Alchemy in Literature: From Chaucer to Fullmetal Alchemist

In the late fourteenth century, an English poet set out to write what he hoped would be a collection of stories to be told by pilgrims on the road to Canterbury. The result was Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and one of the stories — the Canon Yeoman’s Tale — is a long, vivid, technical, and disgusted account of what alchemists actually do in their laboratories. The tale is a satire, and a sharp one, but it is also the most informative document we have about late medieval English laboratory practice. It works as literature because Chaucer understood that the alchemist is a figure the audience will recognize: greedy, deluded, dangerous to himself and his patrons. The Canon Yeoman’s Tale is the first major alchemical scene in English literature, and it set the template for almost everything that followed (Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 1972; Copenhaver, Hermetica, 1992; Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy, 2013).

Medieval foundations

The medieval alchemical literature is mostly Latin and French, and the appearance of alchemical imagery in vernacular poetry is a late medieval phenomenon. The Roman de la Rose (thirteenth century) integrates alchemical imagery into its allegory of love, and the integration is typical of the high medieval habit of using technical vocabularies as a source of figurative resources. Dante and Petrarch use alchemical imagery more sparingly, but they use it, and the religious and philosophical frameworks of the Italian poets provided natural openings for it.

Chaucer is the first major English poet to make alchemical imagery a structural element of his work, and the Canon Yeoman’s Tale is his largest alchemical scene. The tale is worth reading for the laboratory detail alone: the alchemist’s apparatus, his materials, the rhetoric by which he persuades a priest to give him money. The Canon Yeoman himself is a failed alchemist in the service of a Canon, and his long confession is a tour of the alchemist’s art as the alchemist himself sees it. Chaucer is not the only medieval writer to draw on alchemical material, but he is the most ambitious, and his account is the one subsequent English writers were responding to.

The Renaissance stage

The Renaissance is when alchemical imagery becomes a fixture of major literature, particularly in the English and German drama. Shakespeare is the most quotable. The King in King John — “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, / To throw a perfume on the violet, / To smooth the ice, or add another hue / Unto the rainbow” — is a sustained meditation on the futility of trying to improve on what is already perfect, and the meditation is a recognizable alchemical theme. The alchemical reading is well established, and the speech has the cadence of someone who knows the literature (Forshaw, “The Nature of the Art,” in Alchemy and Medicine, 2015).

The Tempest is the more interesting case. Prospero has withdrawn from his dukedom into the study of the secret arts, and the arts he has mastered are recognizably alchemical. The play is structured as a series of transformations worked by Prospero on the people stranded on his island, and the structure is a literary version of the magnum opus. Caliban, Ariel, Ferdinand — they are the matter, the spirit, and the fixed product of the work. Whether Shakespeare intended the alchemical reading is a separate question, and the answer is probably that he did not need to intend it. The alchemical imagery was in the air.

Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610) is the most direct treatment. It is a comedy about three con artists — Face, Subtle, and Doll Common — who set up a fake alchemical laboratory in a London house while the master is away, and who exploit the gullibility of London’s merchants and gentry. The play is a sharp satire, and the satire is informed: Jonson knew the alchemical literature, and his alchemists are recognizable figures, not caricatures. Subtle’s vocabulary, his apparatus, his promises of projection and the philosopher’s stone — all of it draws on real alchemical sources. The Alchemist is the major alchemical play in English, and it is also one of the major English comedies.

The Enlightenment and the Faustian tradition

The eighteenth century was a quieter period for alchemy in literature. The new mechanical philosophy and the rise of the empirical sciences had the effect of relocating alchemy from the library shelf to the curiosity cabinet, and serious literary treatments of alchemical material were rare. But the German tradition kept the Faustian legend alive, and the Faustian legend is the other major literary tradition of the alchemist.

Goethe’s Faust, Part Two (1832) is the centerpiece. The Homunculus scene, in which Wagner produces a small, transparent being in a flask, and the homunculus travels with Faust and Mephistopheles through the classical underworld, is the most ambitious alchemical scene in European literature after Jonson’s Alchemist. The homunculus is dissolved in the embrace of Galatea, and the dissolution is a kind of alchemical success — the homunculus, lacking a body, finds one in the sea-born beauty. The scene is essential reading for anyone interested in the literary alchemical tradition (the cluster on the homunculus takes it up in more detail).

The Victorian novel

The nineteenth century saw the rise of the alchemical novel in the Victorian Gothic tradition, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) is the major figure. Zanoni (1842) is a novel about a Rosicrucian adept who has mastered the elixir of life and is tested by love and the French Revolution. A Strange Story (1862) is the more sustained alchemical novel: a young physician encounters a mesmerist and alchemist, and the novel incorporates the doctrine of the elixir vitae and the philosopher’s stone into its Victorian Gothic frame. Bulwer-Lytton drew on the Theosophical and Rosicrucian revival of his own time, and his novels were enormously influential on the later occult novel (Punter, The Literature of Terror, 1996; Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy, 2013, pp. 196-198). D. H. Lawrence’s late Etruscan Places is a different kind of alchemical text — Lawrence reads the Etruscan tombs as alchemical images — but Bulwer-Lytton is the major Victorian case.

The Romantics are more equivocal. William Blake’s “Four Zoas” derive principally from Swedenborg and the Kabbalah, transmitted via Henry More, and the alchemical borrowing is indirect (Damon, A Blake Dictionary, 1965). Coleridge is a more serious student of the alchemical tradition, and the alchemical engagement shows in the notebooks more than the major poems. Kubla Khan has been read as alchemical, and the reading is plausible, but the alchemical content is partial (Roberts, Coleridge and the Alchemical Imagination, 2011). The Romantic engagement with alchemy is real but minor.

The modern novel

The twentieth century produced the most theoretically sophisticated alchemical novels. Aldous Huxley, in The Perennial Philosophy (1945) and The Doors of Perception (1954), treats the alchemical tradition as a major source of his theory of a universal truth at the heart of the world’s religious traditions, and the theory has been influential in subsequent New Age writing. Umberto Eco, in Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), built an entire conspiracy novel around the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, and a fictional plan encoded in a medieval manuscript. The alchemical content of The Name of the Rose (1980) is much more limited, as Eco himself was careful to point out. Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist (1988), a slim allegorical novel about an Andalusian shepherd’s search for a treasure in Egypt, became one of the most widely read novels of the alchemical tradition. The book is shallow as a treatment of the alchemical tradition itself, but it has done more than almost any other text to make the word “alchemy” a household term.

Modern fantasy and science fiction

The alchemical tradition has a major presence in modern fantasy and science fiction, and the most famous single instance is J. K. Rowling’s philosopher’s stone in the first Harry Potter book (1997). The stone in Rowling is the alchemical stone, and several of the other names — Flamel, the Sorcerer’s Stone itself — are drawn from the alchemical tradition. The Japanese manga and anime Fullmetal Alchemist (2001-2010) is built on the alchemical principle of “equivalent exchange,” the rule that nothing can be gained without something of equal value being given up. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea (1968-2001) draws on the alchemical tradition as one of the sources of its magical system, and the wizard Ged’s education has a recognizable alchemical structure. The fantasy and science fiction tradition is now the most active literary tradition drawing on alchemy, and the tradition is the place where most contemporary readers encounter alchemical material.

What alchemy does for literature

The alchemical tradition has served several distinct functions in literature, and the functions are worth distinguishing. The quest for the philosopher’s stone is among the most powerful quest narratives available: a story that combines the practical, the religious, and the philosophical dimensions of human life, and that works as a metaphor for the pursuit of meaning, purpose, and integration. The transmutation of base metals into gold is one of the most enduring images of transformation in Western literature, and the image has been used to represent moral and spiritual transformation across a wide range of works. The marriage of Sol and Luna — the union of the active and the passive, the conscious and the unconscious — is a powerful image of integration, used in everything from the Rosarium to Goethe to the modern fantasy tradition. The alchemist who has overreached — Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Goethe’s Faust, the failed alchemists of Jonson and Bulwer-Lytton — is one of the most enduring images of the danger of unbridled ambition.

The alchemical tradition is not the only source of these images, but it is the oldest, and the source most worth reading. The serious reader of alchemical literature should start with Chaucer and Jonson, then move to Goethe, then to the modern novels. The fantasy and science fiction tradition is worth taking seriously, and the alchemical content of Fullmetal Alchemist and Harry Potter is real, even if it is uneven. The alchemical tradition is one of the most important sources of symbolism, narrative, and meaning in Western literature, and the tradition is, in my view, not finished shaping the modern literary imagination.