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基本説明
New in paperback. Hardcover was published in 2008. Explores the history of alchemy with authority and verve, showing that its study is not one of the odder byways of antiquarianism but a living part of the history of Science itself.
Full Description
In this title, the history of alchemy traced from its earliest roots through to its influence in modern-day science. Beginning in China in the search for the secret of immortality, and appearing independently in Egypt as an attempt to produce gold through the arts of smelting and alloying metals, alchemy received a great boost in Europe from studies by Islamic and Jewish alchemists. Translated into Latin and then combined with what was known of Greek natural science these accounts provoked an outburst of attempts to manipulate matter and to change it into transformative substances known as the Philosopher's Stone or the Elixir of Life. Alchemy's heyday in Europe was the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Demonstrations of the art were performed in royal courts and specimens of the gold so transmuted can be seen in various museums today. During the nineteenth century, attempts were made to amalgamate alchemy with the religious and occult philosophies then growing in popularity; and in the twentieth century psychologists - principally Carl Jung - perceived in alchemy a powerful vehicle for aspects of their theories about human nature.
Contents
Introduction; 1.China - The Golden Road to Immortality; 2. India - The Way of Tantra and Mercury; 3. Roman Egypt - The White and the Yellow Arising from Blackness; 4. The Islamic World - Balance and Magic Numbers; 5. Medieval Europe - Translations, Debates and Symbols; 6. The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries - Pretension, Fraud and Redeeming the World; 7. The Rosicrucian Episode and its Aftermath; 8. Theology Wearing a Mask of Science - the later Seventeenth Century; 9. Alchemy in an Age of Self-Absorption - the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries; 10. A Child of Earlier Times - the Twentieth Century.
