With Flying Pen, When Mortals Sleep - BiteofanApple

With Flying Pen, When Mortals Sleep

August 10, 2026

It was a sweltering August day. I made my way across the promenade, and through the bustling crowd, to a small line forming outside the Timkin Art Museum. Inside, I stumbled on Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Parable of the Sower, painted in 1557, nearly five centuries ago.

Photo: The Yorck Project (2002)<br>10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei

When Bruegel took his brush to this canvas, the New World had just been found by Europeans, and the United States was still long into the future. Around me then were all those people, those wandering souls, who across those centuries stood before this same piece and idly mused at a thing made by the hands of a long-dead Flemish man.

I thought about him. Not Bruegel—another man—one whom I've come to know these past few years. He does not know of me, yet we both could have seen this very painting. We were connected through the mists of time by this canvas portal to the past.

It was October 10th, 2023 at about ten in the evening. I was crawling down a research rabbit hole, as I am wont to do. I wanted to know more about the history of alchemy. I knew the stereotypes, the modern myths, but I wanted to know what real alchemists were doing in their labs.

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Photo: mine

The Secrets of Alchemy by Dr. Lawrence Principe purported to answer this exact question and so I tore through that wondrous book, my face lit by screenglow. When I finished it, I dove into the footnote trail, seeking answers to further questions.

I've pored through a great number of books in the intervening years, and written a fair number of different blog posts on the subjects I discovered there. I met an array of different names: Ripley, Helmont, and Lull, different characters whose stories intermingled and wove a grand tale between the centuries on worn and precious parchment.

Did you know that the seventeenth century was the heyday for alchemy in Europe? Or that Isaac Newton was an alchemist. So was John Locke, in a way. The two were part of a circle of scientists, alchemists, doctors, and philosophers who would go on to found the Royal Society of London. So many famous names in history were there, bound up in the story of alchemy and its rise and fall from grace.

London in particular was a hotbed of alchemical interest at the time, as Germany had been in the decades before. All of Europe was abuzz with it. Yet, in all my reading, had there been no mention of the New World?

What about American Alchemists? Was there such a thing?

Library of Congress, Rare Book Room.<br>Photo: mine

That question would lead me right to him and to the realization that we'd already met. I'd forgotten his name, but Principe had introduced us and his colleague, Dr. William Newman, had penned the man's biography: George Starkey, a name that I will never forget again.

Born in Bermuda and educated as a doctor at Harvard, George Starkey became interested in alchemy early in life and so moved to London in his twenties to practice medicine and alchemy with England's best. At the time, alchemy, which was more akin to pharmacology today, was all the rage among the eager classes. Science was blossoming and so much was open to discovery.

It was with this understanding that Starkey came into the circle of Robert Boyle, John Locke, and Isaac Newton. Like Newton, Starkey is a rare breed among alchemists and among historical figures in general. You see, we have his personal notebooks, and so in addition to deciphering his published works, we get a glimpse behind the curtain into the sort of man he really was. Dr. Principe worked to translate those scribbled writings from their original Latin into English and in them we find a man working to untangle the mysteries of the universe, to puzzle out its causes and effects.

Starkey's Pseudonym. Library of Congress, Rare Book Room. Photo: mine

At the dawn of the modern age, Starkey and his cabal of conspirators wrote to each other as they quested to remake human knowledge. Starkey spent most of his free time beside his furnace, distilling various substances and trying to piece together the makeup of creation. He calculated mass lost to volatile vapors, discovered all manner of variously useful materials, and kept diligent notes that revealed a rather stubborn and quizzical nature. In a curious twist on the traditional method: rather than debate the nature of matter in the cloistered halls of the colleges, Starkey brought his inquiries directly to Nature herself, occasionally asking questions only to be refuted by the fire.

Aside from his successes making ice powder and specialist oils, Starkey described a new kind of "Philosophical Mercury" which he claims will lead him to his ultimate goal of making the Liquor Alkahest, a precursor to the philosopher's stone. He struggles with his work and his increasingly meager finances for years until...