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Isaac Newton and the Occult

Rip Van Woofer

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If anyone would know this it's you guys so:

Just curious -- seems I read somewhere, years ago, that Isaac Newton (in an apparant fit of dottiness?) got into the occult or somesuch for a period of his life. True or apocryphal?

Don't have a good reference handy so I'm asking here.

Of course I understand that the 18th Century was a very different time, and such a lapse might have been more understandable then.
 
Rip Van Woofer said:
If anyone would know this it's you guys so:

Just curious -- seems I read somewhere, years ago, that Isaac Newton (in an apparant fit of dottiness?) got into the occult or somesuch for a period of his life. True or apocryphal?

Don't have a good reference handy so I'm asking here.

Of course I understand that the 18th Century was a very different time, and such a lapse might have been more understandable then.
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I know that he was very big into alchemy. I fact he probably considered alchemy to have been his great pursuit in life. I don't know if that counts as the occult though. I understand his views on the trinity (he felt the idea was a blasphemy) were less than popular with the church.


Steven
 
My sense is that Isaac Newton feared that Jesus created christianity to facilitate Jesus' future technology based ressurection, and Newton was researching ways to stop Jesus before Jesus could turn a future technology based resurrected Isaac Newton (and the rest of us) into auxillary processing power for Jesus' subjective consciousness. Scientific historians subsequently misinterpreted Newton's very rationally self-interested research into ancient religion and languages as an irrationalism. If only.
 
Isaac Newton didn't just "get into the occult" for a period. By all accounts he spent more time on the Bible and alchemy than on legitimate science. He considered the Bible to be the divinely inspired Word of God. According to The Newton Project "Besides the huge body of published scientific writing for which he remains most celebrated, he also penned over a million words on the subject of alchemy and somewhere in the region of two and a half million about religion."
 
A great book on Newton's life (with particular focus on his alchemical and biblical works) is "The Last Sorceror," by Michael White.

His argument is that Newton's obsession with finding patterns and meaning in bible and alchemical texts also contributed to his scientific insights. Plausible, if not completely convincing, and well worth a read.
 
Thanks. It was the alchemy I had half-remembered. Didn't know about his religious interest.

I think I remember being surprised at his lifelong obsession with alchemy, partciculary in a man who practically embodied the Enlightenment. Wasn't alchemy already somewhat disreputable by then? (EDIT: According to the Newton Project site, apparently not...) Thanks to both for those links.

More books to add to the "must read someday" pile...
 
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Newton built a working time machine. I will sell you the plans for only $500.00 US.
 
Let us thank Dan Brown in the DaVinci Code

for discovering that Newton also devoted some of his time to being Grand Master of the Priory of Sion, or Knights Templar, or something. I forget.
 
Cynric said:
His argument is that Newton's obsession with finding patterns and meaning in bible and alchemical texts also contributed to his scientific insights.
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I don't think there can be any doubt about this, and not just concerning Newton. I believe John F. Nash (the real one, not the false version from the film) drew his genius and his madness from the same well -- an obsessive compulsion toward pattern. It is also one of the keys to understanding the genius, the excesses, and the lapses of Einstein, among others. And not just scientists -- composers, artists, inventors, and other innovators as well.
 
An important point to remember about Newton and alchemy is that at the time alchemy was legitimate science. What we know as alchemy now is not the same as was practiced then, it was a mix of modern alchemy and modern chemistry that eventually spit into seperate fields of real science and woo. What Newton did was basically mix things together and see what happened. Having observed that some materials can react to form entirely different ones it does not seem unreasonable to think that other materials, such as lead, can react to form a different one, such as gold, without modern knowledge of molecular chemistry.
 
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