Alchemy in Europe and the Middle East

Although it has been assumed that alchemy was inconsistent with new ideas about nature associated with the scientific revolution or that the promoters of the "new science" rejected alchemy, historians now refuse simple narratives associating the scientific revolution with the decline of alchemy. During the seventeenth century, alchemy continued to be a vibrant field of natural philosophical inquiry; most prominent natural philosophers took a mixed view of it. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), for instance, condemned alchemists' tendency toward secrecy, contrasting it with the openness and cooperation that he advocated in reforming the pursuit of natural knowledge. Still, he looked to alchemy as an important source of knowledge about matter and medicine.

Historians have shown that Robert Boyle (1627–1691) and Isaac Newton (1642–1727) were both deeply involved with alchemy both in theory and practice, often in startlingly productive ways. Boyle, for instance, believed in the possibility of transmutation and worked on it for decades, seeking out the knowledge and skills of numerous adepts. Boyle's corpuscular matter theory, for which he is often hailed as a crucial figure in the history of chemistry, bolstered his belief in transmutation and the philosophers' stone. Scholars have shown that Isaac Newton was an avid student of alchemy as well, likely devoting more time to alchemical study and experiments in his lifetime than to physics. Although historians still have a great deal to understand about the exact purpose of Newton's alchemical studies, they clearly played a crucial role in his larger project of understanding God and nature.

By the end of the seventeenth century, alchemy was associated with new medicines, natural magic, ancient wisdom, and popular recipes for making gold as well as the innovations of the scientific revolution. Over the course of the eighteenth century, however, the alchemist's purview came to be more limited. Influenced by Antoine Lavoisier's (1743–1794) efforts to resituate chemical natural philosophy on a foundation of quantitative analysis of matter, a new kind of chemist emerged. Whereas the terms alchemy and chemistry were used synonymously until the end of the seventeenth century, in the eighteenth century scholars increasingly sought to separate the two, restricting alchemy to gold making and spiritual alchemy (activities that natural philosophers began to exclude from science), while also redefining alchemy's scientific and technical dimensions as chemistry. As a result, alchemy increasingly lost its long-standing association with science in the eighteenth century, retaining only its ancient links to mysticism and transmutation.

Alchemy continued to flourish among communities of occultists and Romantic natural philosophers in the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), for instance, had an enduring interest in alchemy, viewing it as a secret key to the relationships between humans, God, and the cosmos. Nineteenth-century occultists picked up a theosophical thread in the writings of earlier authors such as Paracelsus, Valentin Weigel (1533–1588), Jakob Böhme (1575–1624), and Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), incorporating alchemical study and images into the activities of secret societies. Finally, in the early twentieth century, the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung identified similarities between alchemical symbols and the dreams of his patients, positing that alchemists' descriptions of transmutation were a metaphor for the development of the individual. This view of alchemy, which interprets alchemy as a symbol for deeper psychological processes, has endured in the popular imagination into the twenty-first century.