Isaac Newton's occult studies
Based on Wikipedia: Isaac Newton's occult studies
The Secret Life of Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton predicted the world would end in 2060. He spent decades trying to turn lead into gold. He believed ancient temples contained encoded messages from God. And he thought metals might be alive.
This wasn't some crackpot working in obscurity. This was the same man who invented calculus, discovered the laws of motion, and explained why planets orbit the sun. The architect of modern physics spent more time on alchemy and biblical prophecy than he ever did on the science that made him famous.
When Newton died in 1727, his estate faced an awkward problem. The great scientist had left behind an enormous collection of manuscripts, but most of them weren't about physics or mathematics at all. They were filled with alchemical recipes, biblical interpretations, and elaborate chronologies attempting to date ancient history using scripture. The estate's evaluator, a physician named Thomas Pellet, declared the bulk of this material "not fit to be printed." It was hidden away for over two hundred years.
A Fire in the Laboratory
Newton first encountered alchemy as a twelve-year-old boy. He was boarding in the attic above an apothecary's shop—essentially an early pharmacy where medicines were compounded from various substances. The smells, the experiments, the mysterious transformations of matter: they captivated him. This fascination never left.
We don't know the full extent of Newton's alchemical work. Much of it may have been destroyed in a fire that swept through his laboratory. But what survived reveals an obsession that consumed decades of his life.
His goal? The philosopher's stone.
To modern ears, this sounds like fantasy—the stuff of Harry Potter novels. But to Newton and his contemporaries, it was serious science. The philosopher's stone was believed to be a substance capable of transmuting base metals like lead into gold. Some alchemists also believed it could produce the Elixir of Life, granting immortality or at least dramatically extended youth.
Newton watched an experiment called "Diana's Tree," in which silver dissolved in acid would gradually crystallize into branching, tree-like structures. To him, this wasn't just a chemical reaction. He saw it as evidence that metals "possessed a sort of life." They grew. They transformed. Perhaps they could be perfected.
Why We Never Knew
Newton kept his alchemical work secret, and for good reason.
In seventeenth-century England, alchemy was dangerous. The Crown feared that successful alchemists might flood the market with artificial gold, destroying the economy. Unscrupulous practitioners had already given the field a bad reputation, promising wealthy patrons miraculous results and delivering nothing but empty purses. The penalties were severe. In some cases, convicted alchemists were hanged on gilded scaffolds, their bodies decorated with tinsel and fake gold—a grim joke at their expense.
But Newton had other reasons for secrecy too. He was famously sensitive to criticism, almost pathologically so. His disputes with Robert Hooke over optics left him so wounded that he refused to publish his full work on light until after Hooke died. His calculus sat in his desk for thirty-eight years before he released it to the public, a delay that sparked a bitter priority dispute with the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
If Newton was reluctant to publish his groundbreaking mathematics for fear of criticism, imagine how he felt about his alchemical experiments. The scientific community was already beginning to view alchemy with skepticism. Robert Boyle, Newton's contemporary and fellow member of the Royal Society, had published work establishing the foundations of modern chemistry. Newton knew Boyle's approach was more rigorous, more systematic. Yet he continued his own esoteric experiments in private.
The Portsmouth Papers
After Newton's death, his papers passed to his niece Catherine through her husband John Conduitt. The family kept them for generations, eventually landing in the possession of the Earls of Portsmouth. For nearly two centuries, almost no one saw them.
Then, in 1936, the ninth Earl of Portsmouth needed money. He consigned Newton's unpublished manuscripts to Sotheby's auction house in London. The sale catalogue listed 329 lots. More than a third of them dealt with alchemy.
The scientific world was stunned.
One of the most eager bidders was an unlikely figure: John Maynard Keynes, the economist who would later reshape how governments manage their economies. Keynes was fascinated by Newton not as a scientist but as a human being, a figure far more complex than the marble bust in Trinity College suggested. He bought many of the alchemical manuscripts himself.
After studying them, Keynes delivered a famous lecture in which he declared that Newton was "not the first of the age of reason" but "the last of the magicians." He was the final great mind to look at the world as the ancients had—a universe full of secret codes and hidden wisdom waiting to be deciphered.
Decoding the Universe
Newton believed the universe was a puzzle box created by God, and that the key to unlocking it lay scattered across ancient texts. The Greeks, the Egyptians, the Hebrews—all of them had possessed profound knowledge that had since been lost or obscured. Newton's task, as he saw it, was to recover this wisdom.
This concept had a name: prisca sapientia, Latin for "ancient wisdom." According to this view, God had revealed fundamental truths to Adam and Moses directly. These truths had been passed down through generations, encoded in scripture, architecture, and symbolic language. Over time, they had been corrupted or forgotten. But they could be recovered by a sufficiently dedicated scholar.
Newton believed he was that scholar.
He taught himself Hebrew so he could read the Old Testament in its original language, though he relied heavily on dictionaries since his knowledge remained limited. He annotated a treatise on alchemy that had been given to him by a colleague, writing in the margins about Solomon, the ancient Israelite king renowned for his wisdom:
This philosophy, both speculative and active, is not only to be found in the volume of nature, but also in the sacred scriptures, as in Genesis, Job, Psalms, Isaiah and others. In the knowledge of this philosophy, God made Solomon the greatest philosopher in the world.
If Solomon was the greatest philosopher, then Solomon's Temple—the great structure he built to house the Ark of the Covenant—must contain philosophical secrets.
The Temple as Time Machine
Newton spent years studying the dimensions of Solomon's Temple. His primary sources were the biblical books of First Kings and Ezekiel, which describe the structure in considerable detail. But Newton didn't see these descriptions as mere architectural records.
He believed the temple's proportions encoded a chronology of Hebrew history. By understanding its geometry, he could work backward to establish precise dates for ancient events. This was crucial for his larger project of creating an accurate timeline of world history, which he eventually published as The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended.
Newton drew heavily on the work of a Spanish Jesuit named Juan Bautista Villalpando, who had published elaborate reconstructions of the temple based on Ezekiel's visions. Villalpando's engravings showed a building of tremendous complexity and beauty, its proportions supposedly derived from divine revelation. His work had sparked a craze across Europe. Physical models of the temple were built and displayed publicly. One enormous model, thirteen feet high and eighty feet in circumference, was exhibited at the Royal Exchange in London, where visitors could view it for half a crown.
Newton's own analysis of the temple appeared posthumously in 1728, adding to the public fascination. But for Newton, this wasn't entertainment. It was detective work on the grandest possible scale—an attempt to read God's secret message encoded in stone and measurement.
The End of the World
Newton approached the Bible the same way he approached physics: as a system governed by precise rules that could be discovered through careful study. He wrote extensively on the Book of Revelation, the apocalyptic final chapter of the New Testament, attempting to decode its symbolic language.
In a manuscript from 1704, Newton calculated that the world would end no earlier than 2060. He was careful about this prediction, noting that he made it "not to assert when the time of the end shall be, but to put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently predicting the time of the end, and by doing so bring the sacred prophecies into discredit as often as their predictions fail."
This is vintage Newton: supremely confident in his own methods, dismissive of others who attempted the same work, and convinced that the problem simply required the right analytical framework.
He didn't consider himself a prophet. Prophets receive divine revelation directly. Newton believed he was something different: an interpreter, someone capable of understanding what the actual prophets had written. The Bible would "prophesy for him," as he put it. He just needed to crack the code.
He even wrote a manuscript titled "Rules for interpreting the words & language in Scripture"—essentially a user's manual for decoding biblical prophecy.
The Same Notebook
Here's what makes Newton so difficult to understand from a modern perspective: he didn't see any contradiction between his scientific work and his occult studies. They were all part of the same project.
His surviving notebooks show optical experiments written on the same pages as alchemical recipes copied from obscure medieval sources. The investigation of light and the search for the philosopher's stone were equally valid ways of uncovering nature's secrets. Newton invented new symbols and notation systems for both.
This wasn't unusual for his time. The seventeenth century was an in-between era. The Scientific Revolution was underway, but the categories we now take for granted—science versus pseudoscience, chemistry versus alchemy, astronomy versus astrology—were still being defined. Isaac Newton stood precisely at this historical pivot point, one foot in the ancient world of hidden wisdom and sacred codes, the other in the emerging world of experimental verification and mathematical law.
Which Newton was the real one? The physicist who explained the motion of planets, or the mystic who hunted for the philosopher's stone?
Keynes argued they were the same person, that Newton's scientific genius was inseparable from his conviction that the universe contained secret patterns waiting to be revealed. His law of universal gravitation wasn't derived from experiments, at least not initially. It was an intuition—a guess—that Newton then dressed up in geometric proofs to make it respectable. The same mind that saw hidden messages in scripture also saw hidden order in the heavens.
The Nervous Breakdown
Newton suffered a serious mental breakdown in the early 1690s, during the peak of his alchemical work. He became paranoid, writing strange accusatory letters to friends. He couldn't sleep. His handwriting deteriorated. Some historians have speculated that mercury poisoning from his alchemical experiments may have contributed—mercury was a common ingredient in alchemical recipes, and chronic exposure causes neurological damage.
Whatever the cause, Newton eventually recovered. He moved to London, took a government position as Warden of the Royal Mint, and spent his later years prosecuting counterfeiters with the same obsessive attention to detail he had once devoted to decoding Revelation. He was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705, the first scientist ever to receive that honor.
When he died in 1727, he was the most famous scientist in the world. His Principia Mathematica had transformed physics. His Opticks had revealed the secrets of light and color. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, among kings and poets.
The alchemical manuscripts went into storage. The biblical chronologies gathered dust. For two centuries, the world remembered Newton the way his estate wanted him remembered: as a monument to pure reason.
Strange Seas of Thought
The poet William Wordsworth, writing a century after Newton's death, described him as "a mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone." Wordsworth meant this as praise for Newton's scientific imagination. But the description is even more apt than he knew.
Newton's strange seas included alchemical furnaces glowing late into the night. Ancient Hebrew texts parsed word by word. The precise measurements of a temple destroyed two thousand years before he was born. A date circled in the future when all earthly history would end.
Today, Newton's alchemical and theological manuscripts are scattered across collections in Jerusalem, Cambridge, and Oxford. Several digitization projects have made them available online, allowing scholars—and curious readers—to explore the hidden dimensions of Newton's mind. The Chymistry of Isaac Newton Project and The Newton Project are working to transcribe and publish everything.
What emerges from these documents is a portrait far stranger and more fascinating than the marble bust suggests. Isaac Newton wasn't just a scientist who happened to have some odd hobbies. The same obsessive drive, the same conviction that nature's secrets could be unlocked through careful study, animated all his work. He was looking for the same thing in a prism that he was looking for in the Book of Daniel: evidence of a rational, ordered universe created by an intelligent God.
He found part of the answer in mathematics and physics. The rest of the puzzle, he never solved. But he never stopped looking.
The world hasn't ended yet. We have until 2060 to see if his biblical calculations were as accurate as his laws of motion.