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Article ID: CBB001213517

Reproducing the Tree of Life: Radical Prolongation of Life and Biblical Interpretation in Seventeenth-Century Medical Alchemy (2013)

Ambix: Journal of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry
Volume: 60, no. 4
Issue: 4
Pages: 341-360

Publication Date: 2013
Edition Details: Part of a special issue, “Alchemy and Religion in Christian Europe”
Language: English

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Medicine Alchemy Science and religion Medicine and science, relationships Development; growth; life; death Christianity Metaphors; analogies 17th century

The Tree of Life in the Bible's Genesis account has been a powerful and enduring symbol of radical prolongation of life in Christian culture. The Biblical injunction against attaining the Tree in the aftermath of the Fall did not stop some alchemical philosophers from trying to reproduce it in the laboratory. Thus, in the High Middle Ages, the English friar Roger Bacon argued that a medicine very similar to that of the Tree of Life could be obtained by alchemical means. The association between the Tree of Life and alchemy flourished in the seventeenth century, when several alchemists discussed the possibility of reproducing the radical life-extending qualities of the Tree. This article investigates the writings of six representative alchemists dealing with this subject matter, including the anonymous author of the Gloria Mundi, Andreas Tentzelius, Pierre-Jean Fabre, Jan Baptist Van Helmont, Franz Oswald Grembs, and Johann Ludwig von Frundeck.

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Article Nummedal, Tara (2013) Alchemy and Religion in Christian Europe. Ambix: Journal of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry (pp. 311-322). unapi

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