By Kiran Toor

"In an attempt to trace Coleridge’s familiarity with Hermetic and alchemical discourses throughout his life, it has been necessary to review works as varied as those of Plato, Marsilio Ficino, Ralph Cudworth, Jacob Boehme, Herman Boerhaave, and F. W. J. Schelling. It is then suggested how Coleridge appropriates alchemical terminology to his own aesthetic and imaginative ends."


https://www.cambridgescholars.com/produc...438-2656-3

Heinrich Khunrathʼs use of Ficinian metaphysics of light.

By Martin Žemla.

https://www.prometheustrust.co.uk/Ficino...__emla.pdf

"The Tantric Alchemist is a work on alchemy as decoded by Tantra and a work on Tantra as understood by alchemists. It uncovers works by Thomas Vaughan and suggests how he and his wife—a 17th-century Welsh couple unique in the history of western alchemy—met their fate when dealing with forces they knew only too well, but which were stronger than their ability to control them."


At Scribd:

https://www.scribd.com/book/331236640/Th...-Tradition

By Theodore Ziolkowski

At Scribd:

https://www.scribd.com/document/34745618...Literature

By Euan Roger

"Where did Geoffrey Chaucer get the inspiration for his stories? As part of my research into the hundreds of Chaucer life records in our collections, I’ve been taking a look into one of the Canterbury Tales – the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale – which may have been based on Chaucer’s experience of a real-life trial in the court of the King’s Bench, the records of which are found at The National Archives. The trial was that of William de Brumley, a chaplain from Middlesex who had been caught red-handed trying to sell four counterfeit coins to the Master of the Royal Mint at the Tower of London; coins made – it was claimed – by means of alchemy. These coins had been made from a combination of gold, silver and other ‘medicines’ (‘sal armoniak’, ‘vitriol’ and ‘golermonik’ – probably meant to read ‘bole armoniak’) by the art of alchemy which William claimed he had been taught according to the doctrine of a canon of the king’s chapel at Windsor."


https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/geo...d-alchemy/

"This article studies the cultural significance of alchemy among the Russian nobility in St. Petersburg during the reign of Catherine the Great. It is argued that Catherine the Great perceived alchemy as a Western practice promoted by foreign charlatans and by mystically-inclined Freemasons, which threatened to undermine the foundations of her vision of Russia being a beacon of reason and enlightenment. The first section of this paper concentrates on Petr Ivanovich Melissino and examines the manner in which this prominent Russian aristocrat incorporated alchemy as a core component of his seven-grade Masonic Rite."

Subscription only.

https://brill.com/view/journals/jre/5/1/...anguage=en

At JSTOR:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/sla....90.3.0401

"Flemish painter, a pupil of David Teniers the Younger. He was a member of Antwerp's guild of painters by 1646. His abundant production, generally signed or monogrammed, but seldom dated, spreads out between 1638 and 1670. Influenced greatly by his master and Adriaen Brouwer, van Helmont specialized in the painting of genre subjects, particularly village scenes, kermesses and interiors, but also produced still-lifes and several versions of The Temptation of St Anthony. In addition, he painted Italian markets and fairs, which suggests he visited Italy at some point in his career. Apparently of an unruly character and often involved in brawls, he left Antwerp in 1674, leaving many paintings with his creditors, and settled in Brussels where he died five years later."

https://www.wga.hu/bio_m/h/helmont/biograph.html

An Alchemist in his Laboratory.

   

The Alchemist.

   

"Largely forgotten today in the shadow of his more famous father, the 17th-century Flemish alchemist Francis van Helmont influenced and was friends with the likes of Locke, Boyle, and Leibniz. While imprisoned by the Inquisition, in between torture sessions, he wrote his Alphabet of Nature on the idea of a universal “natural” language."

"The theory he propounds is that the ancient and therefore uncorrupted Hebrew characters are actually diagrams illustrating how the lips and tongue should be positioned when uttering the sounds they make. A series of woodcuts in the book show cross sections of heads in profile with the speech organs exposed to reveal how they are shaped exactly like Hebrew letters."

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/fra...of-nature/

By Jan Matejko.