It is certainly possible to identify points of tension between alchemists and institutional churches, and it is undoubtedly the case that some alchemists saw only a superficial connection between their art and their faith. Still others pondered whether and how alchemists’ skills might be useful during the End Times, or drew on exegetical techniques developed to understand Scripture in order to parse difficult alchemical texts. Like Luther, some drew on alchemy as a way of explicating theological concepts (or vice versa), while others drew analogies between the creation and operation of alchemical materials and Biblical passages, or considered the effects of alchemical medicines on the body in relation to the bodies of extraordinary figures like Adam, the Virgin Mary, or the saints. Indeed, from the moment alchemical texts and ideas began to circulate in European scholarly circles in the twelfth century, alchemists and theologians alike explored numerous connections between alchemy and Christianity. 1Martin Luther was not an alchemist, of course, but the reformer's allusion to alchemy in discussing the Day of Judgment hints at how broadly the art resonated as a way of engaging religion in sixteenth-century Europe. The Christians and righteous shall ascend upward into heaven, and there live everlastingly, but the wicked and the ungodly, as the dross and filth, shall remain in hell, and there be damned. For, as in a furnace the fire extracts and separates from a substance the other portions, and carries upward the spirit, the life, the sap, the strength, while the unclean matter, the dregs, remain at the bottom, like a dead and worthless carcass even so God, at the day of judgment, will separate all things through fire, the righteous from the ungodly.
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