A Suggestive Inquiry into Hermetic Philosophy

"The first matter is a miraculous substance, one of which you may affirm contraries without inconvenience. It is very weak and yet most strong. It is excessively soft and yet there is nothing so hard. It is one and all, spirit and body, fixed and volatile, male and female, visible and invisible, burns and burns not. It is water and wets not; it is earth that runs and air that stands still. In a word, it is Mercury, the laughter of fools and the wonder of the wise, nor has God made anything that is like him. He is born in the world, but was extant before the world. Hence that excellent riddle which he has somewhere proposed of himself: "I dwell" — saith he— "in the mountains and in the plains, a father before I was a son. I generated my mother, and my mother, carrying me in her womb, generated me, having no use for a nurse."
This is that substance which at present is the child of the sun and moon; but originally both his parents came out of his belly" -Thomas Vaughan from 'Aula Lucis' or 'The House of Light'

"The true adepts have been rare exceptions in the world, despite of all calumny, famous, and favored above their kind. Let any one but with an unprejudiced eye regard the writings of those who may be believed on their own high authority to have succeeded in this art, and he will perceive that the motives actuating them were of the purest possible kind; truthful, moral, always pious and intelligent, as those of the pseudo-alchemists, on the other hand, were reckless and despicable....Wisdom must be sought for her own sake, neither for gold or silver or any intermediate benefit, lest these all should be denied together without the discovery of their source. " - Mary A. Atwood - 'Hermetic Philosophy & Alchemy: A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery'

Collection highlights

The Ritman Library owns a copy of the original edition of Mary Ann Atwood’s “A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery” published in 1850. Allegedly the larger part of this edition perished at the hands of the author and her father, Thomas South, who believed his daughter had revealed too many Hermetic secrets.This copy also contains the last leaf advertizing “The Enigma of alchemy and Oedipus resolved”, a poem by Thomas South which was burnt along with the remaining copies of “A Suggestive Inquiry”. All efforts of the author and her father notwithstanding, Atwood’s work was re-published in 1918 with an appendix of some 40 pages containing her ‘table talk and memorabilia’. Lawrence Principe and William Newman regard Mary Anne Atwood as one of the ‘two most seminal figures in the history of the “spiritual interpretation of alchemy”' in the nineteenth century' (the other one being the American author Ethan Allen Hitchcock).

Atwood asserted in her preface that of all creatures alone, man ‘is able to contemplate the things which exist around him, with the germ of a higher faculty, which, when rightly developed and set apart, reveals the hidden Forms of manifested Being, and secrets of the Causal Fountain, identically within himself’ (p. xiv).

This copy was presented by Mary Ann Atwood to her cousin, James Crawford.

See Lawrence M. Principe & William R. Newman, “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy”, in Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe (2001).

www.ritmanlibrary.com

Download the guide of The Ritman Library for free!
http://bit.ly/HermeticallyOpen

http://dx.doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-10752

A Suggestive Inquiry into the - Title view - C.G.Jung - e-rara C.G.Jung; Title: A Suggestive Inquiry into Hermetic Philosophy and Alchemy, Author, Contributor: Atwood, Mary Anne, Belfast : Tait, 1920

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KyhktI0cZI

Manly P Hall - 'A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery' - Mary Ann Atwood Landmarks of Esoteric Literature. Manly P Hall - 'A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery' - Mary Ann Atwood. Manly Palmer Hall (March 18, 1901 – Augu...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Anne_Atwood