Newton and the Origins of Civilization

"Jed Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold point out that in the 17th century there was a widespread view among alchemists that the totality of ancient mythology was just encoded alchemy. There are many examples one could give, but I’ll stick with one that comes up in Newton’s “Index Chemicus”, a very long concordance of the alchemical writings that he read. He talks about Osiris, the Egyptian god, as being a sort of salt. He’s relying there on a 17th-century alchemist named Michael Maier, who interpreted Egyptian mythology as encoded alchemy. Maier argued that these stories about the Egyptian gods and goddesses and so forth were actually recipes that were dressed up as though the Egyptians were talking about actual divinities. That was the view of Maier and Newton interprets Maier in his own work on alchemy. But in other writings on chronology Newton interprets Osiris literally as a god, though in a certain, restricted sense. Newton in his chronological writings worked with Euhemerus’s interpretation of mythology, in which the gods and goddesses of the ancients were originally human beings who were then treated as heroes and catasterised, so to speak, into the heavens as divinities. In other words, his chronological theory based on Egyptian mythology runs directly at odds with the alchemical theory of ancient mythology that he’s taking from Michael Maier. These are very distinct ways of looking at mythology. They are in fact contradictory and mutually exclusive. I would argue that Newton did not himself believe that the ancients were encoding alchemy in their mythology. Instead, I suspect he thought people like Michael Maier were using mythology as a way of writing alchemical riddles that then had to be decoded if one was going to carry their alchemy into practice. Newton was trying to build his chronology of the ancient world through studying the Bible and using what he knew about mythology. He really thought that you could extract actual dates out of biblical and mythological literature, with the help of astronomy and other scientific tools that he had at his disposal. For example, he tries to date Jason and the Argonauts’ adventures according to what he knew about the precession of the equinoxes. There’s a precession of one degree every 72 years, so he was able to work backwards from what he knew about the position of the equinoctial colures in the 1680s and 1690s and later. So he’s incorporating astronomical material as a way of pinpointing the dates that he gets from ancient literature. That fell out of style after Newton’s death and by the 19th century it was considered rather ridiculous. Another key feature of the book is the fact that Feingold and Buchwald have a very different view of Newton’s anti-trinitarianism than the one you get in other writers like Westfall. Again we need to go back to Keynes. Keynes thought that Newton was a heretic, that he is an anti-trinitarian from the early 1670s, if not earlier. That position has been picked up by other people, for example Westfall. The evidence for it is primarily the fact that Newton refused to take holy orders in 1675. Entering holy orders was a condition of his fellowship at Trinity College. He managed to get a special dispensation and, according to Westfall, Keynes, and various others, the reason why he refused to take holy orders was because he was effectively a crypto-heretic and would not agree to swear that the Trinity—in which the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are of the same ‘substance’—was a legitimate way of interpreting Christianity. Buchwald and Feingold argue otherwise. They suggest that Newton did not become an anti-trinitarian until at the very earliest 1679 and possibly later, and that his reason for rejecting holy orders was simply because he wanted to do scientific research unencumbered by religious duties. So it’s a radically different interpretation."