For its seventh issue (scheduled for release in 2026), Arcana Naturae (Agorà & Co) will be looking at the “black legend” of alchemy and its intersections with the history of magic and science. Initially regarded as a “sacred art”, then for a time as a legitimate scientific pursuit, alchemy has nonetheless become synonymous with demonic practices in the collective imagination. How can such a turnaround be explained? When did it start, who were its instigators (whether voluntary or involuntary), and what were its consequences?

Argument

Although characterised by a definite scientific appetite, a marked experimental approach and direct technical applications (goldsmithing, glassmaking, etc.), alchemy was mostly permeated by a rhetoric of secrecy that was partly fatal to it (Greiner, 1998). What’s more, the profile of some of its historical protagonists already pointed to an interpenetration between alchemy and magic: the scribe of the Greek alchemical papyri in Leiden and Stockholm, for example, also copied the first pages of the Greek magical papyrus XIII (Dosoo, 2016). Their aims often converged, as with Maslama Ibn Qāsim al-Qurṭubī, the author of the Rutbat al-ḥakīm and the Ghāyat al-ḥakīm (the medieval Picatrix), for whom knowledge of alchemy and magic crowns any philosophical path (De Callataÿ & Moureau, 2016). Present both in the manuscript and print culture, their theories influenced each other retrospectively, as in the case of the physician Paracelsus, who drew on medieval magic before Paracelsianism rubbed off on Renaissance magic (Kahn, 2016). In general, the condemnations of alchemy and magic were unanimous, and we all know the intransigence of a Nicholas Eymerich (Matton, 2023), or the disapproval of a Symphorien Champier (Copenhaver, 2012) on this subject. Finally, the representations of their actors have ended up merging into a single mould: that of the black magus, very much in vogue in Romantic literature (Parmentier, 2023 and Fischer, 2023).

Although the assimilation of alchemy with magic seems to be mainly the work of its detractors, the relationship between these two conceptual worlds is much more complex than it appears and deserves to be studied more in details. The following avenues for reflection are likely to provide some clarifications:

• the deliberate or fortuitous encounter between magic and alchemy, in both textual and/or visual forms
• the use of magical practices in alchemy and alchemical recipes in magic, and/or discussions on magic and its critics in alchemical treatises
• the connections and/or presence of alchemy in the books of secrets and in natural magic
• the relationships and tensions between the need for secrecy and the need for dissemination of scientific knowledge
• the condemnation of alchemy from a legal and/or theological point of view, in various cultural areas
• the disenchantment of magic, the evolution of scientific discourses on alchemy and the social consequences of its marginalisation in the beginning of the contemporary period
• the evolution of the figure of the alchemist linked to that of the magician and the scientist in art and/or literature, whether medieval, modern or contemporary

Submission guidelines

Articles should be around fifteen pages long (between 30,000 and 50,000 characters, including spaces) and should preferably be written in French or English. Detailed proposals for articles (300 words), together with a short CV and the usual contact details, should be sent (in .doc or .pdf format)

to arcana.revue@gmail.com,

copying tom.fischer.09@protonmail.com

Sergei.Zotov@warwick.ac.uk

by 30 May 2025

Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 30 June 2025.

Articles must be submitted by 28 February 2026 for double blind peer review. On the basis of the advice and the recommendations made, the editorial board takes the decision to: 1) publish the article; 2) ask the author to make revisions to comply with the journal’s expectations; 3) reject the article. The authors will be notified of the final decision within 1 to 2 months.

After acceptance, they will be asked to make any corrections or revisions to the text within the specified period, before proofreading for final corrections.

Agenda

• Deadline for submitting proposals: 30 May 2025.
• Notification of acceptance of proposals: 30 June 2025.
• Deadline for submission of articles (for peer review): 28 February 2026

Issue editors

• Tom Fischer, PhD candidate, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE-PSL), Laboratoire d'Etudes sur les Monothéismes (CNRS-UMR 8584), Paris
• Sergei Zotov, PhD , Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, Warwick University, and Frances A. Yates Long-Term Fellow at the Warburg Institute, University of London