- The Alchemy of Conquest: Science, Religion, and the Secrets of the New World by Ralph Bauer
In recent years scholars have depicted the iconic title page of Sir Francis Bacon's 1620 Instauratio Magna (3, fig. I) as exemplifying the interconnection between science and empire in early modern Europe. Featuring a ship sailing beyond the Pillars of Hercules and the motto Multi pertransibunt & augebitur scientia ("many shall travel to and fro, and knowledge will increase"), Bacon's work portrayed his inductive method, whose aim was the conquest of nature, and the discovery of the Americas as linked fulfillments of Daniel's Old Testament prophecies. In his ambitious The Alchemy of Conquest, Ralph Bauer argues that the modern Baconian paradigm of scientific discovery originated in alchemical theory and practice and that this foundation shaped the Doctrine of Discovery, a legal precedent in U.S. and international law that justified—and continues to justify—Indigenous dispossession. At the same time, the colonial conquest of America legitimated the idea of scientific discovery by giving it salvific significance, thus "forg[ing] an unprecedented synthesis of science, religion, and state power" (11). It is this symbiosis between scientific discovery and colonialism that Bauer labels "the alchemy of conquest."
The Baconian method, Bauer argues, was the culmination of a late medieval paradigm shift from viewing empirical inquiry as an occasion to sin to seeing experimental "discovery" as a form of divine revelation with tangible benefits for evangelization and state building. Driving this epistemological transformation was an influx of pagan and Arab-Islamic texts, including alchemical writings, which altered European views on the nature of matter and generated a natural philosophy that emphasized observation as the first step in naturalist inquiry. Moreover, practitioners often sought utilitarian outcomes from natural knowledge, such as the production of new drugs, dyes, and liquors and technologies for navigation, warfare, and mining and refining metals. Alchemy's synthesis of natural philosophy with craft traditions such as metalworking and the distillation of medicines provided the model for this conceptual shift. Accordingly, Bauer describes the emerging idea of discovery as an empirical and metaphysical hunt that traversed the boundary between the known and unknown and yielded proprietary rights over its material results. Its "distinctly 'conquistadorial'" (60) aspects, he argues, shaped how Europeans apprehended and engaged with the New World. [End Page 478]
The core of Bauer's book, and its main strength, examines how Franciscan friar alchemists merged Christian millenarianism with materialism into what he calls "ecstatic materialism" (138), a chivalric missionary science that came to define the Spanish apostolic mission in the Americas. Franciscans found inspiration in the writings of brethren Roger Bacon (c. 1214?–c. 1292) and John of Rupescissa (c. 1310–1366)—who validated alchemy as a method to bring practitioners closer to the divine and purify Christian bodies in preparation for the apocalypse—and Ramón Llull (c. 1232–1316), whose work Arbor scientiae (tree of knowledge) articulated a logical system for discovering Christianity's metaphysical truth as a complement to coercive violence for converting non-Christians.
Although Llull denounced metallic transmutation, his belief that artisans could use the process of reduction to redeem the prima materia (the first matter of creation) from corrupted sublunary matter exerted considerable influence on the Spanish mission in America. Bauer contends that, in contrast to the Dominicans, who treated Amerindians as formless matter awaiting ensoulment through conversion to Christianity, early modern Franciscans regarded Indigenous people as corrupted by diabolism but able to be reclaimed through Llullian reduction.1 Just as alchemical transmutation began with mercury's penetration into corpuscles between particles of matter to reduce it to the prima materia, Franciscan friars believed catechization and iconoclastic violence could reveal God's original imprint in Amerindians. Missionaries such as Bernardino de Sahagún enlisted Llull's encyclopedism alongside ethnographic observation as aids in redeeming Amerindian souls and identifying aspects of Indigenous culture worth preserving; later, the Jesuit José de Acosta compared conversion to silver refining, amalgamating "the unpurified...