“Eirenæus Philalethes” (1623?-?) and George Starkey (?-1665).
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
H. Stanley Redgrove
§ 60. The use of the pseudonym “Philalethes” has not been confined to one alchemist. The cosmopolitan adept who wrote under the name of “Eirenæus Philalethes,” has been confused, on the one hand, with Thomas Vaughan, on the other hand with George Starkey (?-1665). He has also been identified with Dr. Robert Child (1613-1654); but his real identity remains shrouded in mystery.[82] George Starkey (or Stirk), the son of George Stirk, minister of the Church of England in Bermuda, graduated at Harvard in 1646 and practised medicine in the United States of America from 1647 to 1650. In 1651 he came to England and practised medicine in London. He died of the plague in 1665. In 1654-5 he published The Marrow of Alchemy, by “Eirenæus Philoponos Philalethes,” which some think he had stolen from his Hermetic Master. Other works by “Eirenæus Philalethes” appeared after Starkey’s death and became immensely popular. The Open Entrance to the Closed Palace of the King (the most famous of these) and the Three Treatises of the same author will be found in The Hermetic Museum. Some of his views have already been noted (see §§ 1 and 22). On certain points he differed from the majority of the alchemists. He denied that fire was an element, and, also, that bodies are formed by mixture of the elements.
According to him there is one principle in the metals, namely, mercury, which arises from the aqueous element, and is termed “metalically differentiated water, i.e., it is water passed into that stage of development, in which it can no longer produce anything but mineral substances.”[83] Philalethes’s views as to “metallic seed” are also of considerable interest. Of the seed of gold, which he regarded as the seed, also, of all other metals, he says: “The seed of animals and vegetables is something separate, and may be cut out, or otherwise separately exhibited; but metallic seed is diffused throughout the metal, and contained in all its smallest parts; neither can it be discerned from its body: its extraction is therefore a task which may well tax the ingenuity of the most experienced philosopher. . . .”[84] Well might this have been said of the electron of modern scientific theory.
Source notes
[82] See Mr. A. E. Waite’s Lives of Alchemystical Philosophers, art. “Eirenæus Philalethes,” and the Biographical Preface to his The Works of Thomas Vaughan (1919); also the late Professor Ferguson’s “‘The Marrow of Alchemy’,” The Journal of The Alchemical Society, vol. iii. (1915), pp. 106 et seq., and Professor G. L. Kittredge’s Doctor Robert Child, The Remonstrant (Camb., Mass., 1919). The last mentioned writer strongly urges the identification of “Eirenæus Philalethes” with George Starkey.
[83] “Eirenæus Philalethes”: The Metamorphosis of Metals (see The Hermetic Museum, vol. ii. p. 236). Compare with van Helmont’s views, § 57.
[84]Ibid., p. 240.