Mike A. Zuber is a Research Fellow at the University of Queensland's Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. He received his doctorate at the University of Amsterdam in 2017. Before joining the University of Queensland, he pursued postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford with funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation.

• List of Figures


• Acknowledgments


• Conventions


• Introduction


• 1 The Radical Reformation, Paracelsian Networks, and Pseudo-Weigelian Alchemy


• 2 A Nuremberg Chymist and a Torgau Astrologer Read Pseudo-Weigel


• 3 Jacob Boehme's Spiritual Alchemy of Rebirth


• 4 Abraham von Franckenberg and the Ancient Wisdom of Rebirth


• 5 Georg Lorenz Seidenbecher, Franckenberg's Spiritual and Philosophical Son


• 6 Friedrich Breckling, the 1682 Boehme Edition, and Spiritual Alchemy


• 7 Collaboration, Counterfeit, and Calumny in Amsterdam


• 8 Dionysius Andreas Freher, Boehme's Apostle to the English


• 9 Mesmerists and Alchemists in Victorian London


• 10 Mary Anne Atwood and Her First Readers


• Epilogue


• List of Works Cited


• Index

Spiritual Alchemy traces the early-modern antecedents of modern alchemy through generations of followers of Jacob Boehme, the cobbler and theosopher of Görlitz. Spiritual alchemy combines traditional elements of alchemical literature with Christian mysticism. In 1850, it inspired Mary Anne Atwood to write her landmark Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery, usually seen as the first modern interpretation of alchemy. Drawing extensively on manuscript and otherwise obscure sources, Zuber challenges the received wisdom that posits a rupture between pre-modern and modern forms of alchemy.