Blending of Natural Sciences and Occult Studies

In the Medieval and Early Modern periods, natural science blended with occult studies, and this is why the modern subject of chemistry arose out of the ancient practice of alchemy. This intermixing of the mysterious and the concrete can be illustrated by the concept of a Diana’s Tree.

Diana was the Ancient Roman Goddess of the hunt (as illustrated in the first slide of a Roman painting), but she also stood for the moon. And in the field of alchemy, heavenly bodies were associated with different metals — the moon, and Diana, both went with silver.

Alchemists figured out that they could “grow” tree-like (aka “dendritic”) crystallized silver out of mercury from a solution of silver nitrate (see second image), which to their minds illustrated that metals could be transformed into other metals — some even wrote about them as though they were alive, and the alchemical process was like gestation.

Isaac Newton himself practiced alchemy, and a recently discovered manuscript of his contains his hand-written copy of a recipe by the American born alchemist George Starkey, that would make “sophick mercury,” a sort of Diana’s Tree. We do not know if Newton ever tried to follow the directions of Starkey, but his interest speaks to the continued interest in the occult even as the Scientific Revolution was beginning.