Quest Magazine

The First Alchemists: The Spiritual and Practical Origins of the Noble and Holy Art
Tobias Churton
Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2023. 303 pp., paper, $26.99.                      

The quest to chart the history of alchemy is not new. A.E. Waite, Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, Titus Burckhardt, E.J. Holyard, Frances Yates, Allison Coudert, and many others have contributed in various spirited ways to the current conversation about alchemy, expanding our knowledge of its manifestations in medieval and early modern Western contexts.

Our understanding of the beginnings of alchemy, however, remains disappointingly narrow. Tobias Churton, well known for his work in esoteric studies and acclaimed biographies of Elias Ashmole, Aleister Crowley, G.I. Gurdjieff, and William Blake, trains his own spirited analysis on this problem. Writing for the intelligent lay reader, he offers profiles in ancient audacity that take us back to a rich intersection of pagan, Jewish, Christian, and gnostic wisdom and the fascinating figures who practiced the “noble and holy art” even before Arabic and Greek conspired to give it the name of al-kīmiyā.

Churton begins his history with the paper trail—or, rather, the papyri trail. Early alchemists, principally centered in Roman Egypt during the first centuries of the Common Era, performed all sorts of artisanal and spiritual labor, but they also engaged in literary labor. Their work spaces, fusing commercial, industrial, academic, and monastic elements, were part laboratory, part factory, part oratory, part studio, and part scriptorium. They wrote about their craft, their colleagues, their competitors, their equipment, and even their dreams. Some wisely stored their documents in terra-cotta urns. Or perhaps apprentices hid them, or censors buried them. In any event, Churton ranks the nineteenth-century discovery of Demotic, Old Coptic, and Greek manuscripts at Thebes with the twentieth-century unearthing of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi library.

Relying on standard translations of the original texts, now housed at Leiden and Stockholm, Churton brings his own linguistic and exegetical skills to bear on the literary treasures as well. He agrees with the ninth-century Byzantine historian Synkellos: the first alchemists wrote about gold and silver and stones and purple “but in an oblique way.” That intentional indirection was their common literary signature. Their shared worldview was the intellectual counterpart to the complex vaporous brews that warmed their alembics, crucibles, and vats.

As individuals, though, the first alchemists were remarkably diverse. Churton the biographer excels in developing portraits of adepts such as Kleopatra the Wise, Mariam the Jewish Prophetess, Ostanes the Mede, the writer known to modern scholars as Pseudo-Democritus and to ancients as “the Philosopher,” Pammenes, Pebechius, and especially Zosimos of Panopolis, who lived in the fourth century CE, and his partner Theosebeia, whom he called his “purple-robed” sister.

Throughout the book, Churton argues that these philosopher-practitioners did not traffic in the gold-making claims of later legend (or fantasies of the philosopher’s stone, for that matter). They predated both. Churton reveals his own knack for transmutation as he molds three-dimensional images of the figures out of the scantiest documentary evidence. He devotes the bulk of his work to Zosimos, whose self-narrated dreams are now familiar to every novice in the field of analytical psychology. The person Churton might have called the “historical Zosimos” was neither temple functionary nor mad scientist nor proto-Jungian. He was a creative blend of entrepreneur, designer, manufacturer, teacher, writer, and mystic made possible by the distinctive character and contours of his time and place.

Zosimos is Churton’s portal into the cultural milieu that nurtured a symbiosis between inventive work with metals, textiles, plants, and precious stones and “the blue-sky gnostic message” of Roman Egypt’s high-energy cosmology.

Jung said his latter-day entrée into alchemy was a dream about a strange house with an old, mysterious library. Churton invites us into the curious house of late antiquity and its rambling library of Hermetic classics, Greek science, Gnostic gospels, “speculative trance texts,” and unrestrained mythologies that link cunning technique not only to the sons of Cain but also to the daimonic sons of God. Churton even draws a dotted line from early alchemy to homoousios—an adjective denoting the free-floating “same substance” concept that was soon monopolized and weaponized by agents of an unprecedented imperial Christianity.

Churton’s synthetic and syncretic mind, coupled with animated, occasionally scrappy, prose, brings to life this almost irretrievable approach to art, science, and spirituality. One of his most important suppositions is the existence of nonsacerdotal guilds or networks uniting the early alchemists. He ponders the riddle of evolution from Zosimos to the likes of Paracelsus and Isaac Newton, particularly alchemy’s conversion from a coeducational to a single-sex enterprise. But change comes as no surprise to the alchemical imagination, old or new. Churton allows the noble and holy art to tell its story in its own oblique way.

Peter A. Huff

Peter A. Huff, author or editor of seven books, teaches religious history at Benedictine University. His article “The Current State of Unbelief” appeared in Quest, spring 2022.                

American Aurora: Environment and Apocalypse in the Life of Johannes Kelpius
Timothy Grieve-Carlson
New York: Oxford University Press, 2024. 310 pp., hardcover, $120; paperback, $39.95.

Shortly before his death in 1993, social critic and editor Irving Howe told a group of contributors to his seasoned political quarterly Dissent: “We have two problems at this magazine. The first is that some of you don’t know how to write in English. The second is that some of you don’t want to write in English. The second of these is the far greater problem.”

Howe meant that the Upper West Side living room of writers, many of whom taught college, were increasingly using academic jargon as a mark of professionalism. Indeed, the very unreadability of much current scholarly writing in the humanities functions as a source of pride to many pedants, who see their respective specialties as rightly possessed of their own nomenclature, much like the study of the reproductive cycles of mollusks.

Ironically, perhaps, the rise of Western esotericism as a recognized field of study has introduced a bold, fresh, rigorous, and scholarly new wave of literature into the humanities. Because academia until recently neglected, or even rejected, study of occult, mystical, pietistic, and esoteric thought streams, much of the new bumper crop of scholarly literature in esoterica exudes the freshness of discovery.

A prime example appears in scholar of religion Timothy Grieve-Carlson’s impeccably timed and pristinely written (and reasoned) American Aurora: Environment and Apocalypse in the Life of Johannes Kelpius. His book testifies not only to the overall quality of recent scholarly exegeses of esoterica but also the fruits of growing up in a household that maintained a set of Time-Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown series (as noted in his acknowledgments). 

American Aurora is timely because Grieve-Carlson finds in Johannes Kelpius (1667‒1708)—the Hermetically influenced Christian monk who sojourned from Central Europe to establish a short-lived but influential colony outside Philadelphia in 1694—a subject who invariably appears in historical literature with little backstory and often a semilegendary telling. Grieve-Carlson notes:

“Our dim historical memory of Kelpius and the hesitation of scholars to cut back against the strata of folklore and legend have turned him into a kind of tabula rasa for an American occult tradition in search of an origin story from the earliest period in American history, a uniquely American spin on Wouter Hanegraaff’s suggestion that esotericism is always grounded in a discourse of ‘ancient wisdom.’”

This early passage frames the adventurousness and purpose Grieve-Carlson brings to his study. The author  dirties his hands, not only traveling to the rocky, root-twisted banks of the Wissahickon Creek in Germantown, Pennsylvania, where Kelpius and his circle struggled to live (leading to the abbot’s death from tuberculosis at age forty-one) but also plumbing period literature to grasp how this Lutheran pietist and religious radical understood himself and his wilderness surroundings. “Can a historian of religion,” Grieve-Carlson wonders, “read a landscape as a primary source?” Not only can he, I offer, but to overlook it means neglecting vital material.

It doesn’t take much to further detect subtlety and nonconformity in Grieve-Carlson’s approach. Rather than repeat recent nostrums (such as the textual sins of historian Frances Yates) or older nostrums (such as lettered Europe’s immediate embrace of the Corpus Hermeticum’s redating in the seventeenth century), the author charts a path, in both text and notes, that leavens ready-made notions.

In so doing, Grieve-Carlson argues persuasively that the influence of Hermeticism—the late-ancient compact of Greek-Egyptian thought—on Christian figures such as Kelpius, Paracelsus (c.1493‒1531), and Jacob Boehme (1575–1624) produced a pre-Enlightenment Gaia philosophy in which humanity and nature function as one whole. “Early modern Protestants,” he writes, “turned to Hermetic and alchemical literature because it offered an environmental knowledge that was applicable to a changing climate.”

During a Central European era of “persistent drought, cold, and war”—as well as increased persecution of mystical pietists—there also arose, the author notes, better reportage of natural phenomena, sometimes from farmers or tradesmen witnessing a meteorite. Collegiate authorities in the Old and New Worlds typically dismissed such reports as fancies of superstitious villagers, much as today’s sclerotic professional-skeptic culture disregards replicable findings from parapsychology or creditable evidence for UFOs.

The brutality of life in Central Europe was enough to drive the forty or so members of “the Kelpius group” to attempt transatlantic voyage to the American colonies. Once arrived, Kelpius and his circle sought to read hidden meanings into the colonial wilderness—and read many books too. Kelpius was a bookbinder by trade and, as Grieve-Carlson notes, made a decent living at it. Their learned commune laid tracks for others, including the Ephrata and Shaker colonies. I believe the author could have done more to consider this aspect of the monk’s legacy. 

Grieve-Carlson is admirably generous toward popular historian Julius Sachse (1842‒1919), who promulgated several myths around Kelpius, including his Rosicrucian lineage. Next to Sachse, occult scholar Manly P. Hall (1901‒1990) proved among the few writers who kept Kelpius’s name alive in the first half of the twentieth century. But Hall too overrelied on folklore. He got Kelpius right in impact but fuzzy in details; Grieve-Carlson gets the hermit right on both counts.

Grieve-Carlson (along with scholars possessing related interests, like April DeConick and Hugh B. Urban) is continuing a cultural refinement begun over a generation ago by Yates: documentation of how Renaissance Hermeticism subtly but foundationally informed Western culture. We finally have a formidable study of Kelpius, one of the vessels through which that influence passed. 

Mitch Horowitz

The author, a member of the TSA, is a PEN Awardיwinning historian, former vice president at Penguin Random House, and host of Discovery/Max’s Alien Encounters. His latest books are Modern Occultism and Happy Warriors. His work is censored in China.

Theosophy and the Study of Religion
Edited by Charles M. Stang and Jason Ananda Josephson Storm
Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2024. 364 pp., hardcover, $191.

Scholars of Western esotericism have increasingly been exploring Theosophy as a source of cultural influence. Although much of this work is uneven and characterized by a certain academic myopia, on the whole they treat Theosophy and its leading figures thoughtfully and respectfully.

The latest entry in this category is Theosophy and the Study of Religion, a collection of academic essays. Themes discussed are “Theosophy, Early Christianity, and the Question of Origins,” “Theosophy and Race,” “Theosophy and Asian Religions,” and “Theosophy and Language.”

As expected, “Theosophy and Race” is the weakest section. One could summarize its conclusions thus: “We just know that there is racism in Theosophy, although we can’t exactly put our finger on where.” Theosophical works are blamed for fueling racist discourse in the early twentieth century, although this had any number of sources and influences, of which Theosophy was far from the strongest. By this view, the central goal of the Theosophical Society—the universal brotherhood of humanity “without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or color”—is mere window dressing.

The section on Christianity displays a certain obliviousness, sometimes suggesting that the early Theosophists were more original than they were or claimed to be. Denise Kimber Buell’s “Modern Theosophy’s Legacy in New Testament and Early Christian Studies” says, “This formulation, ‘Christ in you,’ is crucial for theosophists,” citing Annie Besant’s Esoteric Christianity and Anna Kingsford’s Perfect Way. Buell makes it sound as if Besant and Kingsford had come up with this idea, but (as they themselves contended) it has been central to Christian mysticism from the beginning.

Similarly, in “A Theosophical History of Religions,” Olav Hammer writes, “Every religion, in Blavatsky’s view, presents an exoteric version of teachings to ordinary believers, and another, esoteric, aspect to a spiritually advanced elite”—as if she had cooked up this idea, which goes at least as far back as classical antiquity.

Probably the most astounding omission is in Charles M. Stang’s “H.P. Blavatsky and Origen of Alexandria,” a comparison of HPB’s views with those of the third-century church father. In regard to reincarnation, Stang points out, correctly, that “Origen did espouse some sort of doctrine of rebirth, as part of a grand, cosmic evolution of fallen minds on their way back to the embrace of their divine source.” But Stang fails to mention that Origen emphatically distinguished the Christian concept of resurrection from reincarnation: in fact he repeatedly denies and mocks “the foolish doctrine of reincarnation” (Contra Celsum 3.75)—a fact that is surely relevant to the discussion. Of course Blavatsky does not mention it either. No doubt Stang is right in saying that “Blavatsky’s knowledge of Origen and his writings was rather limited,” but one might have hoped for better from Stang.

Arthur Versluis’s “Theosophies and Asian Religions” discusses the connection of the theosophy of the seventeenth-century mystic Jacob Boehme with that of the Theosophical Society. Versluis cites Joscelyn Godwin’s view, expressed in his Theosophical Enlightenment, to the effect that “between Blavatskyan theosophy and its Christian offshoots and Böhmean theosophy there is virtually no continuity. Godwin is right about that,” Versluis concludes, without further explanation. One wonders why he bothered to write the article.

Two of the more valuable pieces vindicate certain claims about religious origins made by early Theosophists that were repudiated by the academics of their day. Wouter Hanegraaff discusses G.R.S. Mead’s contention in Thrice-Greatest Hermes that the Corpus Hermeticum reflected a genuine Egyptian inspiration rather than being, as scholarly opinion of the day held, a mishmash of Greek, Jewish, and Christian ideas. Scholars have come to agree with Mead (although, as Hanegraaff indicates, without crediting him). Even so, a reader goes away astonished by the amount of academic energy that has been expended to determine that, after all, the Hermetic texts were exactly what they claimed to be: a codification of Egyptian esoteric concepts in the language of the Greeks.

Michael Gomes’ article “Max Müller, Blavatsky, and the Esoteric Buddhism Debate” discusses the fraught relationship between Blavatsky and Müller, the most admired scholar of Indian religions of the late nineteenth century. Blavatsky declared the existence of an “esoteric Buddhism” (made famous by A.P. Sinnett’s 1883 book of that title), which Müller vehemently denied. According to Gomes, time has circled round to vindicate Blavatsky: “By the beginning of the twenty-first century Esoteric Buddhism was now a fixture in the Buddhist narrative.” Gomes concludes, “How well has Müller’s verdict on esoteric Buddhism held up? . . . Not well, at all.” But Gomes does not mention that this esoteric Buddhism—chiefly the Tibetan Vajrayana—bears little resemblance to the esoteric Buddhism of Blavatsky.

Perhaps the most important passage in this collection is in Isaac Lubelsky’s “Grounding the Celestial,” which describes the process by which present-day academic consensus was hashed out in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: “In my understanding, the modern Western worldview, with its clear borders between the legitimate scientific and the non-scientific, was born out of the period described in this essay. Therefore the story of the Theosophical Society is an excellent example to this rift that ended with the creation of two rivaling fields, the theosophical one moved aside, in order to define the established scientific field and to enable its dominance. In other words, the scholar’s voice, or the historian’s voice in my case, is bound to use the same Western set of tools when interpreting the theosophical story. This voice is therefore by no means objective, and has, perhaps unfortunately, no other choice than to be critical, as long as it keeps the same scientific tendency that was born out of this struggle.”

Lubelsky’s frankness is refreshing. One wishes that other scholars in the field were more willing to admit how their views are skewed by their academic orientation. If this bias were merely a lack of emotional affinity, it might make no difference, but it often leads to mistakes and misconceptions even from a scholarly point of view. As a result, much of this literature must be read with caution and skepticism.

Richard Smoley

Printed in the  Fall 2024  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Keene, Douglas, "The Krotona Centenary"  Quest 112:4, pg 8-9

By Douglas Keene 

On April 21 of this year, the centenary celebration for Krotona Institute of Theosophy in Ojai, California, was held. During the week leading up to the event, there were classes on the topic of “From Inner to Outer Transformation.” The public was invited to activities on Saturday and Sunday, with the formal ceremony of public addresses performed on the Sunday afternoon. Talks were given by Linda Oliveira, a prominent Theosophical Society member from Australia, Betsy Stix, mayor of Ojai, TSA archivistr Janet Kerschner, and me. Here are my remarks. 

Good afternoon.

It is my pleasure to participate in the celebration of the centenary of the Krotona School in Ojai. I’ve been coming to programs at this facility for nearly three decades and am always inspired and uplifted by being on these grounds. This is a beautiful sanctuary, nestled in the hills of Ojai Valley, which those of us who spend time here have come to love and cherish.

I have many fond memories of coming to Krotona. I recall that I would often fly out for a program on the weekend from New Hampshire. I would take a 6 a.m. cross-country flight out of Boston early on Friday morning, which required me to get up at midnight or 1 a.m. Eastern time (which, of course, is three hours earlier here). I never slept well on planes, and therefore I could be up for a twenty-four-hour cycle by the time I attended the program that evening. I remember watching Joy Mills through blurry eyes until at last it was time to fall asleep. The weekend would fly by, and suddenly I was on a red-eye flight back home on Sunday night, landing in the early morning hours of Monday. I would sometimes try to work later in the day. Even though the travel was stressful, for the hours I was in Krotona, I felt rejuvenated and uplifted.

The TSA and Krotona divided in the early 1920s for a variety of reasons, with the Theosophical Society moving to Chicago and later Wheaton, Illinois, while the Esoteric School of Theosophy established itself in this location, now a hundred years ago. The Krotona Institute of Theosophy, also located here, has helped spread the message and deeper resonance of Theosophy and its fundamental principles to thousands over the years. The KIT has shared in the mission of the Theosophical Society, which is to “encourage open-minded inquiry into world religions, philosophy, science and the arts in order to understand the wisdom of the ages, respect the unity of all life, and help people explore spiritual self-transformation.”

The Krotona Institute and the TSA have had a sibling relationship for the last century. Like many siblings, we occasionally disagree but have always been mutually supportive and encouraging and have a deep devotion to each other. I have known KIT vice president and resident head Elena Dovalsantos most of the time she’s been living here—well before each of us held our present offices—and I believe our capacity to communicate and promote harmony within our two organizations is excellent. We share a message, which is to expand the teachings of the Ageless Wisdom and promote unity and compassion within our world today.           

How can we bring a shared vision of the future? First, by education. Through a series of diverse programs, we can share our experiences and teachings with a new generation and a wide array of individuals. In this time of global crisis, many are looking for depth of experience and understanding. The desires of the body and the lower mind begin to recede as we search for something more enduring, more real. One place to find these enduring principles is within the Theosophical tradition. When the news of daily events grinds us down, when the pursuit of popularity feels empty, we crave a deeper connection, a profound sense of purpose in our lives. People are seeking light, as they do in all ages and places. Although no one can provide final answers, much can be learned and shared.

Second, the teachings engender an attitude of altruism. When we recognize our unity with other human beings and with all life, it is natural to wish to be of benefit in some way, particularly to those who may be wanting in basic necessities, but also to those who are struggling with spiritual confusion or alienation.

Krotona is an oasis, but also a way station, where we learn to take our energies and abilities out into the greater world in an empathetic and practical sense. We each have something to share, even if it is only our own humanity, letting others know that they are not alone.

We must have eyes to look outward, to know what our place and work in the world is and will be. But we must also look inward in order to understand our inner nature, sense our unity, and see the divine path. We must know ourselves through self-reflection and self-evaluation. We must understand not only our desires and capacities, our instincts and intuition, but the deepest aspects of our nature and our links to divine aliveness. When our vision becomes clear, looking inwardly and outwardly, these two must be assimilated, working in harmony, as we unfold toward our greater potential.

Let us remember what Annie Besant has written: “Never forget that life can only be nobly inspired and rightly lived if you take it bravely and gallantly, as a splendid adventure in which you are setting out into an unknown country, to meet many a joy, to find many a comrade, to win and lose many a battle.”

Krotona is about to embark on its second hundred years in Ojai. There is an enormous aptitude here for creating deep and profound programming and providing connecting experiences. It can bring understanding, harmony, and resonance to us in our often chaotic lives. These teachers can gather fellow seekers together and lift our consciousness so we can see and feel the oneness, the uniqueness, the intertwining of all of us. It is a valued treasure, a jewel, which radiates for us and beckons us to come and find the peace and stillness we seek.

Congratulations and best wishes for the next century.

Thank you very much.