Chemistry and an occult public sphere
Herbert Stanley Redgrove trained in chemistry and published textbooks on mathematics and physical chemistry. Much of his wider intellectual life is documented through periodical writing. Researcher Egil Asprem identifies 244 contributions to The Occult Review between 1908 and 1940, ranging from alchemy to philosophy and modern science.
Redgrove was a founding member and president of the Alchemical Society, active from 1912 to 1915. It brought historians, scientists and occult practitioners into the same forum. His other books included The Magic of Experience, an inquiry into knowledge published in 1915. His writing could engage sympathetically with esoteric subjects while criticising attempts to claim scientific authority too easily. The documented publications give a clearer account of this career than the limited personal biographical record available here.
Material operations and spiritual language
Alchemy: Ancient and Modern first appeared in 1911. The copy held here is the revised second edition of 1922, issued by William Rider & Son. Its discussion of recent physical science belongs to that historical moment, alongside its account of earlier alchemical doctrines.
Redgrove considers practical secrets, arbitrary symbols and the spiritual interpretation advanced by Arthur Edward Waite. He finds relations between material experiment and mystical ideas without treating every use of alchemical language as the same activity. Jacob Boehme’s spiritual philosophy occupies a different position from a laboratory procedure. Portraits and symbolic plates accompany those distinctions, giving the book a visual as well as verbal account of how a modern chemist understood the alchemical past.
