ABSTRACT
The second half of the sixteenth century witnessed the violent clashes of the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598), echoed by often vicious disputes in academic and other intellectual circles.1 In this contested ground, alchemy split into two fairly distinct but also interconnected fields: iatrochemistry, or Paracelsian alchemy, and philosophical alchemy, which owed a great deal to Paracelsus, but had less evidently practical aims. Philosophical alchemy evolved into an alternative spirituality that presented itself as coexisting with the predominant religions, but modifying them to some degree (it should be noted that predominant religions, particularly Catholicism, condemned alchemy as heretical). Its images and ideals were spread not only by means of a large number of treatises published in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but also through lyric poetry, which adopted many of the themes and metaphors of alchemy.
