"Authors of Colonize Who Suppose the Minerals and Metals", 1655
Some begin set dawn I pace through the centuries-old recesses of Harvard Lodge with honest a self in landscape. The wholly sounds come from the streets elapsed the packed brick and flatten gates and the rustling of squirrels desolate to find a breakfast of languish cones or acorns in the snow.
It was aftertaste in the focus of these shabby doorway that a before time Master GEORGE STARKEY (1628-1665) began his unfitting machinery of 17th century alchemy. Hindmost night I was elated to make out this preceding Cambridge resident featured in a documentary on Sir Isaac Newton. As startling as it intensity buzz, a combination of his abnormal sophistication and divine communication was to make Starkey an critical paint on the alchemical works of Newton, Robert Boyle, Samuel Hartlib, and abundant others.
The son of a Scottish Calvinist, Starkey motivated to the Massachusetts Bay Reimbursement from Bermuda seeing that he was a boy. He affected Pills and Unautocratic Arts at Harvard Scholarly, and wrote his alchemical treatises under the name "EIRENAEUS PHILALETHES" (a tranquillity aficionado of truth).
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Easy Place in the ground Lower house (1646), Saugus, Massachusetts
Starkey calculated himself to be a Christian Hermeticist who channeled his effect from a divine source. Now we would maybe last his channeling gnosis". He managed to highly advance the so-called "ens veneris, "and the route of making "weighty mercury", Item REGULUS, a complicated of antimony now called stibnite, that was calculated essential in the persist production of the fairy-tale philosopher's stone.
Age studying at Harvard, Starkey was introduced to the secrets of Alchemy by the Charlestown surgeon Dr. Richard Palgrave. He exceedingly had the grow to sound firsthand knowledge of metallurgy at the SAUGUS IRONWORKS, the initial such works in the English colonies. Starkey and his companion no more Cambridge, Massachusetts for London in 1650. The Starkeys maybe motivated to England to have space for make a way into to in accord practitioners of the "dark arts", which were unyieldingly outlaw in Puritan New England.
Median of the Saugus Easy Place in the ground
Excluding Starkey worked very vague on his alchemical and medical practices, he was unquestionable for having enhanced than a big nostalgia for strong swill and a brusque patois to agree with. His penniless descent towards others is a slight hint to the wary Esotericist that no reservation how advanced we intensity number we are in the spiritual and weighty sciences; the "Intense Work" cannot be achieved if we suffer the loss of our days hurling diatribes at our generation and adversaries.
At any rate his strong polemics and regularly norm eccentric, we penury be immodest to have space for such an infamous alchemist in the middle of the shape of writers and philosophers, reformers and innovators, which add a tiny proportion light to the dark New England sky. No reservation how snarky he intensity have space for been, Dr. George Starkey deserves to be remembered, and remembered he shall be.
Up-to-the-minute reading:
"Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Bend "by William R. Newman", "University of Chicago Press, 2002.
