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Back to: The Hermetic Laws & Quantum Physics
The Hermetic Underground in the History of Science
Before we talk about Bohr and Heisenberg turning east, we need to talk about something that standard histories of science tend to skip past. The founding of modern science itself was deeply entangled with Hermetic, alchemical, and occult traditions. The tidy story in which Francis Bacon invented the scientific method, Newton put it on a mathematical footing, and the Enlightenment scrubbed away the superstitions of the past, is a story that has not survived serious historical scrutiny. The real history is messier, more interesting, and more instructive for our purposes.
The historian Frances Yates put this thesis on the map in 1964 with her book Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, arguing that Renaissance Hermeticism was a major driver of the scientific revolution. The Yates thesis in its strongest form has been contested by later historians, and rightly so; not everything in early modern science can be traced to Hermetic roots. But the softer version of her thesis, that Hermeticism, alchemy, and Rosicrucian thought played an undeniable role in the intellectual lives of figures like Kepler, Newton, Boyle, and Leibniz, is now broadly accepted by historians of early modern science. Let us look at three cases.
Isaac Newton as Alchemist
Isaac Newton wrote, by conservative estimate, well over a million words on alchemy. These manuscripts, which Newton kept private in his lifetime, were auctioned at Sotheby’s in 1936, most of them purchased by the economist John Maynard Keynes, who in his 1942 lecture “Newton, the Man” described Newton as “not the first of the age of reason” but rather “the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians.” Keynes’ lecture remains the most vivid introduction to the side of Newton that the standard histories omit.
The definitive modern scholarly study is Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs’s The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought, published by Cambridge University Press in 1991. Dobbs argues, on the basis of decades of work with the primary manuscripts, that Newton’s alchemical research was not a late-life eccentricity or a passing interest. It was a sustained, systematic investigation that ran for roughly three decades, interlocked with his work in optics and celestial mechanics, and grounded in a coherent religious and philosophical worldview. Newton believed, in Dobbs’s reading, that ancient sages had possessed knowledge of nature that had been lost, that alchemy was a legitimate path to recovering it, and that the God who had written the book of scripture had also written the book of nature in ciphers that required patient decipherment.
Newton produced an English translation of the Emerald Tablet, the short Hermetic text that gave us the phrase “as above, so below,” and he preserved it among his alchemical papers in his own handwriting. A Latin copy of the Emerald Tablet, also in Newton’s hand, survives among his alchemical manuscripts. His commentary on the Tablet, known as Keynes Manuscript 28, can still be consulted. Newton rendered the Latin word telesmus as “perfection,” a translation choice that Dobbs analyzes at length because it opens a window onto how he understood the relationship between natural forces and spiritual operations.
The point is not that Newton’s alchemy was correct in the modern chemical sense. Most of it, on modern understanding, was not. The point is that Newton’s science was never cleanly separated from his esoteric studies. He believed he was recovering knowledge that had been guarded by ancient sages. He read the Emerald Tablet with the same attention he gave to the Principia. When he wrote, in the General Scholium added to the second edition of the Principia in 1713, that “this most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being,” he was writing as the same man who had just spent six weeks with his furnaces burning to isolate what he called the “active principle” in matter. The Hermetic underground is not a side note to Newton’s science. It is part of its foundation.
Gottfried Leibniz and the Monadology
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is known to every student of philosophy as the author of the Monadology (1714), to every student of mathematics as the co-inventor with Newton of the calculus, and to every student of computer science as the man who worked out binary arithmetic and who imagined a universal calculus of reasoning that is the distant ancestor of modern symbolic logic. What is less known is that Leibniz spent the winter of 1666-67 working as a secretary, or perhaps apprentice, in an alchemical society in Nuremberg. The exact nature of this society is disputed by historians; some have linked it to Rosicrucian currents, though the scholar G. M. Ross has argued that the primary activity was practical alchemical experimentation without clear Rosicrucian affiliation. What is not disputed is that Leibniz’s exposure to alchemical and Hermetic sources at the start of his career was real and sustained.
The Monadology itself is the clearest example of Hermetic influence in Leibniz’s mature philosophy. A monad, in Leibniz’s system, is a simple, indivisible, non-material unit of reality. Each monad contains within itself the whole universe, reflected from its particular perspective. Each mirrors the whole. This doctrine, that the part contains the whole, and that the microcosm reflects the macrocosm, is one of the oldest Hermetic principles. It is explicit in the Emerald Tablet (“As above, so below”). It is implicit in every mystical tradition worthy of the name. Leibniz did not hide this inheritance. He wrote approvingly about Hermetic thinkers, he believed the I Ching was originally an Egyptian text written by Hermes Trismegistus, and he coined the term philosophia perennis, the perennial philosophy, which he adopted from the earlier Italian writer Agostino Steuco.
Here is the instructive point. Leibniz’s monadology is not alchemy. It is a rigorous rationalist metaphysics, worked out with mathematical care, that served as one of the main competitors to Cartesian dualism and Newtonian materialism for the next century. But its deepest intuitions, that reality is fundamentally mental, that each part reflects the whole, and that a single truth is expressed differently in different traditions, are straightforwardly Hermetic. Leibniz rigorized the Hermetic picture. He did not abandon it.
The Rosicrucian Atmosphere of the Early Royal Society
The Royal Society of London was founded in 1660, chartered by Charles II in 1662, and became the prototype of the modern scientific academy. It is often told as the institutional beginning of the scientific method in its fully modern form. What is less often told is the atmosphere in which it emerged. The decades leading up to the founding of the Royal Society were also the decades of the Rosicrucian furor, when three anonymous pamphlets published in Germany between 1614 and 1617 (the Fama Fraternitatis, the Confessio Fraternitatis, and The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz) announced to Europe the existence of a secret brotherhood of alchemists and sages who were preparing to transform arts, sciences, and society.
Between 1614 and 1620, roughly 400 pamphlets and books were published across Europe debating the Rosicrucian manifestos. They sparked an intense interest in the combination of Hermeticism, alchemy, Kabbalah, and Christian mysticism that they embodied. Frances Yates argued that the Invisible College ideal promoted in the Rosicrucian literature, a network of natural philosophers working in secret toward the reform of knowledge, was a direct inspiration for the informal gatherings of English natural philosophers that eventually coalesced into the Royal Society.
The Yates thesis is contested. Specifically, later historians have shown that the leading figures of the early Royal Society, including Robert Boyle and Christopher Wren, cannot be shown to have been card-carrying Rosicrucians in any documented sense. But the softer thesis, that the intellectual atmosphere of the 1650s and 1660s in England was saturated with alchemical and Hermetic currents, and that key founding figures were seriously engaged with these currents, is supported by the record. Boyle, often called the father of modern chemistry, was a lifelong alchemist who spent enormous effort trying to communicate with other alchemists in coded language. Elias Ashmole, one of the founding members, was a serious Hermeticist and the compiler of the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, an anthology of English alchemical verse.
The point for us is modest but important. The institutional birth of modern science was not a clean break from the esoteric traditions that preceded it. The break came later, mostly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the Enlightenment sharpened the line between “rational” and “mystical” inquiry and progressively wrote the esoteric side out of the official story. What got written out was not fantasy and superstition across the board. It was a rich, complex, partly empirical and partly mystical investigation of nature that had been inseparable from the investigations we now remember. When we say the founders of quantum physics turned to Eastern wisdom, we should understand that their own scientific tradition had a Hermetic underground of its own, and that in some sense the turn eastward was a recovery of something that had been native to Western science before the Enlightenment edited it out.
Why the Esoteric Side Got Suppressed
It is worth asking briefly why this underground gets left out of the standard histories. Part of the answer is professional. By the nineteenth century, the scientific community was consolidating its identity and its funding, and distinguishing itself from everything that could be dismissed as mystical or unprofessional was part of the consolidation. Part of the answer is philosophical. Logical positivism in the early twentieth century drew a sharp line between what could be meaningfully said (the empirical and logical) and what could not (the metaphysical and mystical), and most of the Hermetic tradition fell on the wrong side of that line. Part of the answer is cultural. Western education has for over a century privileged a story of steady progress from superstition to reason, and the Hermetic underground complicates that story.
None of this means the suppression was unjustified in every case. Plenty of nonsense has been done under the banner of Hermeticism. What it does mean is that the suppression was never complete, that the figures we most admire in the history of science were often seriously engaged with what got suppressed, and that the twentieth-century quantum pioneers’ turn toward Eastern and Western wisdom is better understood as a rediscovery than as a novelty. The river went underground. It did not dry up.
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