The Alchemy of Conquest: Science, Religion, and the Secrets of the New World

By Ralph Bauer

The Age of the Discovery of the Americas was concurrent with the Age of Discovery in science. In The Alchemy of Conquest, Ralph Bauer explores the historical relationship between the two, focusing on the connections between religion and science in the Spanish, English, and French literatures about the Americas during the early modern period.

As sailors, conquerors, travelers, and missionaries were exploring "new worlds," and claiming ownership of them, early modern men of science redefined what it means to "discover" something. Bauer explores the role that the verbal, conceptual, and visual language of alchemy played in the literature of the discovery of the Americas and in the rise of an early modern paradigm of discovery in both science and international law. The book traces the intellectual and spiritual legacies of late medieval alchemists such as Roger Bacon, Arnald of Villanova, and Ramon Llull in the early modern literature of the conquest of America in texts written by authors such as Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, José de Acosta, Nicolás Monardes, Walter Raleigh, Thomas Harriot, Francis Bacon, and Alexander von Humboldt.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Oct 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9780813942551

Ralph Bauer

Ralph Bauer is associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is author or editor of numerous books, including The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity.

Book preview

The Alchemy of Conquest

Writing the Early Americas

Anna Brickhouse and Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Editors

The Alchemy of Conquest

Science, Religion, and the Secrets of the New World

Ralph Bauer

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2019 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

First published 2019

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bauer, Ralph, author.

Title: The alchemy of conquest : science, religion, and the secrets of the New World / Ralph Bauer.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2019. | Series: Writing the early Americas | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018048205 (print) | LCCN 2018059506 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813942551 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813942544 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813942568 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCHS: America—Early accounts to 1600—History and criticism. | Alchemy—Early works to 1800—History and criticism. | America—Discovery and exploration.

Classification: LCC E141 (ebook) | LCC E141 .B25 2019 (print) | DDC 970.01—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018048205

Cover art: Nutrix eius terra est (The Earth is his nurse). Emblema II. (In Michael Maier, Atalanta fugiens [1618]; courtesy of the Library of Congress); background: Equatorial Jungle, Henri Rousseau, 1909 (Shutterstock)

For Fredrika

What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish. What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? . . . What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish?

—Ishmael in Herman Melville, Moby Dick

The Brotherhood of American Explorers was established on April 17, 1492, the day that King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella consented to support the voyage of Christopher Columbus. Since then, according to promotional histories, the elitist organization has admitted to membership no more than nine brothers each year. The public notions held that the brothers were explorers to the nines; however, their perfections were not espoused from leather armchairs. The explorers were associated with political wealth, righteous patriotism, and covert activities on reservations and in Third World nations with deposits of uranium and other rare minerals.

—Gerald Vizenor, The Heirs of Columbus

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Alchemy and Apocalypse in Macondo

Part I. The Alchemy of Exception

1. The Hermeneutics of Secrecy: Aristotle and Discovery

2. Egyptian Gold: Alchemy and Crusade in the Later Middle Ages

3. The Alchemy of Conversion: Ramón Llull’s Chivalric Missionary Science

Part II. The Alchemy of Conquest

4. The Secrets of the World: Christopher Columbus’s Ecstatic Materialism

5. The Llullian Renaissance and European Expansionism

6. Physicians of the Soul: The Alchemy of Reduction and Ethno-demonology in Early America

Part III. Lucretius’s New World

7. Cannibal Heterotopias in the Sixteenth Century

8. Homunculus americanus

9. The Blood of the Dragon: Alchemy and New World Materia Medica

Part IV. The Alchemy of the White Legend

10. Walter Raleigh’s Legends: Black, Gold, and White

11. Things of Darkness: Alchemy, Ethno-demonology, and the Protestant Cant of Conquest

12. Eating Bacon: Alchemy and Cannibal Science

Coda: Alexander von Humboldt, Alchemist of the Tropics

Notes

Index

Illustrations

Figure 1. Francis Bacon, frontispiece, Instauratio magna (1620)

Figure 2. Andrés García de Céspedes, Regimiento de nauegación (1606)

Figure 3. The serpent ouroboros (1618)

Figure 4. Thomist natural law metaphysics

Figure 5. Christ being hanged (Ullmann, Buch der Heiligen Dreifaltigkeit)

Figure 6. Christ being killed (Ullmann, Buch der Heiligen Dreifaltigkeit)

Figure 7. Woodcut depicting Arnald of Villanova (Hartmann Schedel, Nuremberg Chronicle)

Figure 8. Christ being racked (Ullmann, Buch der Heiligen Dreifaltigkeit)

Figure 9. Ramón Llull’s First Figure, showing the Nine Dignities

Figure 10. The Llullian Arbor scientiae

Figure 11. Columbus’s signature, detail

Figure 12. Columbus as Christ Bearer in Juan de la Cosa’s Mappa mundi (1500), detail

Figure 13. Table of lunar eclipses (1476)

Figure 14. Heraldic symbol of the Crown of Aragon

Figure 15. Dante’s scheme of the universe, slightly modified (1855)

Figure 16. Nutrix eius terra est (The Earth is his nurse) (1687)

Figure 17. Missionary instructs Native Americans (1579)

Figure 18. A mummy seen by André Thevet in Egypt (1554)

Figure 19. Native Americans executing prisoners of war (1558)

Figure 20. Native Americans preparing a captive for ritual killing (1580)

Figure 21. Brazlilian cannibalism (Theodor de Bry, 1593)

Figure 22. Nicolás Monardes, El Dragon (1580)

Figure 23. Nicolás Monardes, El Dragon (1580), detail

Figure 24. Martin Schongauer, Flight into Egypt, woodcut

Figure 25. Martin Schongauer, Flight into Egypt, woodcut, detail

Figure 26. Nicolás Monardes, frontispiece to Diálogo del hierro (1574)

Figure 27. Nicolás Monardes, frontispiece to Diálogo del hierro, detail (1574)

Figure 28. Dragon being slain (1687)

Figure 29. Taclla, Andean digging stick and symbol of pachakuti (1615)

Figure 30. Passage of refracted light through a solid medium, according to Harriot’s atomistic theory of matter

Figure 31. Diagram of refraction as reflection

Figure 32. John White, The Flyer

Figure 33. Theodor de Bry, The Coniuerer (1590)

Figure 34. Theodor de Bry, Der Schwarzkünstler oder Zauberer (1590)

Figure 35. Sandro Botticelli, Primavera, with Hermes

Figure 36. Sandro Botticelli, Primavera, detail: Hermes

Figure 37. Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587)

Figure 38. Native Floridians worshipping a column decorated with the French royal coat of arms (1591)

Figure 39. Theodor de Bry, frontispiece, America, pt. 3 (1593)

Figure 40. Theodor de Bry, frontispiece, America, pt. 4. (1594)

Figure 41. John Smith, from A map of Virginia vvith a description of the countrey, the commodities, people, government and religion (1612)

Figure 42. Francis Bacon, frontispiece, The Great Instauration (1620), detail

Figure 43. The arrival of St. Bartholomew in pre-Columbian Peru (1615)

Figure 44. The Green and Red Lion (1618)

Figure 45. Portavit eum ventus in ventre suo (The wind carried him in his belly) (1618)

Figure 46. Theodor de Bry, Their matter of prainge vvith Rattels abowt te fyer (1590)

Figure 47. Alexander von Humboldt, chart showing mean temperature around the world as dependent on latitude, longitude, and altitude (1817)

Figure 48. Alexander von Humboldt’s Naturgemälde of the Chimbarrazo (1805).

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank, first and foremost, Anna Brickhouse and Kirsten Silva Gruesz, the editors of the series in which this book appears, as well as Eric Brandt, Assistant Director and Editor in Chief at the University of Virginia (UVA) Press, and Ellen Satrom, Managing Editor of UVA Press, for their initial interest, as well as considerable support and patience with regard to the completion of this project. Special thanks go to the University of Virginia’s Americas Center/Centro de las Américas for providing a generous publishing subvention that greatly helped with the publication of this book. I also want to thank the anonymous readers for UVA Press for their helpful comments and suggestions, as well as the UVA editorial board for their support. Thanks also to Susan Murray for her editorial work on the manuscript. I dedicate this book to Fredrika Teute for her long-standing leadership in expanding the horizons of early American studies generally, and for her generous support of my work, particularly, with her invaluable encouragement, advice, and critiques with regard to this book.

During the many years that this project has taken to complete, many friends as well as colleagues in my department, my university, and the profession at large have offered invaluable readings, advice, comments, and conversations on various earlier and partial iterations of this book. These friends and colleagues include Orlando Bentancor, Ruth Hill, Carles Pitarch, David Boruchoff, Surekha Davies, Marcy Norton, Allison Bigelow, Jessica Wolfe, Cynthia Radding, Jerry Passannante, Kellie Robertson, William Eamon, Harold Cook, Nicholas Popper, Holly Brewer, Richard Bell, Gordon Hutner, Nadine Zimmerli, Paul Mapp, Sandra Gustafson, Gordon Sayre, Luis Fernando Restrepo, Sara Castro-Klaren, Jaime Marroquín Arredondo, Ricardo Padrón, Hester Blum, Helmbrecht Breinig, Oliver Scheiding, Heike Paul, Günter Leypoldt, Jan Stievermann, Udo Hebel, James Delbourgo, Nicholas Dew, Nicholas Wey-Gómez, Zachary Matus, Tara Nummedal, Owen Stanwood, Hal Langfur, John Slater, Stephanie Kirk, Sarah Rivett, Santa Arias, Raul Marrero Fente, Timothy Bruno, Kelly Wisecup, Jason Payton, Steve Rojcewicz, Leon Jackson, Consolación Baranda, Robert Levine, David Shields, Vera Kutzinski, Ottmar Ette, Colin McEwan, Antonio Barrenechea, and Lukas Etter. Special thanks go hereby to James Dougal Fleming, who has read and commented on the entire manuscript. I could not be more grateful for his invaluable advice and comments. Special thanks also go to my colleague Andrea Frisch, from whom I have learned a great deal in the course of several years of team-teaching a lecture course on early modern accounts of discovery and cultural encounter. This book is in many ways the product of our collaboration in teaching.

Thanks also go to the John Carter Brown Library (JCB) for granting me a long-term fellowship that was absolutely vital in the conception and research of this project. I am especially indebted for their intellectual and bibliographic resourcefulness to former director Norman Fiering, as well as to past and present members of the JCB staff and community, including Ken Ward, Leslie Tobias Olson, Susan Newberry, and Carol Delaney.

I also thank the English Department at the University of Maryland for its continuous support of my work and initiatives, providing me with research funds, leave, and research-assistant support over the years. With regard to this project, I want to express my special gratitude to the excellent research assistant who has worked with me on the intricacies of medieval Latin, Benjamin Turnbull, one of the most promising classicists of his generation.

Earlier versions of parts of this book have previously appeared in various journals and collections of essays. Specifically, earlier versions of a part of the introduction have appeared in a special issue of Colonial Latin American Review 26, no. 1 (March 2017); in the collection of essays Turn of Events, edited by Hester Blum (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), and in a special issue of English Language Notes (56, no. 2 [2018]), edited by Maria Windell. Parts of chapter 9 have appeared in Medical Cultures in Early Modern Spain, edited by José Pardo Tomás, Maria Luz López Terrada, and John Slater (Ashgate, 2014). Earlier versions of parts of chapter 10 appeared in Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, edited by James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (Routledge, 2007); in Translating Nature: Cross-Cultural Histories of Early Modern Science, edited by Jaime Marroquín Arredondo and Ralph Bauer (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019); or are forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492–1898), edited by Santa Arias and Yolanda Martínez San-Miguel. And various early versions of parts of chapter 11 have appeared in Coloniality, Religion, and the Law in the Early Iberian World, edited by Santa Arias and Raul Marrero Fente (Vanderbilt University Press, 2014) and in Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas, edited by Sarah Rivett and Stephanie Kirk (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). Finally, various early versions of the coda have appeared in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation or are forthcoming in a collection of essays in honor of Lois Parkinson Zamora and edited by John Ochoa and Monika Kaup. My thanks to the editors and readers of these earlier versions for their helpful comments.

Finally, I want to express my deepest gratitude to my wife, Grace Crussiah, for her love and companionship over the years. This work would not have been possible without her support and partnership.

Introduction

Alchemy and Apocalypse in Macondo

In Gabriel García Márquez’s epochal novel Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), the nineteenth-century South American patriarch José Arcadio Buendía and several of his fellow villagers set out from their newly founded town of Macondo in order to discover a passage to the Pacific Ocean. But instead of completing the age-old quest, they find, after many days of struggle, an enormous sixteenth-century Spanish galleon in the South American jungle: Tilted slightly to the starboard, it had hanging from its intact masts the dirty rags of its sails in the midst of its rigging, which was adorned with orchids. The hull, covered with an armor of petrified barnacles and soft moss, was firmly fastened into a surface of stones. The whole structure seemed to occupy its own space, one of solitude and oblivion, protected from the vices of time and the habits of the birds. Inside, where the expeditionaries explored with careful intent, there was nothing but a thick forest of flowers.¹ The discovery of the galleon broke José Arcadio Buendía’s drive, for he considered it a trick of whimsical fate to have searched for the sea without finding it, at the cost of countless sacrifices and suffering, and to have found it all of a sudden without looking for it, as it lay across his path like an insurmountable object. Realizing that the location he chose for founding Macondo is actually a peninsula, Buendía falls into a deep despair: We’re going to rot our lives away here, he cries out to his wife, Úrsula, without receiving the benefits of science.²

Buendía’s fascination with the wonders of modern science had first been incited by the arrival of an alchemist named Melchíades and his carnivalesque gypsy band in Macondo, which was then still a world so new that many things lacked names and that in order to indicate them, it was necessary to point. But the scientific marvels that Melchíades brings—a magnet, a magnifying glass, a telescope, and even an entire alchemical laboratory—do not lead to the advancement of knowledge and social progress in Macondo; instead, they inflame the imaginations of the male members of the Buendía clan with futile quests for metallic transmutation; harebrained schemes of solar warfare; and vain attempts to find scientific proof for the existence of God. Generation after generation, the men of Macondo are trapped in a cycle of madness, solitude, and arrested development that ends a hundred years later with the dramatic realization of the last of Buendías, in the last paragraph of the novel, that Macondo’s history and destruction had been scripted all along in an apocalyptic prophecy, written down in an enigmatic manuscript in the ancient Indo-European language of Sanskrit by the alchemist, chronicler, and prophet Melchíades. Thus, as Aureliano Buendías finally deciphers the manuscript, it is revealed that Macondo, the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finally finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to a hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.³

This book might be described as an attempt to tell the literary and cultural history of Melchíades’s alchemical manuscript, as well as to understand its apocalyptic power. The memorable image of the sixteenth-century Spanish galleon in García Márquez’s novel shares a long tradition with the Melchíadean language of alchemy in the early modern historiography of the discovery of America. Perhaps the most iconic iteration of the former can be found on the frontispiece of the Instauratio magna (The Great Instauration, 1620), Francis Bacon’s programmatic elaboration of a new method of scientific inquiry by inductive elimination that would come to define the so-called Scientific Revolution: a sixteenth-century galleon passing through the Pillars of Hercules into the pure realm of nature in the New World, leaving behind all tradition, politics, and culture in the Old. As is well-known now, Bacon’s image was probably adapted from a Spanish manual on navigation, Andrés García de Céspedes’s Regimiento de nauegacion (Madrid, 1606), which had presented on its title page a variation of the Habsburg coat of arms (see figs. 1 and 2).⁴ For Bacon, the Habsburg topos of plus ultra (further beyond) seems to have captured his own idea of a new, reformed, or purified science that repudiated the old worlds of what he called received philosophy—the book-bound knowledge of Aristotelian Scholasticism. Although Bacon himself still had to employ all the arts of rhetoric to persuade his (largely indifferent) monarch of the benefits of his proposal for a state-sponsored science on an empiricist footing, by the end of the seventeenth century the European discovery of America had become a common allegory for the triumph of the experimental method in the so-called New Sciences among the Fellows of the newly founded Royal Society of London. Thus, the chymist Noah Biggs described his alchemical inquiry into the structure of matter as an investigation into the America of nature.

Figure 1. Francis Bacon, frontispiece, Instauratio magna (1620). (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

I praise God who hath been so bountifull to me, as to call me to the practice of Chymistry, out of the dregs of other Professions: Since Chymistry hath principles not drawn from fallacious reasonings, but such as are known by nature, & conspicuous by fire; and she prepareth the Intellect to penetrate, not the upper deck or surface of things, but the deep hold, the concentrick and hidden things of nature and maketh an investigation into the America of nature, farther then the whole Heptarchy, yea, then the whole Common-Wealth of sciences, all put together, and peirceth unto the utmost confines and profundities of reall truth.⁵

Figure 2. Andrés García de Céspedes (1560–1608), Regimiento de nauegacion q[ue] mando haser el rei nuestro señor por orden de su Conseio Real de las Indias a Andres Garcia de Cespedes (Madrid: en casa de Iuan de la Cuesta, Año M.DCVI, 1606). (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.)

Biggs’s peculiar phrase "the America of nature" suggests that, by the second half of the seventeenth century, the European discovery of America had become the paradigm of scientific discovery per se in the New or Experimental Philosophy as first theorized by Bacon and then implemented by the Royal Society—a paradigm of discovery predicated on the idea that reall truth is to be found by investigating not the surface of things but the hidden things of nature.⁶ In terms of Thomas Kuhn’s famous formulation, we might say that it was in the wake of Bacon’s New World paradigm of discovery that scientific change became itself paradigmatic in modern Western culture. By paradigmatic change, I mean Kuhn’s sense of the term as a substitution or supersession of an older model of science by a newer one that makes an absolutist claim to truth in a larger metanarrative of scientific progress.⁷ The modern structure of scientific change Kuhn described as a revolutionary paradigm shift stands in marked contrast with the early modern (or Renaissance) pattern of scientific change during the sixteenth century, which Roland Greene has compared to a palimpsest—the overwriting of an older meaning of a word or concept (in his case, invention) by an emerging new meaning, without the older one being erased, to the effect of a coexistence of several meanings that would seem to our modern minds to be anachronistic.⁸ Whereas, arguably, the pattern of epistemic change Greene described still survives in the humanities today, paradigmatic change has governed the natural sciences from the eighteenth to the late twentieth century, when the debate about quantum physics and string theory signaled the end of discovery in the Baconian sense of the word.⁹

The White Legend

García Márquez’s literary image of the European galleon entangled in (South) American nature defamiliarizes the triumphant narrative of scientific progress underwriting the Baconian paradigm of discovery, an apocalyptic narrative that had long been suspect from the avant-garde point of view of Latin America on scientific modernity. Indeed, Macondo’s apocalyptic end in Melchíades’s alchemical manuscript alerts us to some of the more dystopian legacies of Baconian science in its historical entanglements with the violence of European imperial expansionism and settler colonialism in the early modern period. One of these legacies came to a head in 2007, when the United Nations General Assembly adopted the long-anticipated Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by a vote of 143:4. The four countries that voted in opposition to the Declaration were Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States—all of them former British colonies. In the case of the United States, this opposition was based on a long legal tradition that reaches back at least to the 1823 Supreme Court case Johnson v. M’Intosh, in which Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that private citizens (in this case, Johnson) could not purchase land from Native American nations because, by right of preemption, the title to all Indian lands lawfully belonged to the federal government of the United States and that, therefore, the government held the exclusive right of conferring onto private citizens titles to Native American lands. The government’s title to Indian land, Marshall explained, rested on what he called the Doctrine of Discovery—the principle that discovery gave title to the government by whose subject, or by whose authority, it was made, against all other European governments, which title might be consummated by possession. . . . Discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it. The connection between discovery and exclusive title rested on a tradition in Roman law, according to which a res or terra nullius (a thing or land without an owner) belonged to whoever first finds it. But Marshall specifically invoked the examples of the Iberian empires in the Americas. Spain did not rest her title solely on the grant of the Pope, he wrote. Her discussions respecting boundary, with France, with Great Britain, and with the United States, all show that she placed it on the rights given by discovery. Marshall hereby perpetuated an Anglo-American legal fiction that sought to legitimate the Protestant territorial claims in the Americas vis-à-vis the claims previously made by other, Catholic European powers, not vis-à-vis indigenous claims to sovereignty in the New World. With regard to indigenous claims, he presumed that the question had been settled in the sixteenth century—that what he called the doctrine of discovery had been legitimated by the Spanish conquest of America.¹⁰

We do not usually think of discovery primarily in connection with indigenous rights, imperial conquest, and settler colonialism. In what Bruno Latour has called our modern purified science, discovery means not the expansion of one people’s dominion at the expense of another but the extension of human knowledge into the realm of the unknown, into the realm of nature.¹¹ Discovery comes hereby before conquest, and to the extent that conquests have often followed discoveries in history, they are seen as the result of a regrettable but avoidable aberration of the natural human propensity to want to discover new things. In fact, there is a hardy Anglo-American tradition that does not conceive of the British invasion and occupation of America as a conquest at all. Thus, Anglophone historians of America since the seventeenth century have preferred words such as plantation, settlement, and colonization to describe the English presence in America following its discovery. The phrase the conquest of America hereby inevitably refers to sixteenth-century Spanish America, which appears as a temporary relapse into medievalism that seventeenth-century English colonists had been called on to rectify.¹² The Black Legend and the White Legend—the story of the inordinate cruelty of the Spanish conquest of America and the story of the English discovery of a virginal America respectively—thus became the two interdependent founding myths of Anglo-American settler colonialism. The founders of the United States are therein seen as the heirs not of Hernando Cortés the conqueror but of Christopher Columbus the discoverer.¹³ Hence, in the United States, Columbus Day is celebrated but not Cortés Day, even though Columbus never came any closer than Cortés to a place that would later become a part of the United States. By contrast, the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest has appeared in the modern Anglo-American historical imagination as a sort of historical parenthesis within the Age of Discovery—the roughly two hundred years between Columbus’s landfall and the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia.

According to the White Legend, it was an age when Western culture broke through the traditional confines of the book-bound circle of classical knowledge; liberated itself from the inherited religious superstitions of the medieval Dark Ages; and ushered forth the modern age of empiricism, progress, and even scientific revolution. Columbus’s first transatlantic journey is hereby seen as the watershed event that propelled Western culture on its distinctly modern path, a path that not only broke with its own medieval past but also set it apart from other, non-Western cultures in the world. Why, asked the popular American historian Daniel Boorstin, did not the Chinese, the Arabs, or the Indians discover America? The reason, in his view, was an essential difference in the history of humanity between those solar cultures that, like the modern West, prize innovation over tradition and those lunar cultures, like those founded by the Chinese, Arabs, or Indians, that prize tradition over innovation. My hero is Man the Discoverer, he declared; the world we now view from the literate West . . . had to be opened for us by countless Columbuses. . . . All the world is still an America.¹⁴

To be sure, few historians specializing today in the study of the early modern period, the early Americas, or the history of science still subscribe to Boorstin’s heroic (and racist) account of the discoverers as the unambiguous heralds of universal human progress. Some historians have recently even described the disastrous demographic, ecological, and cultural consequences of Columbus’s discovery for those who were discovered as an American Holocaust.¹⁵ More broadly, the Columbian Exchange following Europe’s discovery of America has been seen as the beginning of the Anthropocene, the epoch in global history when many geologically significant conditions and processes are profoundly altered by human activities.¹⁶ Even the very idea of a European discovery of America in 1492 by Columbus has come under critical scrutiny. However, much of this debate has revolved around the question of who was first to discover America—the Norse, possibly even Phoenicians, Africans, and Chinese, not to mention Native Americans.¹⁷ The question of discovery has become, in this school of thought, a mere question of perspective. In a classic statement characteristic of much modern scholarship on the question of discovery, Hans Selye writes: Was America discovered by the Indians who were here from time immemorial, by the Norsemen who came in the tenth century, or by Christopher Columbus, who came in 1492? It is still being discovered now, every day, by anyone who drills a new well. . . . Discovery is always a matter of viewpoint and degree. Whenever we single out an individual as the discoverer of anything, we merely mean that for us he discovered it more than anyone else.¹⁸ Selye’s understanding of discovery as a matter of viewpoint is fundamentally flawed, however, for it presupposes not only that the various accounts of discovery (Native American, Norse, African, Chinese, European, etc.) constitute a single tradition but also that all these groups conceived of their presence in the Americas as the consequence of a discovery. Yet, if surviving oral and textual traditions are an indication, most (if not all) Native American cultures conceived of their presence in the Americas as the result not of a discovery but, similar to Old World peoples, of various acts of genesis after which they have always been there.¹⁹ And why should it be any different? While we know today by way of empirical science that Homo sapiens spread to Europe from Africa, few (if any) Europeans would think of their origin in terms of the discovery of Europe by Africans. In other words, the notion of a prediscovery of America—whether it was by Native Americans, Africans, Chinese, or Vikings—is based on a modern Western ideology that is hardly less Eurocentric than the claim that America was discovered by Columbus in 1492. The controversy about who was first has hereby merely reinforced a particularly hardy form of New World exceptionalism that still underwrote much of hemispheric American studies in the twentieth century. It is an exceptionalism that is predicated on the notion that, while most of the world simply was, America was discovered.

As the sociologist of science Augustine Brannigan has pointed out, the error of understanding discovery as a matter of viewpoint originates with the premise that ours is a singular natural world which we know in common, unmediated and through empirical means.²⁰ In other words, its fallacy results from a particularly modern Western understanding of what it means to discover something, an understanding that the literary scholar James Dougal Fleming has called the hermeneutics of discovery, which accords one particular ontology to the thing to be discovered.²¹ It is this ontological notion of America as a New World that the Mexican philosopher of history Edmundo O’Gorman once called a geographic hallucination when asked to comment on Herbert Eugene Bolton’s famous proposal that the Americas have a common history.²² In his own seminal works in hemispheric American studies, La idea del descubrimiento de América (1951) and La invención de América (1958), O’Gorman had therefore pursued a hermeneutical approach that built on the philosophical critiques of Martin Heidegger in order to argue that, before being able to discover something, one has first to hold or develop a concept of its possibility—a fore-understanding (Vorverstehen).²³ Hence, O’Gorman argued that before Europeans could discover America, they had first to invent the idea of a world with a fourth part—an idea that was impossible to conceive within the epistemic structure of traditional Christian cosmology, which acted as a sort of cosmic jail that committed its mental prisoners to the tripartite composition of the world on the doctrinal grounds that the imago mundi and its populations must be accounted for by the descendants of the three sons of Noah.²⁴ O’Gorman therefore challenged us to inquire not into the history of the discovery of America but into the history of "the idea that America was discovered. Such a project would yield insights, he suggested, into the historical nature of the New World and the meaning of its history" for modernity at large.²⁵

More than a half century later, O’Gorman’s critique still stands as an important reminder that the problem of discovery can never be approached as a question of positivist historiography but only as a question of intellectual history, philosophical hermeneutics, and literary tradition. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize some basic assumptions that O’Gorman’s hermeneutical approach shared with Boorstin’s positivist one. First, both proceeded from the assumption that there was a radical break in scientific mentality in the early modern period that allows us to speak of the modern age, even though each would position Columbus on opposing sides of this great fissure. Thus, whereas for Boorstin, Columbus was the first of the moderns, for O’Gorman, he was the last of the ancients for having died believing (or at least insisting) that what he had reached was Asia. Second, both Boorstin and O’Gorman presumed that the European encounter with the New World was a decisive event from which this modern Western scientific culture emerged; that it was the hard fact of the European encounter with America itself over which medieval mentalities stumbled into modernity—that the discovery (or invention) of America was the paradigm of modern discovery per se. And finally, O’Gorman, like Boorstin, assumed that to discover something necessarily means to find something new and that discovery is therefore antithetical to tradition. In short, O’Gorman eschewed the question of the historicity of the modern idea of discovery itself. Hence his argument that the history of the invention of America began not with Christopher Columbus but with Amerigo Vespucci—or whoever it was who wrote under his name the tract Mundus novus, published without place or date (though probably around 1504), therein declaring, It is lawful to call it [the Indies] a new world because none of these countries were known to our ancestors, and to all who hear about them they will be entirely new.²⁶

Although O’Gorman’s critique of modern positivist historiography has been seminal in subsequent postcolonial and poststructuralist criticism in early American studies, its effect has been that the historical problem of the modern idea of discovery has largely been ceded to an often Eurocentric historiography and philosophy of science, while it has been all but ignored in (post)colonial and hemispheric American studies.²⁷ Thus, the word discovery has largely disappeared from the titles of scholarly books about early modern European expansionism in the Americas.²⁸ Instead, cultural and literary historians have preferred words such as encounter or invention, rather than discovery, in their titles, even though invention and discovery were still largely synonymous in the early modern period.²⁹ They have taken stock of the darker side of Boorstin’s triumphant story of scientific progress, arguing that early modern forms of Western knowledge, such as humanist philology, cosmography, and historiography, served as the epistemic armature of empire with which Europeans colonized other, non-Western forms of knowledge, sign systems, conceptions of space, and cultural memory.³⁰ The very concept of the discovery seemed to be based on an erasure of indigenous subjects and knowledge that was rationalized by the claim that non-European peoples had no legitimate cultures, religions, or histories—that their knowledge didn’t count because it was not recorded in alphabetical writing systems and because it was not Christian but superstitious or even diabolical. As the postcolonial critics Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson have observed (in a different context), indigenous knowledge is invariably rendered invisible in the European discovery narrative. The Native must know and yet not know, for the European can discover a place only if it is not already known. This paradox of modernity is resolved by textualizing the event in a way that renders Native knowledge pragmatic rather than conceptual and strategic. The Native has the practical knowledge . . . but not the conceptual knowledge to see its ‘true’ significance.³¹

In this book, I revisit O’Gorman’s critique of the modern Western idea of the discovery of America, but I wish to expand his original scope by asking how the European idea of the discovery of America became the paradigm of modern scientific discovery per se—of Boorstin’s notion that, for the modern discoverer, All the world is still an America. I hereby ask not how the Western notion of discovery rationalized conquest but what role the European conquest of America played in the history of the modern idea of discovery, particularly in the context of the Baconian idea of science as the conquest of nature. Whereas recent work in the history of science has highlighted the sociological contexts that gave rise to the New Sciences in seventeenth-century Europe,³² this book explores the intersections between the histories of science and geopolitics in the making of a modern paradigm of discovery in the age of European expansionism.³³ Moreover, whereas recent critical science studies have generally neglected the role that religion played in the history of scientific modernity, this book focuses on the language of alchemy in the early modern literature of discovery. I will argue that the Baconian paradigm of discovery has a colonial history that I call the alchemy of conquest, a history in which conquest came before, not after, discovery;³⁴ for, I will argue, it was in large part the conquest of America that legitimated the modern idea of discovery by underwriting it with a salvific and even millenarian reason that forged an unprecedented synthesis of science, religion, and state power. An outgrowth of late medieval Aristotelianism, the language of alchemy operates in the early modern literature of discovery to mediate between innovation and tradition, the new and the known, natural philosophy and theology, as well as the material and the spiritual, by casting empiricist inquiry in strongly religious terms and the discovery of the secrets of nature in terms of divine revelations and the fulfillment of ancient prophecies.

When using the phrase alchemy of conquest, I employ the term alchemy both literally and metaphorically: literally, because the modern empiricist concept of discovery has its epistemological roots in medieval alchemy—roots that are still evident in the verbal and visual language in which the narratives of the European discovery of America are cast; and metaphorically, because conquest, like alchemy, is what legitimated the (early) modern paradigm of discovery. When I say that it was the conquest of America that forged an unprecedented union between science, religion, and state power, I mean to invoke a number of premises on which my argument is based. First, I want to suggest that the modern paradigm of discovery was not a mere consequence of what has been called the impact of the New World upon the Old.³⁵ According to this historical narrative, the modern paradigm of discovery resulted ipso facto from the event of discovery itself, from an epistemic shock in the encounter with the unfamiliar and the new. This notion of a shock of the unfamiliar has been a dominant critical paradigm especially in New Historicist accounts of the literature of the European encounter with the Americas at least since Stephen Greenblatt’s seminal Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (1991). There, Greenblatt argued that the early European explorers of America, lacking a conceptual or philosophical language with which to absorb this shock, resorted to a rhetoric of wonder that objectified, demonized, as well as ultimately commodified and appropriated the New World—its exotic plants, animals, and peoples—as marvelous possessions. Greenblatt hereby conceived of the experience of wonder as a rift or cracking apart of contextual understanding that seems to resist recuperation, containment, [and] ideological incorporation; it sits strangely apart from everything that gives coherence.³⁶ But, while it is true that the early explorers and natural historians frequently resorted to the language of the marvelous in the face of the new, they usually did not wonder for long before they began to philosophize, finding ready intellectual recourse when translating their experiences of first encounter in the experience of writing—an experience that may be called the second encounter with the New World.³⁷ For, as Anthony Grafton has reminded us, in the early modern period, the Western canon did not yet form a monolithic grid that rigidly imposed a uniform order on all new information but, rather, presented the discoverer with a remarkably elastic and eclectic kaleidoscopic variety of Aristotelian, Plinean, Epicurean, Neoplatonic, Hermetic, and Arabic textual traditions that was, in many ways, perfectly suited to handle the alleged epistemological shock of discovery through the power of tradition.³⁸

My second premise is that the modern paradigm of discovery is not a stable transhistorical category that was already available for the justification of conquest from the very beginning of European expansionism in the Americas (as Justice Marshall and many of his postcolonial critics have assumed). In the sixteenth century, the notion of discovery and the legal rights of possession attached to it in modern times (res/terra nullius) were not yet understood in the unequivocal terms of a European subject and a non-European object of knowledge. Thus, most sixteenth-century Europeans recognized that although the Indies were new to them, they were not new to Amerindians and that Amerindian knowledge of their world was entirely legitimate (though, as we will see, the early modern debate about the ontological status of Native Americans played an important part in the history of the modern paradigm of discovery). To most sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europeans, the Americas (the Indies of the West) were not so much new as they were secret. They were a secret that had been hidden from them until latter days but that had been known by someone. And yet, if by the nineteenth century, Justice Marshall could take for granted that the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of America had established the Doctrine of Discovery, it was because, in the course of a three-hundred-year process of intense intellectual labor and translation, a tradition of international law had evolved together with a particular paradigm of discovery in natural philosophy that delegitimated not only non-Western forms of knowledge but also the early modern European eclectic kaleidoscopic variety of knowledge traditions.

Third, by using the word forged, I want to suggest that the empiricist epistemology that undergirds our modern notion of discovery did not emerge ex nihilo during the early modern period; rather, it had its roots in the late medieval Christian engagement with Islam, particularly in the medieval cultural nexus between crusade and the transmission of Aristotelian science, especially alchemy, into the Latin West during the thirteenth century. While the alchemical quests for the secrets of nature had remained a rather marginal enterprise in late medieval science—as a branch of meteorology surviving mainly as a technical art, practiced outside the courts and academies—it was only in the geopolitical context of European imperial expansionism in the New World during the sixteenth century that alchemy emerged as a prominent branch of natural philosophy—particularly in Neoplatonic occult philosophy. It was now cultivated in the royal courts throughout Europe, and its hermeneutical, epistemological, and rhetorical models of discovery in terms of a hunt for the secrets of nature between and beyond the categories of Scholastic scientific reason became appropriated as instruments of power by the early modern imperial states, in institutions such as the Spanish Consejo de Indias (Council of the Indies) and Casa de Contratación (House of Trade), as well as the alchemical and botanical laboratories of Philip II’s court at the Escorial.³⁹ In the context of the conquest of America, the secrets of nature were transformed into the secrets of state, and the alchemical seeker of natural secrets into the modern secretary.⁴⁰

Finally, by using the word forged I mean to suggest that the prehistory of this modern hermeneutics of discovery often literally thrived on what we would today call literary forgeries—traditions of pseudonymous misattributions of alchemical texts and their empiricist epistemology to authorities renowned for their exceptional ancient wisdom or impeccable Christian piety (or both)—authorities such as Aristotle, Hermes Trismegistus, Geber, Albertus Magnus, Arnald of Villanova, or Ramón Llull. Although medieval Christian alchemy had roots in some of the authentic works of Aristotle that had entered the Latin West from the Arabic tradition during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it developed a tradition of spiritualized materialism in late medieval and early modern Europe that was Aristotelian in origin but distinct from the mainstream Scholastic Aristotelianism of Thomist (hylomorphic) metaphysics in ways that had important consequences for the history of the European conquest of America and for the modern history of discovery. If this alchemical tradition lived largely in the shadows of these pseudo-authorities from medieval times up to the seventeenth century, the exposure of these forgeries by humanist philologists in the early modern period did little to stamp out its perennial appeal; on the contrary, by cutting it loose from its traditional ties to religious authority on which its legitimacy had traditionally depended, the humanists prepared its path for a new career in modern science.⁴¹

Convertibility, Reduction, and the State of Exception

In the third chapter of Das Kapital, in a section devoted to the building of treasure (Schatzbilding), Karl Marx cited Christopher Columbus’s famous 1503 Letter from Jamaica, in which the Admiral of the Ocean Sea exclaimed: Gold is a wonderful thing! Whoever possesses it, is lord of all that he wants. By means of Gold, one can even bring souls to Paradise.⁴² Marx saw the transformation of gold in the early modern period from a medium of exchange to a self-generating source of capital in surplus value of money as a form of alchemy that was intimately related to the history of conquest. Thus, he noted how the ancient Phoenicians, like the early modern Spanish conquerors in America, were in the habit of looting the Delphian temple treasures, melting down the sacred artworks made from precious metals, and remolding them into money coins.⁴³ Whereas for the Greeks, Marx argued, the temple treasures were holy banks (heilige Banken), for the Phoenicians, "the commercial nation par excellence, money was the transmuted form of everything" (die entäußerte Gestalt aller Dinge). Unlike the ancient Greeks, the ancient Phoenicians understood value in terms of the principle of convertibility: "As you cannot tell in money (Geld) what has been converted into it, everything is convertible, goods or not, into money. Everything can be sold and bought. Circulation becomes the great social crucible in which everything is captured and transformed into crystal money. Not even the bones of saints, and even less so the more delicate res sacrosanctae extra commercium hominum [sacred things, external to the trade of man], are able to resist this alchemy."⁴⁴ And yet, it was, of course none other than the Greek philosopher Aristotle who had famously written, in the Nicomachean Ethics, that money measures all things.⁴⁵ Because it makes all things convertible, it has the name money (nomisma). But while in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes that money "exists not by nature but by law (nomos) and it is in our power to change it and make it useless, elsewhere he writes that its principle of convertibility exists in nature, a first" principle that he calls archē: "That of which all existing things consist and from which they first come to be and into which they finally pass away (the being, ousía, remaining but changing in its modification), this they say is the element and principle (archē) of all existing things, and therefore they think that nothing is generated or destroyed, as this kind of being is always preserved."⁴⁶ Scholars have struggled with the question of why the Greeks—a polytheistic culture—should have elaborated a monistic cosmogony. Drawing from mythology, psychoanalysis, as well as political and economic theory, Richard Seaford sees Aristotle’s idea as the culmination of a philosophical tradition in cosmological monism beginning with the Milesians in the sixth century BC and elaborated in Hesiod’s notion of the chaos in the Theogony, a monism that was shared also by other ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures such as the Babylonians, the Hurrians, the Hittites, and Phoenicians. The earliest state is envisaged as undifferentiated, Seaford writes, whether as a dark chasm or (by implication) as sky and earth forming ‘one shape’ before becoming separate.⁴⁷ This monistic cosmogony found its political expression in monarchy (i.e., Zeus’s absolute rule). However, as political monarchy died out in Greek society, sociopolitical monism came to be defined as the power of money, which, like monarchical power, is all-embracing, imposing a single, universal power on all things without destroying their diversity: "The transcendent power of monarchy had been projected onto the cosmos. The transcendent impersonal power of money, reified as a fact of nature, is projected onto the cosmos as a powerful transcendent substance. Unlike monarchy, money is impersonal, and is exchanged into, and the undifferentiated equivalent of, all things, each of which somehow embodies monetary value."⁴⁸

This monism of money is predicated on the logic of two processes—reduction and circulation in liquid form. On the one hand, as Seaford notes, everything—even the silver—is reduced in a sense to (pure) gold.⁴⁹ On the other hand, as Marx noted, "the continual circulation of the two antithetical metamorphoses of commodities, or the liquid exchange of sale and purchase, appears in the restless circulation of money, or its function as a perpetuum mobile of circulation. Thus, according to Marx, money petrifies into coagulated treasure as a sort of Philosophers’ Stone in the merchant’s alchemical opus. He is the builder of treasures."⁵⁰

Indeed, Marx’s description of the money economy as a sort of alchemy predicated on a monistic logic of convertibility through reduction and circulation closely resembles the way in which late medieval alchemists understood the processes of metallic transmutation. One of the most famous of these alchemists makes a brief appearance also in García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad—the Valencian physician Arnald of Villanova (1235–1311).⁵¹ In the widely known alchemical tract Rosarius philosophorum (attributed to Arnald but most likely written after his death by a pseudo-Arnaldian alchemist before 1410), the Arnaldian explains that, while it is not possible to change one species of metal into another directly, metallic transmutation can be achieved through the alchemical regimen of reduction (reductio, a leading back) through fire. In this violent regimen of fiery penitence, also called the sol niger (black sun), the substantial form of the metal is killed and the natural processes of elemental generations and corruptions that produced it are reduced (or reversed) to its first matter (prima materia) in the primal undifferentiated state of chaos (in primam reductur materiam). The idea of prima materia is based on an Aristotelian monistic conception of matter, the notion that an invisible, stable, and unchanging substratum exists beneath the constantly changing appearance of forms. In the monistic state, the elements can circulate freely, enabling the alchemist to recombine them and convert them into a different, more noble substance, in further alchemical regimens. This is known as the work of circulation (opus circulatorium), for to change nature, the Arnaldian writes, is nothing else but to rotate the elements in a circular fashion.⁵² The contrary qualities of the four elements—air, fire, earth, water—present in every mixture are compared to warring enemies, each positioned at the extreme corners of the Aristotelian elemental square. In the opus circulatorium, however, these four contrary qualities are rebalanced into a new state of circular union and harmony, known as the alchemical wedding, from which the fifth element and the Philosophers’ Stone are born. As Lyndy Abraham writes: During this circulation, the elements of earth, air, fire and water are separated by distillation and converted into each other to form the perfect unity, the fifth element. This conversion takes place by unifying the qualities that each element has in common: earth which is cold and dry may be united with water through the common quality of coldness since water is cold and moist (or fluid), water may be united with air through fluidity since air is hot and fluid, and air is united to fire through heat, since fire is hot and dry.⁵³ This conversion by rotation was often symbolized in alchemical iconography by the image of the ouroboros, the serpent which ingests its own tail, thus forming a circle (see fig. 3); but in medieval Christian alchemy, it also frequently appears in the form of various instruments of torture, such as the wheel and the rack (as we will see in chapter 2). The notion of reduction that makes possible this elemental circulation was first elaborated in the influential thirteenth-century alchemical tract Summa perfectionis, written by Geber (aka Paul of Taranto), who laid there the materialist foundation of all late medieval alchemical (i.e., non-Thomist) theory of matter as being corpuscular in structure, rather than continuous and homogeneous, a theory that would still be influential in the early modern period, most prominently in the concept of reductio in pristinum statum elaborated by the German alchemist Daniel Sennert (1572–1637), who, in turn, profoundly influenced Robert Boyle’s mechanical philosophy.⁵⁴

From a Marxian point of view, then, the explosion of alchemy in the so-called Age of Discovery might be partially explained in terms of the socioeconomic changes of the Renaissance, especially in western Europe, which saw increased levels of urbanization and an unprecedented expansion of a money economy that began to loosen the old feudal social structures. The alchemical opus hereby reflects on a microcosmic scale the monistic logic of convertibility through reduction and circulation upon which the larger society and economy operate on a macrocosmic scale. However, as Marx also noted, early modern European culture was the heir not only of Phoenecian commercialism but also of Greek (especially stoic) philosophy, which denounced money as subversive of the economical and moral order of things. Citing Athenaeus of Naucratis’s Deipnosophistae, Marx writes that, in the stoic tradition, the money economy is seen through the analogy of pulling Pluto by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth; as a greet[ing] gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life.⁵⁵ The late medieval and early modern treasure builder therefore feels a deep ambivalence about the monistic logic of reduction and circulation. Everything must be reduced to money and circulated, except for gold itself, which, as absolute value, must not be transformed into a means of enjoyment. The treasure builder therefore sacrifices his carnal lust to his gold fetish. He takes seriously the gospel of abstention. . . . Hard work, saving, and greed, are, therefore his three cardinal virtues, and to sell much and buy little the sum of his political economy.⁵⁶

Figure 3. The serpent ouroboros. Emblema XIV. (In Michael Maier, Atalanta fugiens [1618]. Source: Secretioris naturæ secretorum scrutinium chymicum, per oculis et et intellectui accuratè accommodata, firguri cupro appositissimè incisa, ingeniosissima emblemata, hisque confines, & ad rem egregiè facientes sententias, doctissimaque item epigrammata, illustratus [Francofurt Congress].)

More recent scholarship on the cultural history of alchemy has followed up on Marx’s sense that the explosion of alchemy in early modern Europe can partially be understood in socioeconomic terms. For example, the historian of science Pamela Smith, in her study of the seventeenth-century German alchemist Johann Joachim Becher, has argued that the increasing importance accorded to alchemy in the courts of early modern Europe can be understood in terms of alchemists’ mediation between the immovable values of the landed nobility in the courts and the practices and movable values of the money economy of the commercial world. This is because, in medieval Christian alchemy, the operations of conversion through reduction and circulation had become deeply spiritualized through Christological analogies and attached to various strands of Christian messianism, millenarianism, as well as chivalric apostolic zeal and crusading militancy. Thus, alchemists such as Becher framed the commercial projects in the traditional idiom and gesture of noble court culture and translated the commercial values into court culture.⁵⁷ Literary historian Karen Pinkus has further argued that early modern alchemy hereby generated a sort of state of exception, functioning culturally to reconcile capitalist greed with Christian (especially Augustinian) spirituality and morality, where greed is seen as one of the cardinal vices: Greed develops alongside money in history, and it must, therefore, be considered in relation to alchemy to the degree that alchemy is a production (of gold) and gold is money. Greed is precisely what is disavowed by those more ‘spiritual’ or philosophical forms of alchemy, and the typical early modern alchemical treatise includes disclaimers against the use of precious metals on the market.⁵⁸ If Pinkus was primarily interested in how the language of alchemy legitimated a state of exception in terms of early modern capitalist greed for wealth, in this book I will ask how alchemy legitimated a state of exception also with regard to another sort of greed in the context of early modern European expansionism. It is the kind of greed that St. Augustine, in the Confessions, had defined as concupiscentia oculorum (lust of the eyes), or vain curiosity (vana curiositas) about that which is hidden from us, the secret or the occult.⁵⁹ In other words, I am interested in how the language of alchemy transformed vain curiosity into Augustinian just curiosity (iusta curiositas) in the context of the conquest of America hereby theologically legitimating a Baconian paradigm of discovery that gave rise to scientific empiricism.⁶⁰ But, as we have seen, while the early modern period provided the socio- and geoeconomic contexts in which alchemy could become central to Western scientific culture in the context of European expansionism, the origins of the alchemical nexus between science, religion, and geopolitics inevitably take us back to the late medieval period, particularly to Scholastic Aristotelianism in the context of the First Renaissance of the thirteenth century and the Christian engagements with Islam. As we will see in the two subsequent chapters, the language of Western alchemy emerges in this context from the amalgamation of Christian messianism and millenarian prophecy with a (pseudo-)Aristotelian naturalism that had reentered the Latin West in translations from the Arabic since the twelfth century.

The Alchemy of New World Exceptionalism

Legitimating the scientific foray into the realm of the secret, the language of alchemy enabled a state of exception not only at the microcosmic scale (the America of nature) but also at the macrocosmic scale—as a New World exceptionalism in international law (terra nullius). Although Giorgio Agamben, in his influential elaboration of the concept of the state of exception, was primarily concerned with totalitarian government in the modern nation-state—the Ausnahmezustand, or the suspension of constitutional law in modern states due to global civil war—its theological principle had already been elaborated by Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) in his Summa theologiae in the context of his theory of necessity. As Agamben explains, Aquinas’s paradigm derived from Roman law in the concept of the iustitium, which means standstill or suspension of the law.⁶¹ It is significant, however, that Agamben’s notion of the state of exception in reference to the modern state was adapted from the political theory of international law, particularly from the work of the twentieth-century political theorist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt argued that the modern state of exception found its first implementation not in modern totalitarian governments in Europe but in the New World of the European Age of Discovery. In fact, he saw the state of exception at the root of the (early) modern idea of discovery per se. It is necessary, he wrote, "to understand the new concept of discovery, with all its technical designations (such as descobrimiento, découverte, etc.) in its total historical and intellectual particularity; for discovery is not a timeless, universal, and normative concept; it is bound to a particular historical, even intellectual-historical situation: the ‘Age of Discovery.’⁶² In the context of early modern European expansionism, Schmitt argued, the state of exception manifested itself primarily in what he called global linear thinking: The struggle over land- and sea-appropriations of the New World began immediately after its discovery. . . . Lines were drawn to divide and distribute the whole earth. These were the first attempts to establish the dimensions and demarcations of a global spatial order."⁶³ The most famous of these utopian lines was, of course, that stipulated in the bulls Inter cetera, promulgated by Alexander VI in the summer of 1493 in the aftermath of Columbus’s first transatlantic voyage, demarcating Spanish from Portuguese titles in the Atlantic along a vertical line that ran, from pole to pole, 100 leagues west of the Azores and was later modified in the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) assigning the eastern tip of South America to Portugal. Some thirty-five years after Tordesillas, Spain and Portugal entered into another treaty, the Treaty of Zaragoza (1529), which resolved competing claims in the Pacific, specifically with regard to the Molucca Islands. As Schmitt explained, this type of global line (raya) separated not Christian from non-Christian territories but the spheres of influence in the newly discovered territories in the Indies between two land-appropriating European (i.e., Christian) powers (in this case, Spain and Portugal) who both subscribed to a higher authority (in this case, the pope). Accordingly, they were based on a consensus in international law concerning land-appropriation by two powers who recognized each other as equal parties to a treaty.⁶⁴ These rayas were herein different from the amity lines that began to appear in the sixteenth century in treaties of truce between nonbelligerent European rival powers, especially Protestants and Catholics, competing for territory in the New World. However, while these treaties of amity obtained in Europe, they did not in the New World, which became an extralegal zone in which raids and skirmishes occurred outside the context of formal war. At these lines, Europe ended and the ‘New World’ began with regard to the law of nations. Beyond those amity lines was an ‘overseas’ zone in which, for want of any legal limits to war, only the law of the stronger applied. The characteristic feature of amity lines consisted in that, different from rayas, they "defined a sphere of conflict between contractual parties seeking to appropriate land, precisely because they lacked any common presupposition and authority. . . . Everything that occurred ‘beyond the line’ remained outside the legal, moral, and political values recognized on