Running the Recipes

The argument was backed by going into a laboratory. Alchemical texts are written in cover names, so that a substance is called by the name of a planet, a god or an animal, and generations of readers concluded from the imagery that the operations described were purely symbolic. Principe worked out what a number of those names refer to and carried out the procedures, and they run. The tree of Diana, an amalgam that grows a branching metallic structure in a flask, is one of the demonstrations; work reconstructed from the notebooks of George Starkey, who published as Eirenaeus Philalethes, is another, and the notebooks themselves show a practitioner recording quantities, failures and adjustments in the ordinary manner of a laboratory scientist.

The consequence for this atlas is direct. A text can be a set of instructions and a spiritual allegory at the same time, and the authors do not appear to have experienced any tension between the two, so an entry that describes an alchemical operation as merely symbolic is very likely mistaken and an entry that describes it as merely chemical is missing what it was for. Both readings are needed, and the material was written by people who held them together.