Nature's Evil

Like other low-capital, time-consuming trades, the production of saltpetre flourished in the Baltic lands. Dutch merchants transported it to Amsterdam and then to England. Grand empires were dependent on saltpetre which foreign peasants made from their farmyard waste. In 1579 in England, the Eastland Company was formed to trade in saltpetre, hemp and other Baltic products. Then the alchemist Lazarus Ercker, the head of Emperor Rudolph II’s Bohemian mines, revealed the secrets of saltpetre using scales, proportions and diagrams. Based on these new recipes, the British crown obliged its landowners and farmers to make saltpetre. In the sixteenth century the ‘saltpetre men’ went around private estates collecting ready-made saltpetre. Then, in distant Morocco, deposits of mineral saltpetre were found; similar treasures were found in India, and new monopolies undertook the business. A century later Ercker’s alchemical treatise served as the basis of an impressive debate in the Royal Society in London; the luminaries of the new science debated the transformation of manure into saltpetre. Robert Boyle’s celebrated invention, the air pump, was made during his work on saltpetre. 17

Although he laid down the foundations of experimental science, Boyle remained an alchemist; throughout his life he sought the red elixir which would turn lead into gold and attract angels. The air pump demonstrated the strength of science – Boyle pumped air out of a transparent glass retort in which he had placed a bird, which suffocated in the vacuum. In fact the famous air pump was a simpler invention than many of the mechanisms that metallurgists used in their furnaces. The body of the pump was made from Swedish copper. There, in the wooded hills of the North, miners extracted ore by heating the rock with large fires overnight and breaking chunks off. They pulled the chunks up to the mill and pulverised them into a powder with hammers powered by a waterwheel, then heated the powder on an open fire for a week and smelted it in a furnace. To remove the molten metal, they had to destroy the stove. Then they crushed the metal again. The stove was rebuilt and the ore was resmelted. The whole process took up to three months. Endless trials and errors by local craftsmen were supervised by the cameralist Bureau of Mines, a body made up of aristocrats and alchemists.

The eighteenth century was a time of disenchantment, and this infected alchemy sooner than other branches of natural magic. Having lost the Great Northern War with Russia, the Swedish king, Charles XII, closed the chemical laboratory of the Bureau of Mines and switched his scientists to engineering projects. In 1705 Charles captured Otto Arnold von Paykull, the commander of the Saxon cavalry and a key ally of the Russian troops; a Swedish nobleman by birth, he was sent for trial as a traitor. Paykull also happened to be an alchemist. In the course of his trial he said that he possessed the secret of making gold and promised to share his art in exchange for clemency. The Bureau of Mines guaranteed that Paykull could make Sweden richer than ever, but the king executed the alchemist-cavalryman.

A little later, a new star appeared in this circle – the heir of a wealthy family of mine-owners, Emanuel Swedenborg. He was born very near Falun, a gigantic mine dug among idyllic lakes and forests in central Sweden; both Emanuel’s grandfathers were stockholders in this mine. Started by the Vikings, at its peak in the seventeenth century it produced two-thirds of global copper. Copper from Falun covered the palace of Versailles, was minted into Swedish coins, and was a primary source of wealth for the kingdom. A thousand workers toiled there, burning huge fires and sinking shafts into the rock bottom of three separate pits. The fire-setting method of mining devoured tons of wood; the pits were covered in dense smoke. After visiting the mine, Carl Linnaeus wrote, ‘it was horrible as hell itself.’ On Midsummer’s Eve 1687, just a few months before Swedenborg’s birth, a big part of the mine collapsed: the walls between the three open pits fell down, creating a sinkhole about 100 metres deep and destroying shafts and caves underneath. No one was killed: it was a holiday, the one such day of the year apart from Christmas. The mine continued working, but its output halved.