Nature's Evil

The Little Ice Age (1500–1850) was the opposite of today’s global warming. The latest explanation for this long-drawn-out cooling is the extinction of the indigenous populations in both Americas. Epidemics and wars brought about by the white incomers led to the death of more than 50 million people, whose traditional agriculture and hunting, based on the burning of forests, ceased. When the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere fell, cooling began throughout the northern hemisphere. 14 Harvest failures contributed to the European crisis; wars, uprisings and massacres erupted all over the continent, from England to Ukraine. The genocide in the Americas over the centuries was motivated by the thirst for gold or, failing that, silver. The change in climate was not a cyclical phenomenon: it was brought about by political will. The Spanish Empire created vast quantities of silver and destroyed a huge number of people; silver and wool gave birth to this empire and drained it to the last drop. Behind every sort of raw material stood the people who extracted it and the laws regulating their work. But everything began with nature – with the ore-bearing rocks of the Andes, the shoals of fish in the North Atlantic or the stretches of pastureland in Castile – and came to an end as a result of human actions. It is easy to imagine the resource economy as a man-made construct: people created it, to their advantage or detriment, in their routine appropriation of raw materials. But all these events and policies must also be looked at from the point of view of the ore, sheep, fish and weather – significant players in history, its autonomous agents.

Alchemy

Paracelsus, the father of modern medicine and a contemporary of Luther and Fugger, writes in detail about spirits. Their life is similar to human lives: spirits eat, drink, have sex with one another, and even marry, but they don’t have souls. Spirits of the mine can pass through a solid rock mass, like a person moving through the air. Sometimes they come to an agreement with a human being, seduce him or take him into service. Kobolds, also known as mine fairies, are harmless; the metal cobalt is even named after them. Gnomes can be useful, although they are cunning and treacherous; trolls are dangerous. In the German Alps, gnomes were represented as little old men equipped with beards and tails. In Sweden, mine spirits were most often described as alluring women. The Swedish geologist and alchemist Urban Hjärne participated in a witch trial in 1676. An official of the Royal Bureau of Mines, he was a renowned scholar with international connections; a member of the Royal Society in London, he spent several years in Paris. But Hjärne voted that two of the women who had had sexual relations with the devil should be burnt on a bonfire. This was one of the last witch burnings in Europe.

Alchemists had a broad knowledge of natural magic; they were also metallurgists, physicians and astronomers. Paracelsus taught that the world consists of three universal ‘principles’ – the principle of salt, the principle of sulphur and the principle of mercury. God designated one of the elements, fire, to separate these principles. In 1661 the scientist and alchemist Robert Boyle, one of the directors of the English East India Company, published his treatise The Sceptical Chemist , which was directed against Paracelsus. The world consists not of three principles and four elements but of a countless number of atoms, which bump into each other in chance encounters. The chemical elements are primary substances that cannot be taken any further apart. Boyle thought it possible that elements could transmute; in his world there was no ether, but lead could nevertheless become gold.