ABSTRACT
Alchemical thought tended to follow formalism and involved active principles as shapers of chaotic matter. In alchemy, these principles were often described in terms of male and female. When brought into perfect balance, the male and female principles produced the Philosopher’s Stone, which could both transmute base metals and heal sickness. Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (Paracelsus) (ca. 1493-1541) built an elaborate chemical theory using active agents he called semina (seeds) and archei (artificers) that informed chaotic matter. Paracelsus’s noted follower and systematizer Petrus Severinus (1542-1602) explained that semina were the fundamental immaterial principles from which bodies arise and to which they return. Robert Fludd (1574-1637), an English chemical physician, spoke of the Kabbalistic ruach Elohim (spirit of God) as the primary active principle, which worked through rarefaction and condensation. The Dutch chemical philosopher Johannes Baptista van Helmont (1579-1644) developed the semina doctrine and worked out experimental proofs for the existence of such active principles. He attributed the creation of the world to semina working on the primordial waters of Genesis. This creative action continued in biological activities, such as the growth of plants, in which water is transformed into plant matter by semina.
