From Ashmole to Keynes: Collecting Books of Magic and Alchemy

Many magical and alchemical manuscripts have survived not because their authors protected them, but because at some point someone decided to collect them. Antiquaries, physicians, scientists and economists gathered, out of passion or for study, books that others would have burned. Their collections, which later ended up in museums and libraries, are today the heart of research into the history of the occult, and the way they were formed is itself a story full of surprising episodes.

Elias Ashmole and the papers of John Dee

One of the first great collectors was the Englishman Elias Ashmole, an antiquary with a passion for alchemy, who in 1652 published the Theatrum chemicum Britannicum, an anthology of English alchemical texts in verse. Ashmole collected manuscripts of astrology, alchemy and magic and left them to the University of Oxford, where in 1683 the museum bearing his name opened. Today his manuscripts are kept in the Bodleian Library.

Among the papers that passed through his hands were also some writings of John Dee. According to the account handed down by Ashmole himself, part of these documents had been found in the secret drawer of an old chest, after passing through several owners. Whether or not it is true in every detail, the story shows well how fragile the survival of these texts was.

Hans Sloane and the birth of the British Museum

Even larger was the collection of the physician Hans Sloane, who on his death in 1753 left books, manuscripts and natural objects to the British nation. The British Museum was born from that bequest. Among the Sloane manuscripts, now in the British Library, are numerous texts of ritual magic, including some of the best-known copies of the Key of Solomon and the Lemegeton, on which the nineteenth-century editions were later based.

Newton's alchemical papers

A chapter of its own concerns Isaac Newton, who devoted an enormous amount of reading and note-taking to alchemy. His papers long remained with his descendants, until in 1936 they were put up for auction at Sotheby's in London. An important part was bought by the economist John Maynard Keynes, who gave it to King's College, Cambridge; another was purchased by the scholar Abraham Yahuda and is now in Jerusalem, in the National Library of Israel.

It was Keynes who, after studying those manuscripts, wrote that Newton had not been the first of the age of reason, but the last of the magicians. The phrase, often quoted, helped to change the public image of the scientist and to make alchemy a respectable subject of historical research. Since then historians of science have published and studied those papers, showing how laboratory work, theology and the reading of ancient texts coexisted in the same mind.

The great modern collections

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries other fundamental collections were formed. In Glasgow the chemist John Ferguson assembled an extraordinary alchemical library, described in his Bibliotheca chemica of 1906. The philanthropist Paul Mellon gave Yale University a collection of alchemical and occult manuscripts, while in London the Wellcome Collection, born from the purchases of Henry Wellcome, holds thousands of texts on medicine, alchemy and magic. In Amsterdam, since 1984, the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica has been devoted to the Hermetic tradition.

Collecting has thus saved an essential part of the book heritage of esotericism. Every great collection reflects the tastes and questions of those who formed it, and knowing its history helps us understand why some texts have come down to us in many copies and others in only one, or have not survived at all.