Nearing the end of 'The Madness of Crowds'' alchemists

Mackay makes it sound as if alchemists were more successful as time went on. Either because people's hopes were raised to a fever pitch, or the art of deception became so refined. 

Stories about people like Jean Delisle, a French alchemist from seventeenth century Provence, are a great example of both possibilities in action. 

Having already detailed alchemists' use of false-bottomed crucibles or wands filled with gold and stopped up with wax or butter, Mackay suggests that these were Delisle's tools of choice. And he insists that the man who was quite famous in his own day (having allegedly transmuted base metals into gold and silver hundreds of times in public places) was nothing more than a master of sleight of hand.

This stance makes a great deal of sense since Delisle refused to perform his transmutation before the king thrice. In fact, Delisle had to be drug to Paris. Even then he never performed before the king based on the excuse that he couldn't in fact make the Philosopher's Stone, but an Italian had given him what he had used before and had exhausted his reserves of it during his years in Provence.

Of course, being from a period of time closer to Mackay's, it's no surprise that so much more information about Delisle is available to him and thus he treats him with much more nuance than the earlier practitioners of alchemy.

It's also to be expected that being alive in the midst of the Victorian era, with its legions of genre writers (then largely called "hacks") and poets, Mackay points out the literary debt owed to the Rosicrucians' benevolent spirits (sylphs, undines, gnomes, salamanders) from their emergence in the seventeenth century up to his own day. Such creatures remain a steady inspiration even to today's fantasy writers and figure largely into the mythos of the incredible Tales of series of JRPGs. 

Mackay lets some alchemists slip through

It seems as though I need to reign in my criticism of Mackay. He remains entirely skeptical, but he's starting to admit that some of what alchemists have done is actually good either outright or simply through omission.

First, a case of his seeming to let an alchemist by simply through omission. In his coverage of Sendivogius (at work in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries) he never calls the man out as a charlatan or fake. Mackay's finishing this entry with a quick variation of "need I say more?" definitely implies that he believes this to be the case. He also indirectly jabs at Sendivogius when he notes that tales of this alchemist's greatest deeds can be found in the work that his attendant wrote about him.

Mackay has worked through implication and omission before, sure. But what makes the case of Sendivogius stand out is that, according the the stories told about him, he actually possessed the Philosopher's Stone and regularly transmuted quicksilver into gold, though he covered his wealth with a show of poverty and infirmity. I suppose at this point in his miscellany of human error Mackay simply suspects that any discerning reader will read the fantastic story of Sendivogius and conclude for themselves that he was nothing but a fraud.

I guess I'm just not that discerning, in the end.

The other point that I've come across in which Mackay seems to soften in his treatment of alchemists is when he outright says that for all of their bluster and visionary nonsense, the seventeenth century Rosicrucians did some good. For, according to Mackay, they were the ones that changed alchemy into more of a spiritual exercise and they helped to do away with old superstitions about demons and imps being everywhere and at the root of all human ills. Interestingly, Mackay makes almost nothing of their replacing these superstitions with new ones about benevolent spirits being everywhere and eager to serve humanity.

There's just no popular madness like a seventeenth century popular madness.

Mackay's skepticism goes too far

As if it weren't already obvious, Mackay is a pure skeptic when it comes to alchemists. Though he's not deaf to their stories. In fact, he extracts Denis Zachaire's entire story from his own autobiography, a story that ends with Zachaire's reformation.

After a lengthy search for the Philosopher's stone Zachaire isolated himself to studying the alchemical classics rather than following the trends of his day. Then, as the climax of his story, he transmutes gold on Easter Sunday, thanking god before he decides to sell all he owns and disappears.

Now, transmuting gold on the most sacred day in the Christian calendar does seem very convenient. His solitary study leading up to and solitude during his transmutation also sounds like an embellishment. All of these details suggest that his success was the reward for some sort of increase in holiness.

Though, more than its being full of such embellishments, I think that Zachaire's story signals a shift in the culture of alchemy.

Around Zachaire's time the spiritual dimension of alchemy was picking up, and so Zachaire's story makes sense. Plus, if there is a moral to the man's tale, it's that alchemy can only come to a true end if an alchemist practices without greedy intentions. When Zachaire was working up to his final transmutation he wasn't doing it for gold or any sort of gain - it was just to prove to himself that it could be done.

Mackay, in his blind skepticism, misses this. He obviously has made himself an observer of crowds' madnesses by making himself insensitive to them. His dismissing them all as ridiculous and the worst kind of folly. It may be a fine way to go about writing such a book as his, but being so skeptical is as bad as being entirely credulous.

On sorcerers and alchemists

From Mackay's collection of biographies it sounds like alchemists took a turn for the worst in the Late Middle Ages. From the late fourteenth through the fifteenth centuries in particular, the alchemists that he describes are truly deserving of his scorn. Specifically the child-murdering Gilles de Rais and coin debaser Jacques Cœur. 

Their crimes aren't exactly on par with each other, but both are terrible reprobates that hid their wrong doings behind a screen of being alchemists searching for the philosopher's stone. 

And this apparent state of things makes me wonder.

In the case of Roger Bacon, his grand intellect drew claims and accusations of sorcery. His contemporaries (and many later generations) regarded such claims as a great blow to his reputation. Currently though, and even in Mackay's day, people are much more able to regard Bacon's discoveries as quietly revolutionary, at least in so far as they ran far ahead of what science was doing in his time.

Now, turning to the groups of alchemists motivated by greed and a lust for power, covering themselves with the name "alchemist" (or, more accurately, "alchymist"), it's interesting how the same thing happened.

Most modern readers and Victorian skeptics like Mackay aren't fooled by such titles. Instead, they're able to see past them and to the bearer's crimes. Yet, it's not that the label "alchemist" has many negative connotations, it's that it has hardly any now. At least in the sense that anyone claiming to be an alchemist these days is likely to be dismissed out of hand (and the same could be said for someone claiming to be a "sorcerer").

And that's just what happened in both cases.

The negative label didn't turn into a positive one. Rather, it lost its adhesion and just fell off, revealing the terrible stain that it had been covering over.

Trying to save Roger Bacon's bacon

Mackay's survey of alchemists across the ages continues in The Madness of Crowds. Over the course of twenty pages he wends his way from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. And most of the alchemists he covers have their alchemical deeds neatly covered.

His coverage of England's own Roger Bacon, though, offers a curious case.

Mackay makes no attempt to hide his contempt of alchemists. Each and every biography thus far has included some sort of reference to the alchemists being misguided or having wasted their lives. Roger Bacon's entry in Mackay's collection includes this treatment but it comes primarily through an apologist lens.

No mention is made of Bacon's famed bronze head, imbued with life and the wisdom to answer any kind of question put to it. Neither is there any reference to Bacon's idea of walling up all of England through magical means. Instead, the bulk of this particular biography is all about Mackay lauding Bacon's intelligence and his claims that superstition rose around his reputation because his peers simply couldn't comprehend the extent of his genius.

In fact, rather than Bacon's alchemical deeds, Mackay chronicles his general scientific accomplishments (like his understanding of convex and concave lenses). Mackay's Victorian English pride certainly shines through.

The madness of alchemy

Mackay is quick to state that all alchemists through the ages are quacks of varying degrees. Though he also mentions the very important point that in their fumbling about for the philosopher's stone and elixir of life they made several important scientific discoveries.

After a little bit more of an introduction, he then proceeds to give a brief biography of every known alchemist from the earliest record to the most recent (as of the 1850s). As of twenty pages into this section, Mackay is up to the early thirteenth century and looking at Roger Bacon.

Though, having read the play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay which is about Bacon, it seems that it could have also been about Albertus Magnus and his apprentice Thomas Aquinas. Mostly because the play's centerpiece is Bacon's animated, question-answering bronze head and Magnus and Aquinas apparently brought a bronze statue to life. A living statue that the two men set to doing menial household tasks and that was, according to Mackay's report, so chatty that Aquinas smashed it to bits. I wonder if the statue ever shrugged and sarcastically remarked "It's a living" while it was up and about?

The other thing that's grabbed my attention from the first few alchemists that Mackay's covered is that he's pulled a lot of his information from French sources. I know that Orleans in France was a center for magical practices, but even so, is there some propensity towards the wondrous unknown in France?

A brief and prosperous trade in tulips

Mackay moves from stock schemes to tulips without batting an eyelash. The apparently unexplainable madness around tulips does relate to commerce, though. Specifically, throughout the middle of the 1630s the now iconic flower was a hot commodity in the Dutch market.

Mackay is sure to note his surprise that such mania could seize "so prudent a people as the Dutch" (93). A detail that once again dates his miscellany.

Nonetheless, moving past the Victorian English perspective of Mackay, The Madness of Crowds' value is made clear in this brief chapter.

This book's not just a relic of another century; this book is a memento of a Europe more extrinsically drawn in deep and differing colours.

Not to mention Mackay's propensity for flashing his vocabulary. I'd nearly forgotten about good old "repast," surrounded as we are in the everyday with the salt-less "meal."

Forget all the new corn that comes from old fields, sometimes that old almost forgotten corn from those same fields is even more interesting.

History's role revisited

So the problem with the South Pacific scheme in 1720s England wound up being one of demand outstripping supply.

The price of the company's stock, at a time when many of its holders were selling, was such that the country itself nearly ran out of cash. As a result, and unlike a similar situation with actual goods, England's credit was called into question - a state of affairs that's as perilous on the international level as it is on the personal.

What happened with the banking crash of 2008 wasn't as cut and dry as a single company over-valuing its stock, but the same greed, pride, and desire of the low to better their quality of life were at play. Not entirely rotten motivations, though the power players in both the 1720s and 2008 had no real need to improve their lot in life.

I'm not trying to say that history repeats itself, only that knowing about things like the South Pacific scheme show history's value. This Victorian miscellany of madnesses has got value.

And, running with Einstein's definition of insanity, there's the implication that humanity on the whole is a little insane.

A stock market warning from 1720

The Madness of Crowds (a convenient short version of the book's full title, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds) verges on being a Victorian miscellany. I write "verges on" since it covers a lot of topics, but it gives quite a bit of space to each.

Reading about the stock market crazes of France and England in the 1710s/20s makes me wonder how the Western world has come to rely entirely on such markets for its economy. Times have definitely changed drastically since the eighteenth century and credit is a much stabler thing than it was when trade was nowhere near worldwide nor running through manifold channels.

But to read Charles Mackay assessing the people who fell for the "scheme" of early stock trading as "fools" makes it difficult to see how our world evolved from one so far removed from our own.

Yet, there's still some truth to what Robert Walpole, the one English member of parliament who spoke out against trading on credit alone, had to say against it: Having such a system "would divert the genius of the nation from trade and industry."

As big as the stock market is today, I can't help but wonder what those on Wall Street (and Bay Street, for Canadian readers) would be doing with their wits were it not for the draw of potentially immense, relatively easy wealth.

The Victorian eye for flow

I don't expect that much will change with Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. It at first struck me as something vaguely tabloid-like and it's not really changed course.

The end of Law's saga has been revealed, but as I'd expected, little analysis has come with it. Mind, there has been some, but it comes across as more chatter rather than anything really substantial. All the same, The Madness of Crowds is quite readable. It has yet to be so pre-occupied with itself that it becomes choppy or ill-edited.

It seems, then, that even if they too often fell victim to sensationalism, the Victorians knew quality when it came to the appearance and flow of the printed word.

The Victorians *would* like a 728 page tabloid

Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds almost reads like a tabloid newspaper. Its first 24 pages are filled with anecdotes and recountenances written in an almost chatty style.

But, thus far there's almost no analysis to be found. There's been no look at what allowed John Law's Mississippi Scheme to succeed as it did aside from human greed.

For a book from 1841 (second edition printed in 1852) such a shallow tone is odd. Especially considering that this book is non-fiction. But then, I've never really read anything that could be called a miscellany before. Especially not one of the Victorian ilk.

In fact, considering its length of 728 pages, I wonder if The Madness of Crowds was more of a conversation piece. Obviously it was a popular book if it went through two editons, but it doesn't strike me as something people would sit down to read cover to cover. Perhaps Mackay's voice and tone are attempts to encourage that, though.

Regardless of its original purpose I'm in it for the long haul. No doubt there'll be a pleasant surprise or two along the way.