Alchemical culture and poetry in early modern England

Abstract

There is a longstanding tradition of using alchemical imagery in poetry. It first flourished at the end of the sixteenth century, when the status of alchemy itself was revitalised in European society. Here I explain the reasons for this resurgence of the Hermetic arts, and explore how it was manifested in English culture and in particular in the literary and poetic works of the time.

History of Chemical Notations from Alchemy to Psycho‐Chemistry

“…Alchemists attempted to develop graphic notations to represent the transformations of materials. But they could not describe what occurred in the flasks and retorts in which they concocted or distilled potions or poisons, or "transmuted" metals into gold [6][7][8][9][10][11]. To characterize their concoctions, they drew figures and patterns, imagined dragons, geometric shapes, copulating groups or Kabbalistic re-ordering of letters of words.…”

“…A major flaw in the alchemical approach was the absence of an appropriate general graphic or textual notation to aid in conceptualization. Consequently, alchemical notation tended to the phantasmical figures and astrological imagery common in pre-Copernican cosmologies (pre 1543) and Kabbalistic musings, which did not survive the advent of modern chemistry [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. The absence of a compelling alchemical notation instigated the new generations of modern chemists to radically reconceptualize the composition and transformation of matter, aided by new (graphic) ideagrams and notational descriptions of chemical structures [12].…”

Alchemical analysis of FDA approved drugs

“…However, they can also be applied to processes that do not obey Lavoisier's principle, the conservation of mass, such as the alchemical transmutation of lead into gold. 25,26 Here, we apply them to transmutations between pairs of molecules selected for their similarity according to various molecular ngerprints as similarity measures, an approach related to the recent development of transformer models for drug optimization. 27,28 We start by using DRFP, which encodes chemical reactions by storing the symmetric difference of two sets containing the circular molecular n-grams generated from the molecules of the molecular pair as a binary ngerprint, 21 to represent the chemical space of drug pairs as a TMAP (tree-map).…”

“…However, they can also be applied to processes that do not obey Lavoisier's principle, the conservation of mass, such as the alchemical transmutation of lead into gold. 25,26 Here, we apply them to transmutations between pairs of molecules selected for their similarity according to various molecular fingerprints as similarity measures, an approach related to the recent development of transformer models for drug optimization. 27,28…”

Alchemical Analysis of FDA Approved Drugs

“…However, they can also be applied to processes that do not obey Lavoisier's principle, the conservation of mass, such as the alchemical transmutation of lead into gold. 25,26 Here, we apply them to transmutations between pairs of molecules selected for their similarity according to various molecular fingerprints as similarity measures, an approach related to the recent development of transformer models for drug optimization. 27,28 We start by using DRFP, which encodes chemical reactions by storing the symmetric difference of two sets containing the circular molecular n-grams generated from the molecules of the molecular pair as a binary fingerprint, 21 to represent the chemical space of drug pairs as a TMAP (tree-map).…”