True Alchemy Is The False Alchemy Invented By Freemasons: Historiographical Deconstruction of Speculative Hermeticism
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) April 22, 2026 I. Paduano
Modern popular imagination mistakenly treats alchemy as a purely spiritual or psychological pursuit, but this view is a historical invention. The essay argues that authentic alchemy was a rigorous laboratory practice (chrysopoeia) and a forerunner of chemistry. The notion of "spiritual alchemy"—an interior, allegorical path without empirical work—was largely fabricated within eighteenth-century Masonic systems, later codified by nineteenth-century occultism and Jungian psychoanalysis. This false alchemy, sterile on the material level, has paradoxically come to dominate public perception. Drawing on scholarship by Principe and Newman, and analyzing Masonic rituals and figures like Cagliostro and Raimondo di Sangro, the essay shows how Freemasonry projected its own shift from operational to speculative onto the history of alchemy, creating a persistent cultural artifact that yields nothing for empirical science.