The Alchemical Journey

How Magic Figured into the Italian Renaissance

This essay traces various strains of Platonism throughout the Middle Ages. During this period, Christianity was sanctioned by authority, while related Platonic schools of thought existed as illegal heresies and were collectively dismissed as “magic”. During the Late Medieval period, these underground schools reemerged to challenge the decaying economic order of the day, resulting in the Italian Renaissance. It mirrored how Christianity emerged during the late Roman Empire as a previous magical challenge to authority, only to become, during the Middle Ages, that which it had once rebelled against.

Miracles

By the end of the Middle Ages, the word “magic” had come to mean miracles not sanctioned by the authorities. As Europe's dominant ideological and institutional authority, the Church claimed a monopoly on miracles, sacred knowledge, and divine intervention. Miracles performed by saints or attributed to God through the Church were considered legitimate, while similar phenomena outside its control were labeled as magic and condemned as heretical.

This monopoly of the Church dated back to the Fall of Rome, when the dying Roman Empire adopted Christianity as its state religion. To bolster their waning political power, the last Roman emperors capitalized on Christianity's runaway popularity. They converted, and then set out to erase its intellectual competition. They aimed to make the future exclusively Christian.

The destruction included pagan precursors of Christianity, and related schools of thought that had evolved alongside it from those same precursors. Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and Hermeticism were notable casualties in this era of political persecution. Like Christianity, these schools built on Plato’s distinction between the visible world of change and an invisible world of eternal Forms. They acknowledged that we inhabit an imperfect and transient world, while positing a hidden realm of eternal perfection to which we should aspire.

In Christianity, the mythic ascent out of Plato’s Cave and into divine light is achieved through moral (rather than dialectical) improvement. Early Christianity arose in opposition to the cruel economic hierarchy of the Roman Empire. It fiercely advocated for the poor by referencing the debt forgiveness commanded in Hebrew scripture. But St. Augustine, heavily influenced by his Platonic view of reality as fallen and corrupt, reinterpreted Christ’s forgiveness to instead mean relief from the guilt of personal moral failings.

Augustine’s interpretation was economically convenient for the Roman ruling class, who sought to avoid forgiving debts owed to them by the poor. His version was therefore adopted as the official state religion and bequeathed to history. Rival interpretations of Christianity were thereafter suppressed, along with Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and Hermeticism. These were reduced to illegal heresies and collectively known as “magic.” But they carried on underground, like seeds beneath the winter soil, waiting for spring’s thaw.

Ad Fontes

As the Middle Ages wore on, the Roman Catholic Church began to shamelessly monetize its intellectual monopoly. Because people broadly believed the Church was the only way to receive God’s forgiveness, the Church started charging people for it. This naked corruption, combined with the Church's obvious inability to stop the dying during the Black Death of the mid-1300s, set the stage for the coming of the Italian Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation.

After the Crusades revived stagnant economic currents, banking houses emerged across Europe to facilitate them. Gradually, bankers amassed enough wealth to challenge the corrupt and absolute power of the Vatican. The most famous of these were the Medici of Florence, who almost single-handedly bankrolled the Italian Renaissance.

Ad Fontes was the Latin motto of the Renaissance and of the Reformation. It meant “back to the source.” In the aftermath of the Black Death, a pessimistic gloom settled over the Italian peninsula like a miasmal fog. The Church had been an essential part of the fabric of European life for a millennium, but its reputation spiraled into a steep decline as the Middle Ages drew to a close. It had become the same kind of corrupt authority that early Christians once revolted against.

Then, as now, Italians could see the glorious ruins of Greco-Roman civilization all around them, half buried in the Italian countryside. Even though paganism was a heresy that came with stiff punishment, the investigation of pre-Christian culture seemed preferable to the dismal state of affairs they were confronted with in their own time.

Mass discontent during the late Middle Ages explains the Medici's obsession with magic, particularly alchemy. They kept cabinets stuffed with strange alchemical artifacts like narwhal tusks. They ground up gemstones and consumed the powder, hoping to benefit from magical properties. In defiance of the Vatican, the Medici took a keen interest in the same magical schools of thought that, a thousand years before, the last Roman Emperors had driven underground.

Alchemy

Some of the pre-Christian literature destroyed by the Christian emperors of Rome was preserved by Islamic civilization. Plato's writings are a prime example. During the Crusades, renewed contact with Muslim society began the long, arduous process of retransmitting these lost works back to Christendom.

In addition, Muslim scholars contributed highly influential literature of their own. The Emerald Tablet is one significant example. After the Crusades, this document heavily influenced the Renaissance conception of alchemy, which fascinated the Medici and so many others. It contains the immortal words, “that which is above is like to that which is below.”

The essence of this idea can be understood in how the root system of a tree, hidden underground, mirrors the structure of branches protruding above ground. The image of a tree with symmetrical roots and branches is an enduring symbol of this principle, which dominates modern occultism. Another anachronistic example of this axiom is how the microcosm is thought to mirror the macrocosm; the orbit of electrons around an atom's central nucleus reflects the orbits of the planets in a solar system. As above, so below.

The archetypical Platonic ascent from below to above provided the intellectual framework for Christianity as well as Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and Hermeticism. Renaissance painters used an art technique called trompe l'oeil to illustrate, to stunning effect, the Christian conception of mythic ascent. The name translates to "deceives the eye", and the technique involves creating a highly realistic illusion of three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional surface. The title card of this essay shows a ceiling in the Medici’s palace, painted by Mitelli and Colonna in 1640, which creates a breathtaking illusion of verticality. Their intertwined themes of ascent and divinity are unmistakable.

Renaissance alchemists conceived of the Platonic ascent as an “Alchemical Journey”, in which the soul returns to its divine origin. They emphasized the transformative power of the journey itself as the true goal of the quest. Paolo Coelho’s 1993 novel The Alchemist vividly illustrates the point. It’s the story of a young man seeking treasure under the Great Pyramids, only to finally discover that treasure in the village where his story began. The plot of The Alchemist mirrors the Ad Fontes motto of the Renaissance. The journey of the Medici and the Renaissance alchemists was a voyage back in time to recover something of value lost in Late Antiquity: magic.

The Italian Renaissance

In alchemy, the great work, or “magnum opus,” is the means to complete the Alchemical Journey. Where Augustine had stressed ascension through moral improvement, Renaissance alchemists emphasized technical improvement. The gradual refinement in skill that comes with endless repetition of a craft was, for the alchemist, a long ramp they could traverse to ascend between parallel realms of existence.

The Medici implemented this alchemical idea by using their vast fortune to bankroll the Italian Renaissance. They rescued select individuals from scratching out a subsistence living as Medieval peasants by paying their bills for a few decades. So liberated, these people were free to devote all their time and attention to the refinement of artistic technique. The Medici wanted to see how close they could come to replicating the quality of classical Greco-Roman artwork.

The Medici could never have imagined how successful their experiment would be. The artists they patronized not only mastered the lost techniques of Antiquity, they dramatically surpassed them. Names like Michelangelo, Botticelli, and Leonardo Da Vinci are now even more famous than the Medici bankers who patronized them. The Italian Renaissance, in all its glory, epitomized the great changing of the age from the Medieval to the Modern.

Conclusion

The Christian theme of ascent is characteristic of its Greco-Roman influences, rather than its Hebrew origins. Other Greco-Roman schools of thought that similarly emphasized Platonic ascent were outlawed by the failing Roman state during the Fall of Rome, and condemned as heresy by the Roman Catholic Church during the Middle Ages. Towards the end of the Medieval period, a revival of these schools of thought, particularly alchemy, was financed by a rising banking class, whose conception of Platonic ascent touched off the Italian Renaissance. If “magic” means miracles not sanctioned by the authorities, then the great irony of Christianity is that it arose as a magical challenge to a corrupt economic power, and then became itself a corrupt economic power, ripe for a new magical challenge in the form of the Renaissance.

Chemistry as a science was almost created by the Moslems; for in this field, where the Greeks (so far as we know) were confined to industrial experience and vague hypothesis, the Saracens introduced precise observation, controlled experiment, and careful records. They invented and named the alembic (al-anbiq), chemically analyzed innumerable substances, composed lapidaries, distinguished alkalis and acids, investigated their affinities, studied and manufactured hundreds of drugs. Alchemy, which the Moslems inherited from Egypt, contributed to chemistry by a thousand incidental discoveries, and by its method, which was the most scientific of all medieval operations. Practically all Moslem scientists believed that all metals were ultimately of the same species, and could therefore be transmuted one into another. The aim of the alchemists was to change "base" metals like iron, copper, lead, or tin into silver or gold; the "philosopher's stone" was a substance—ever sought, never found—which when properly treated would effect this transmutation. Blood, hair, excrement, and other materials were treated with various reagents, and were subjected to calcination, sublimation, sunlight, and fire, to see if they contained this magic al-iksir or essence. He who should possess this elixir would be able at will to prolong his life. The most famous of the alchemists was Jabir ibn Hayyan (702-65), known to Europe as Gebir. Son of a Kufa druggist, he practiced as a physician, but spent most of his time with alembic and crucible. The hundred or more works attributed to him were produced by unknown authors, chiefly in the tenth century; many of these anonymous works were translated into Latin, and strongly stimulated the development of European chemistry. After the tenth century the science of chemistry, like other sciences, gave ground to occultism, and did not lift its head again for almost three hundred years.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Faith, 1950, page 244