Dreams, Prayers, and the Social Construction of Knowledge in Early Modern English Alchemy

Discussion of alchemy and dreams has long been dominated by Jungian interpretations holding that alchemy was not about chemistry, but rather about a Gnostic projection of the psyche by the alchemist onto the universal archetypes presented in alchemy's obscure symbolism. Historians have challenged this thesis. They have shown that alchemical allegories did in fact encode important chemical laboratory methods; that alchemical patronage was tied to the chemical production of utilitarian products; and that the twentieth-century psychoanalytical patients whose dreams convinced Jung that alchemical symbols expressed universal archetypes actually had significant knowledge of early modern alchemical texts prior to treatment. Despite these challenges, the Jungian thesis continues to frame the approach of many historians of alchemy. This paper asks a different set of questions about alchemy and dream states. What happens when one looks at alchemists' dreams not as trans-historical archetypes but as utilitarian, historically conditioned experiences? How do early modern alchemists' uses of dreams compare to the way dreams were simultaneously deployed and received in other areas of society and culture? This paper focuses on the self-imposed, dream-like states of prayer that were considered a necessary component of alchemical experimentation, to determine what functionally useful purposes they served, and how they related to other contemporary preparatory rituals, especially in areas of knowledge acquisition. There is a rich body of data, both in early modern alchemical texts, and in the letters and “lab notes” left by late sixteenth and seventeenth century Anglo and Anglo-American alchemists, to inform this study By showing the ways dream states actually worked for alchemical researchers, this paper argues that dreams in the early modern English world had not yet been fully disciplined and subordinated to rational thought processes, and therefore offered a powerful and useful epistemological approach to constituting experience and advancing knowledge.