others have traced it to the Egyptians, from whom Moses was believed to have learnt it. Martini, on the other hand, affirms that alchemy was practised by the Chinese two thousand five hundred years before the birth of Christ. But though a belief in the transmutation of metals was general in the Roman Empire, the practice of alchemy does not appear to have received much consideration before the eighth century. At this period the discoveries of Gebir, an Arabian alchemist, gave so great a stimulus to the quest of the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life that he is generally regarded as the creator of these picturesque delusions, which for a thousand years had so great a hold on the popular imagination.
Banned and fostered in turn, and often at the same time, by the Church; practised in all classes of society and by all sorts and conditions of people; regarded with admiration and contempt; alchemy has played too vast and important a rôle in the history of humanity to be despised, wild and romantic though this rôle has been. Nothing could be more unjust and absurd than to judge it by the charlatans who exploited it. The alchemists whom history still remembers were in reality the pioneers of civilization, who, venturing ahead of the race befogged in dense forests of ignorance and superstition, cut a road through to the light, along which mankind travelled slowly in their wake. Not only were these fantastic spirits of light the parents of modern science and physics, but they have helped to adorn literature and art. Some idea of their importance may be gathered from the many words in common use that they have given to the language, such as: crucible, amalgam, alcohol, potash, laudanum, precipitate, saturation, distillation, quintessence, affinity, etc.
The alchemists often stumbled upon discoveries they did not seek. Science is thus indebted to Gebir for the first suggestion of corrosive sublimate, the red oxide of mercury, nitric acid, and nitrate of silver; to Roger Bacon for the telescope, the magic lantern, and gunpowder; to Van Helmont for the properties of gas; to Paracelsus, the most extraordinary of them all, for laudanum. It is to him also that medicine owes the idea of the clinic. As in chemistry so in other sciences the most important discoveries were made by men who had a marked taste for alchemic theories. Kepler was guided in his investigations by cabalistic considerations.
The search for gold and youth, however, were only one phase of alchemy. It was too closely allied to what was known as “magic” not to be confounded with it. In the popular estimation the alchemists were all magicians. Most, perhaps all, of the so-called occult phenomena so familiar to us to-day were performed by them. Long before such things as animal magnetism, hypnotism, telepathy, ventriloquism, autosuggestion, etc., had a name, the alchemists had discovered them, though they themselves were as unable to explain or account for the wonders they performed as the ignorant world that witnessed them.