Children of Alchemy: (Un)Covering the Significance of the Hermetic Art in Literary Texts, East and West

If hermetic texts are inherently "intertextual" as David Meakin has stated, then literary works referencing alchemy might also contain this same "intertextuality." Reading such literary works together with alchemical texts would thus appear to be a fruitful endeavor. The significance of alchemy on literary works, however, has rarely been discussed, likely because a working knowledge of the hermetic art is required before undertaking any comprehensive analysis. The aim of this work is therefore to closely read several literary texts with the "will" to interpret them in what Karen Pinkus has termed a decidedly "alchemical key.";The texts chosen falls into two general categories. First, texts that refer to alchemy explicitly: The Journey to the West, E. T. A. Hoffmann's "The Golden Pot," and William Godwin's St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century. Our investigation here will reveal that the extent of alchemy's significance in these texts would be lost to a reader who is not familiar with the alchemical tradition. Second, texts that do not refer to alchemy at all but, as we shall see, are in fact extremely alchemical: Ludwig Tieck's "The Runenberg," Hoffmann's "The Mines of Falun," Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Sigmund Freud's Totem and Taboo..;The analysis undertaken indicates that literary texts referencing alchemy appear to become "intertextual" once they refer to the hermetic art. To read such texts with knowledge of alchemy will both assist in an expanded understanding of the texts and also enrich the current scholarship. Knowledge of alchemy may, therefore, be useful for further explications of other texts containing hermetic references. Finally, we will discover that it is possible to take a comparative approach with respect to such disparate texts from the Chinese, English and German traditions, as all use one common alchemical idea to comment on the human condition, namely: the figure of the homunculus.