Thomas Vaughan and the Iatrochemical Revolution

Thomas Vaughan has often been called a 'mystical' or 'spiritual' alchemist by his readers, especially since the nineteenth-century edition of A. E. Waite, whose works helped fuel the late Victorian mania for theosophy, hermeticism, and secret societies. While Waite acknowledged that Vaughan had experimented with metals, he believed Vaughan's true subject was the union between God and the soul; thus he regarded Vaughan as one in a long line of 'spiritual' alchemists.1 The conception of alchemy as primarily a form of spirituality was further popularized in this century by Carl Jung, who was interested in alchemy to the extent that it seemed to mirror his own theories of psychological transformation. The writings of Thomas Vaughan, indeed, continue to enjoy a certain celebrity among those interested in esoteric philosophy. Waite's edition of The Works of Thomas Vaughan: Mystic and Alchemist has been frequently reprinted (whereas Alan Rudrum's scholarly edition had only a meagre print run and is virtually unavailable). Contemporary evidence suggests that Vaughan was recognized in his time as an experimental chemist; his activities with Thomas Henshaw in the Christian Learned Society (ca. 1650) and later association with Sir Robert Moray and the chemical circle surrounding Charles II also point to a role in active research. Since the unpublished notebook of Thomas and Rebecca Vaughan, Aqua Vitae , Non Vitis (British Library MS, Sloane 1741), has largely been ignored, the precise nature of his own research consequently has remained obscure. In this essay I would like to shed some light on that research and its part in the iatrochemical or Paracelsian revolution then underway in medicine.Vaughan began his public career, brief though it was, during the turbulent 1650s, and his writings ought to be seen as a part of the firestorm sparked by the fear that Descartes had depicted an atheistic, mechanistic universe. In his first two treatises, Vaughan devoted considerable efforts to refuting the notion of a lifeless universe and aimed his vitriolic barbs at the 'Whymzies of des Chartes'.2 As a youth Vaughan had been fascinated with the hidden forces of the natural world - which '(I know not how) surpris'd my first youth, long before I saw the University'.3 With his first works, Anthroposophia Theomagica and Anima Magica Abscondita published together in 1650 under the pseudonym of Eugenius Philalethes, he established himself as an anti-Aristotelian and a defender of divine immanence in the universe. He also declared his allegiance to the new science by using the well-known epigraph from the title page of Bacon's Novum Organum for Anthroposophia Theomagica: 'Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased' (Daniel 12:4).4 Like Bacon he was committed to the idea that the way to break open the sealed fountain of truth was empirical investigation:But it will be question'd perhaps, how shall we approach to the Lord, and by what means may we finde him out? Truely not with words, but with workes, not in studying ignorant, Heathenish Authours, but in perusing, and trying his Creatures: For in them Lies his secret path, which though it be shut up with thornes and Briars, with outward worldly Corruptions, yet if we would take the pains to remove this luggage, we might Enter the Terrestriall Paradise, that Hortus Conclusus of Solomon, where God descends to walk, and drink of the sealed Fountain.5At the same time as he declared his commitment to the new empirical methodology, Vaughan dedicated the work to the most notorious of the mystical brotherhoods in early modern Europe, Illustrissimis, et vere Renatis Fratribus R. C. ('to the most illustrious and truly reborn brothers of the rosy cross'). These positions are not as cross-purposed as they might at first appear to modern readers, because the Rosicrucian manifestos were written as part of a campaign to foster a similar renewal in the early years of the seventeenth century. …