ABSTRACT
Written near the end of the most intense half-century of alchemical activity in England, Hermetick Raptures (ca. 1700) is a fitting text with which to conclude this collection. In its ecstatic celebration of enlightenment through spiritual alchemy, the poem strikingly witnesses the survival of late Renaissance Neoplatonism. At the same time, in an excoriating attack on “Impostours & Pretenders,” it provides a valuable retrospective critique of the material, medical, and spiritual alchemies of the seventeenth century, and of the divers configurations of politics, religion, and natural philosophy that inform them. This critique is offered, however, not from the vantage point of scientific rationalism, but from that of a rarefied hermetic mysticism anxious to distinguish itself from perversions of the sacred art.
