Mary Anne Atwood and the Hermetic Mystery of Alchemy
In 1850, a young Englishwoman and her father paid for a book to be printed in London, and then tried to destroy it. The work was a thick volume with a long title, A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery, and it claimed that the alchemists, all through the centuries, had been hiding a secret that was not about gold.
According to the story, the author and her father were afraid they had revealed too much, so they bought back the unsold copies, and burned them. Only a few survived. Those that did became prized objects in the circles of Victorian occultism, and the book returned in print only in the twentieth century. Whether or not the burning happened exactly this way, it tells us something about how the book was received.
The Author
Mary Anne South was born in 1817, in Hampshire, on the south coast of England, and was raised in Gosport by a father who was interested in the strange sciences of the age. Thomas South was a man of independent means, with a taste for philosophy and mysticism. He and his daughter shared a passion for mesmerism, then a popular practice also known as "animal magnetism."
Mesmerism took its name from Franz Anton Mesmer, an eighteenth-century physician who claimed that a magnetic fluid in the body could be directed to heal. A French royal commission, which included Benjamin Franklin, examined the claim in 1784 and concluded that the effects came from the patient's imagination and not from any fluid.
Even so, the practice flourished for decades. In Mary Anne's case, she acted as a subject, and she reported visions in trance. She and her father came to believe that mesmerism was a rediscovery of a very ancient art.
The Book
The Suggestive Inquiry appeared in 1850 under the name Mary Anne South. It is a long, learned work that surveys the writings of the alchemists, including Hermes Trismegistus, Michael Sendivogius and Basil Valentine. Its argument is that the alchemists were not chiefly interested in changing lead into gold.
The true subject of the Great Work, she wrote, was the human being, and the "metals" were stages of a transformation of the spirit. Alchemy, in this reading, was a secret psychology, concealed in chemical language to protect it from the vulgar.
Her explanation of the process drew on the mesmeric ideas she knew: a universal "medium" or vital fluid, which the adept could learn to control through concentration and purity of will. This is where her account is the most obviously a product of her time.
Spiritual Alchemy and Its Critics
Atwood's book was one of the first in English to put forward what we now call spiritual alchemy. Another early case was the American soldier and scholar Ethan Allen Hitchcock, whose Remarks upon Alchemy and the Alchemists (1857) held a similar view. Their interpretation had a long influence. It shaped the Theosophical Society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and later the psychological reading of Carl Jung.
Modern historians of science argue that this view is partly mistaken. The researchers Lawrence Principe and William Newman have shown that earlier alchemists, including Isaac Newton, were seriously engaged in laboratory work, and that their writings often describe actual chemical operations.
Spiritual and religious ideas were present, but they did not replace the experiments. The notion that alchemy was solely a spiritual allegory is therefore largely a nineteenth-century invention. This does not make Atwood's book worthless, but it does mean that it should be read as a document of Victorian thought and not as a final key to the old texts.
Marriage and Silence
In 1859, Mary Anne married the Reverend Alban Thomas Atwood, a clergyman, and took his name. By then, she had come to regret her book. The stories of its destruction are usually placed after this marriage, and some details are doubtful.
What seems certain is that the book was rare for decades. A new edition appeared in 1918, edited by the Freemason and mystic Walter Leslie Wilmshurst, and it brought Atwood's work to a new generation of readers. She lived to a great age and died in 1910, before the new edition.
Closing
Mary Anne Atwood belongs to a small group of nineteenth-century women who dared to publish original work on esoteric subjects. Her views can be questioned, and the science behind them has not held up. Yet she asked a question that remains alive: what did the alchemists seek?
Whether it was gold, the elixir or a change in the self, the answer lies in the old books, waiting to be read with care and a little humility.
Related Esoteric Inquiries
- The Neoplatonic Olympiodorus: The Alchemy of the Soul, the Commentary on Plato's Gorgias, and the Athenian Twilight
- Mary the Jewess: The Balneum Mariae and Early Alexandrian Alchemy
- The Undine: The Symbolism of the Spirit of the Water
Lux Esoterica.
2026.
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