210 THE REVIVAL OF ALCHEMY. 



nificance of the discoveries and are led away into unprofitable and 

 dangerous superstitions. 



In the Middle Ages alchemy was nurtured by ignorant superstition; 

 now it is fostered by the prevalent devotion to esoteric studies; for- 

 merly the i)opular belief was in x)art supported by the fraudulent claims 

 of impostors; now a higher standard of intelligence rejects the trans- 

 parent tricks of imitators of Cagliostro. There are, indeed, occasional 

 attempts to swindle the credulous by appeals to avarice. We read in 

 the daily press of an American confidence man who tried to cheat a 

 London jeweler by pretending to "multiply" sovereigns; of a vulgar 

 scheme of fraud among ignorant tradesmen on the east side of New 

 York City, in which lead, iron scraps, crucibles, and furnaces formed 

 the properties; and of the larger operations of an educated French 

 chemist who found dupes in both South and Forth America ; but in 

 each of these cases the severe logic of law courts intervened and ab- 

 ruptly discomfited the swindlers.. It is not by sleight-of-hand that the 

 revival of alchemy is now being engineered, but by a company of edu- 

 cated charlatans. 



The movement to resuscitate alchemical doctrines and practices has 

 been particularly successful in France, where there are to-day four 

 societies and a "university " claiming to possess occult knowledge of 

 hermetic mysteries. These secret societies are named " Ordre de la 

 Eose-Croix," "L'Ordre Martiniste,"*" La Societe d' Homeopathic Her- 

 metique" and "L' Association Alchimique de France." 



The first two of these societies seem to work on lines similar to Free 

 Masonry, and claim that their secret mysteries were bequeathed by the 

 last sages of Atlantis and by the Lemures to their brethren in Asia and 

 Egypt, dwellers in sanctuaries whence issued Krishna, Zoroaster, Her- 

 mes, Moses, Pythagoras, and Plato. The priestly magi who preserved 

 this lore in the temples of Thebes, Heracleopolis, Aphrodite, Pthah, 

 and Serapis were succeeded by secret alchemical societies of the first 

 centuries of our era; then followed the hermetic lodges of the Arabs, 

 and these gave rise to the Templars, the Eosicrucians, and the Martin- 

 ists. 



The third society cultivates especially occult therapeutics, a system 

 of medicine invented in the sixties by Count Cajsar Mattei, of Bologna, 

 which unites the x)rinciples of Hahnemann with those of the latro- 

 chemists, disciples of Paracelsus. This new departure in medicine 

 publishes four monthly organs and special treatises all its own. 



The Alchemical Association of France is successor to the Societe 

 Hermetique which was founded by the late Albert Poisson (t 1894), also 

 known by the pen-name Philophotes. Its seat is in Paris. The objects 

 of the association, as set forth in its constitution, are " the theoretical 

 and experimental study of evolution and of the transmutation of bodies. 

 Its members, with this end in view, study the processes of the ancient 

 alchemists and compare them with the work of modern chemists." These 



