Good day dear Hive community, first of all I would like to wish you all a pleasant day and hope you had a great start to the new year! Today I would like to talk about the connection of an important personality and alchemy and hope you can learn something new.
Here are some artworks that I created with the help of artificial intelligence and present the well-known German Poet Johann Wolfang von Goethe (1749 - 1832). He is considered a very diverse personality and his works have shaped literature all over the world and he was also very interested in many other areas and so he also dealt with botany, medicine, physics, politics and minerals and he was known for having a large collection of minerals which consisted of over 17,000 specimens. The mineral Goethite was also named after him and in the past I have already discussed it in more detail and if you want to learn more about it, you will find my contribution here. Already in his early year at the age of 16 he was supported by his parents and started his first studies and he moved to Leipzig for purpose and during this time he also decided to devote himself to literature and wrote his first poems and later, he decided to continue his studies in Strasbourg and during this time also his interest in medicine grew and another big milestone was the publication of his first book which had helped him to become more famous. About five years later he moved to Weimar where he also integrated into politics and made a name for himself in this area and also continued to pursue his other interests and researched a lot in botany or mineralogy and while he used pretty much every free minute to devote himself to his literary works. Because of some unrest and crises in his life, he moved to Italy in 1786 where he had dealt intensively with culture and mythology and the collected inspirations flowed into his works and two years later he came back to Weimar and began to express his experiences artistically and he dealt a lot with various branches of art and until his death he devoted himself to all his passions.
Now I have already dealt with his life and would like to come to the actual topic of my contribution, Goethe and alchemy. Goethe dealt a lot with occult or supernatural topics and his occult side appears in many of his works and many of his works have only emerged on the basis of occultism and views in this area. Already in his youth he dealt a lot with alchemy and went deeply into the topic and he built up a great knowledge about it and also conducted research and especially the symbolism and mystical side of alchemy was very important for Goethe. Especially in his work Faust, which is strongly influenced by occult principles, he addresses the mysterious aspects of alchemy and he himself was very influenced by the philosophy of the alchemists of the Middle Ages and for a better understanding of the topic, it was also to his advantage to have previously dealt with other topics such as medicine, minerals or natural philosophy. In his older works, the alchemical knowledge he acquired at a young age had an enormous influence and he decided to process it and some disease-related experiences in his life increased his interest and he devoted himself a lot to producing medicine himself. Some of these experiments were extremely successful and he was able to cure his diseases very well and often there is talk of a certain salt that could be used as a kind of universal medicine and he also described the search of the philosopher's stone and interesting is probably that Goethe worked with a lot of encryption in this context and often dealt with the topic rather subliminally.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to read through my post and I hope you like it and can learn something new about alchemy!