America’s Alchemist and Founding Grandfather — John Winthrop the Younger
John Winthrop Jr: the New England alchemist, colony founder, healer, and politician whose story is too important to be kept in the dark any longer.
John Winthrop the Younger (born in England February 12, 1606, died in Massachusetts April 6, 1676) was the son of John Winthrop Sr, the more well-known leader among the Puritan dissenters who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony. His father’s biblically inspired notion of the fledgling colony as a model for the world to look up to, a “City upon a Hill,” would lead to the idea of America’s exceptional place among the nations of the world. As the founder of his own colony in New London, Winthrop Jr would pursue this idealistic path, though in a slightly different direction. He later became a distinguished governor of the Connecticut colony, and all the while busied himself with experimentation in the alchemical arts.
Why is John Winthrop Jr’s life worth investigating?
As a master of alchemy, Winthrop pursued the occult, magic, and hidden wisdom, conducting experiments that shaped his entire life as a founder, healer, and politician. His influence on early New England helped to shape the way Americans would define the mystical purpose of their republic
His story bears witness to the manifold nature of Puritan America. The founders of the New England colonies were of many minds right from the beginning, and Winthrop was not the only alchemist around
As colonial governor, Winthrop used his occult education in a surprising way to bring about the end of witch-hunts in Connecticut. Winthrop saw through the madness of witchcraft trials, yet dismissed such accusations not as a mere skeptic, but rather as a learned occultist
Winthrop navigated multiple worlds and founded some of his own. As founder of the settlement in New London, he pursued diplomacy with the Pequot nation (a former enemy of the English settlers) and gained their respect. The settlement became a Mecca of healing, with many seeking out Winthrop’s medicinal treatment. In the political sphere, he asserted the sovereignty of Connecticut in the face of pressure from the Crown by obtaining a colonial charter, and he represented the New World as a founding member of the scientific Royal Society in London
How did an alchemist become one of Puritan New England’s most highly regarded citizens?
For most Americans, it’s easy to have a cartoonish impression of early New England. This is due to the glossover treatment that this time period frequently gets from public school teachers, if it’s even taught at all. You may hear about the Pilgrims at Plymouth, their mythic feast with the Indians at the First Thanksgiving in 1621. Then, fast forward to nearly the end of the century: 1692. This was the year of the Salem Witch Trials, which haunt the American consciousness unlike any other event in our early history. The austerity of the Puritan brand of Calvinist Christianity seems impossible to comprehend for those of us living in a secularized age. Puritans, we imagine, would fall too easily into paranoid hysteria due to their religious zealotry. Their worldview seems to be one of regression, an attempt to restore a lost paradise in a new wilderness.
Even a well-read student of American history may wonder why the Puritans would tolerate alchemists in their midst. Weren’t the Puritans just a bunch of religious extremists, a Protestant Taliban who liked to hang witches for fun? Wouldn’t the magical aspects of alchemy be a little too… Satanic… for these Puritan conquerors of a brave new world? After all, there were all those hangings of alleged sorcerers and whatnot….
Meanwhile, whatever impression we have about ‘alchemy,’ as it was practiced over 400 years ago, might be just as cartoonish as our impression of the Puritans. Alchemy has faced neglect by serious historians, perceived as something pseudoscientific or not worth serious research; Winthrop has been likewise relegated to a curiosity at best. Another issue is that numerous spiritual movements and life hack gurus have defined alchemy as something to be understood only in metaphorical or spiritual terms: an inner transmutation that needs to be done to hone one’s body, mind, or spirit. Neither of these viewpoints is helpful….
About a decade ago, Walter Woodward published Prospero’s America, an illuminating study offering an examination of the time period and events surrounding Winthrop’s life. One of Woodward’s main themes is that the Puritans, as 17th century “futurists,” were interested in progress, not regress. They weren’t sitting around being silent, prayerful, and contemplative… that would have been too spiritual, too Catholic (Puritan synonym for Satanic). This did not mean Puritans didn’t see the hand of Almighty God at work everywhere, controlling all phenomena whether good or bad. It also doesn’t mean they didn’t appeal to spiritual tools like prayer, astrology, or folk magic. They just wanted to get to work and get things done. You could discern the meaning of Providence only if you were willing to put in the effort. And if you weren’t busy getting prosperous, well, that might have meant you were on your way to damnation.
The early Puritan colonists’ willingness to engage in mystical experimentation coupled with practical work was most evident in their medical practice. As Woodward writes:
Minister-physicians in Puritan New England incorporated divine influence into every aspect of pathology and its remediation. All physicians performed in this world, through God’s blessings on the means they used, small demonstrations of the great physical transmutation to come. Alchemical physicians, particularly when they participated in the quest to transmute base materials into the panacea alkahest, linked Christian healing to the Christian promise of the Resurrection.
Walter W. Woodward, Prospero’s America (p 201)
Thus, the alchemical goal of ushering in a “great physical transmutation to come” fit the Puritan viewpoint of the new American continent, regardless of what personal opinions one might have had about details of faith or theology. The idea that they rejected any and all magical or alchemical practices is flat out wrong. Both the more traditionally minded religious Puritans and the alchemical practitioners had more in common than not; they were united by a common goal of transmuting humanity and the world.
Winthrop’s journey to America
Like his father, Winthrop became possessed by utopian spiritual visions, though he differed from his father’s rigid religiosity, preferring to seek knowledge from other texts in addition to the Bible. After studying at Trinity College in Dublin, Winthrop went to London in 1624 to study law. But legal studies must have bored Winthrop, because he began to skip out on his studies to pursue alchemical knowledge and find members of a legendary group called the Rosicrucians, whose leader had anonymously published texts in Germany calling for universal brotherhood and betterment of civilization, which would be achieved by combining ancient occult wisdom with emerging principles of medicine, alchemy, mathematics, and mechanics.
Whoever authored these Rosicrucian texts performed a powerful act of 17th Century meme-magic, because the historical record suggests that the Rosicrucian fraternity wasn’t a real group at all, but one in name only. The idea of their fraternity, however, grew to the point where chapters of men calling themselves Rosicrucians began popping up all over Europe.
The idea of creating a new, alchemical civilization for the transmutation of the whole world was seductive at a time when religion-fueled wars and fallout from the Protestant Reformation were tearing Europe apart. Winthrop’s own English homeland would be plagued by the English Civil War, which was partly a religious conflict. What we call ‘progress’ today in the West has its roots in this time period, in the earnest desire by leading thinkers to imagine a better world, one that could be perfected by human will and transcend the squabbles of religious factions.
Indeed, the religious wars in Europe catalyzed the beginning of Winthrop’s intellectual and spiritual pilgrimage when, in 1627, he went along with the Duke of Buckingham on a mission to help Protestant French Huguenots at La Rochelle. The effort failed, but ended up being a springboard for young Winthrop to make an esoteric pilgrimage across the Mediterranean. Before he knew it, Winthrop was traversing through Italy and Turkey, seeing with his own eyes places most Englishmen would only know from legends. We are familiar nowadays with Westerners wanting to venture East in search of wisdom, but Winthrop made his journey eastward at a time when travel was a luxury, not to mention dangerous. But since the Islamic world at that time was known to hold many occult texts from the Ancient Greeks, Egyptians, and other civilizations, the risks must have seemed worth it to Winthrop. After a 14-month journey, he finally returned to England in 1629 a changed man.
Just two years later, Winthrop kicked off his career in the New World. He began as an assistant to his father John Sr in Boston, before venturing out on his own. He had a keen interest in mineral exploits as well as taking advantage of the wild New England landscape as a vast alchemical laboratory. He made several trips back and forth between Old and New World in the 1630s and 40s, at a time when intercontinental travel was impossible for most people, making contacts with various experts in the broad pansophic movement. Ultimately, a vision for his own colony founded on pansophic principles led him to what became New London, Connecticut.
So, what did an alchemist like Winthrop actually do?
Woodward’s study is highly informative of the world of Winthrop, though the personal details of Winthrop the man or his routines aren’t so clear—in particular, his specific alchemical practices aren’t always known.
Nevertheless, we can extrapolate a lot about the kinds of things he might have been into. Winthrop was an avid collector of occult texts which he brought with him to the New World. In particular, he had many books from the personal library of John Dee, who was an advisor to Queen Elizabeth I and an accomplished mathematician, astrologist, and occultist. Woodward notes that Winthrop adopted Dee’s alchemical monas hieroglyphica, which he marked on his various crates of possessions that were shipped overseas from England (p 35). Such symbols were intended by occultists to elicit a deeper language of nature which awaited human interpretation, so perhaps this was an attempt by Winthrop in his daily life to manifest the truth masked behind physical reality.
The practical goals of Winthrop’s New London colony included mining and locating profitable minerals like iron and lead. But beyond practicality and profit, the alchemical quest must have always been on Winthrop’s mind. If he could discover the alkahest, a theorized material that would dissolve a substance into its basic parts, then he could recreate substances out of anything. Or if the philosopher’s stone could be found somewhere in this mysterious New England wilderness, then Winthrop might have been able to turn any native mineral into gold, to manufacture a lavish hoard that would rival the treasure troves the Spanish Conquistadors had plundered from the Aztec and the Inca….
There was always a great deal of secrecy in alchemical experimentation, which may be another explanation for the lack of details on Winthrop’s actual practices. But for any kind of Christian alchemist such as Winthrop, it would have also been important to have a degree of humility and submission to God’s will, for this knowledge was a volatile substance that could be lethal in the wrong hands. In a letter to Samuel Hartlib, Winthrop speaks of a divine purpose behind the obscurity of material knowledge:
God hideth from the unworthy vaine sinfull world many excellent things, which he knoweth they are very apt to abuse, turning all to pride and luxury and vanity, and such as God hath revealed such excellent secrets as might be of use to mankind they [the alchemists] feare the divulging of them least they should be turned to abuse by the vaine world.
John Winthrop Jr, as cited by Woodward (p 39)
As secretive as Winthrop’s personal experiments may have been, by the late 1650s his reputation as a knowledgeable, alchemical healer among New England’s colonist population soared. Colonists would make journeys of weeks or months to get to New London and stay for long periods. The nearby Pequot Indians were impressed by his skills as well, and Winthrop learned a lot about native medicine as well.
By and large, Puritans had a providential view of illness, seeing disease as a test from God, and indeed, they saw the smallpox that affected the Indian populations as evidence of God’s grace against the heathen unbelievers. Nevertheless, early New England lacked licensed medical doctors, so practically speaking providential beliefs could only endure for so long. This was a world in which even a routine illness could mean death, especially for infants and children. Alongside traditional herbal medicine of the medieval European tradition, Winthrop experimented with chemical medicines made out of minerals, forerunners of modern pharmaceutical medicine we know today.
Humbling the Devil
After Winthrop became governor of Connecticut in 1657, he presided over witch trials at Hartford. Up until that point, the court had a 100% conviction rate for witchcraft cases; 7 out of 7 accused witches had been condemned since 1647 (Woodward, p 227). But once Winthrop showed up, that began to change. As Woodward argues, Winthrop’s dismissal of witchcraft accusations was rooted in being a learned occultist rather than a rationalist skeptic. He would have seen magical and alchemical practice as a complex system of forces that would be too much for the average person to be capable of doing without the right education (p 212). So oddly enough, it was his somewhat elitist attitude perhaps that ended up saving the lives of the women who were accused during his tenure as governor. Also, it’s important to realize that the purpose of having witchcraft trials in the first place was to ascertain whether the magic involved was diabolical or not. Thus, Winthrop would have been seen as a qualified man for the job.
As mentioned earlier, Puritans were surprisingly tolerant of magical practices, insofar as they did not breach the boundaries of acceptable Christian practice. Conducting experiments with new technology or materials might have seemed magical, but was not problematic for the Church. Likewise, ritualistic activities in conjunction with such experiments, like prayer, invoking God, angels, or timing experiments to astrological seasons, were also okay (Woodward p 38). However, if such experiments or invocations were used for personal gain or power, even something as minor as curing a personal ailment, there could be grounds for suspecting the devil was involved.
Of course, in isolated colonial communities, the definition of what was acceptable versus unacceptable might come down to whether the community liked you or not. As with the more famous witchcraft cases in Massachusetts, it seemed that long pent-up grudges and disputes between neighbors had the tendency to ignite a firestorm of witchcraft accusations.
For the difficult task of arbitrating acceptable versus unacceptable magic, Winthrop had the help of a fellow occult expert Gershom Bulkely, who had recently taken over as minister of Hartford. In the case of Katherine Harrison, who was convicted of witchcraft by a jury, Winthrop and Bulkely succeeded in convincing the magistrates to overturn the verdict. The magistrates of the courts had appealed to the expertise of the two men in occult matters, especially since the accused witch Harrison was well versed in astrology. She was also a local healer and would have therefore treaded the danger zone between licit and illicit practices. Since Harrison was a widow who had a long history of contention with her neighbors, that sadly made it even easier for her to fall under accusations of witchcraft.
Bulkely called into question the thinness of evidence against Katherine Harrison, including spectral evidence, which was the legal concept of using witnesses’ reports of visions in a court of law against accused witches. The specter (or spirit) could have been of the witch in question, or of a creature employed by the witch (a familiar). In either case, these specters were thought to be used by a witch to torment their victim remotely. Bulkely and Winthrop insisted that if spectral evidence was going be used at all, then at least two witnesses would have to see the same thing at the same time. What this did was effectively rule out the use of spectral evidence without actually discrediting it (which might have offended some of the local populace).
In addition, Bulkely emphasized the line between acceptable vs unacceptable magical practices, and while he, like Winthrop, might have dismissed practitioners like Harrison as amateurs, it was argued that the diabolical was not involved in Harrison’s practice, or at least there was a lack of evidence to convict. Most strikingly, Bulkely makes a theological assertion that relegated Satan to the status of “glorified fortune teller”; he argued that while Satan had considerable power on Earth, it would be too presumptive to give him too much credit, and indeed sacrilegious (Woodward, p 250).
As a Christian alchemist above all, we can assume that Winthrop, like Bulkely, would have subscribed to a thoughtful basis for his faith, not ascribing undue power to Satan, as many fearful settlers of the New England colonies seemed to do. This episode highlights the great irony of extreme Puritan thought in the New World: in their satanic panic about warding off evil, they were in fact praying too much to the devil, rather than appealing to the God of their faith.
The political scene
Earlier in his career, Winthrop had made his political mark as a founder of the New London colony and by forging an alliance with the Pequot nation, whom the English settlers had recently fought a war with. This put him at odds not only with his own father and the colonial authorities of both Massachusetts and Connecticut, but also with the Mohegan tribe under Uncas, who were in conflict with the Pequots. At times, the colonial authorities sided against Winthrop in favor of the Mohegans, though ultimately due to popular outrage, Winthrop was allowed to continue running New London in peace.
Winthrop sought to learn from the Pequots and indeed his efforts ensured that the tribe wasn’t wiped out under Mohegan or English aggression. He worked closely with a Pequot named Cassacinamon who became a valued informant to Winthrop on intertribal relations that were crucial to Winthrop. There is no evidence to suggest Winthrop regarded the Pequots or any other native nation as inferior, and he sought to live alongside them at Nimeaug, the Pequot settlement near the future New London. For his mining ventures, he affirmed native customs in land purchase thanks to his understanding of Pequot ways. The Pequots, likewise, seemed to have respected Winthrop, since he was perceived to embody the talents of a tribal leader and shaman all in one.
Even more significant in the political realm was Winthrop’s success in preserving self-government for the Connecticut colony. Just as the colonies in New England were getting going in the 1640s, the political situation in Old England deteriorated to a point where war broke out between pro-monarchist and pro-parliament forces. King Charles I was beheaded, and a republican, albeit dictatorial, government under Oliver Cromwell took over.
After a shaky decade or so known as the Interregnum, and Cromwell’s death, the monarchy was restored under King Charles II. Charles II was eager to reassert the King’s authority, and this meant eyeing the colonies in New England with suspicion. This was because New England’s Puritans would have been sympathetic to the republican regime; the war had been both political and religious in nature. Many Puritans thought that the Reformation had not gone far enough in England, and that the King and his Anglican church were just a new version of the Pope and his Roman Catholic Church.
Indeed, many who had signed King Charles I’s death warrant, including Winthrop’s own father-in-law, sought refuge in Connecticut after the Restoration. Therefore, Charles II began to make efforts to gather intel on the colonies, which had more or less been left to their own devices during the Interregnum. To this end, the Royal Society was founded in part to keep tabs on colonial possessions under the guise of collecting “natural history” data on these regions; later in life Winthrop rebuffed requests for supplying London with a comprehensive natural history time and again. In his time at London, Winthrop pledged loyalty to the King while securing Connecticut its colonial charter, which consolidated the New Haven and Connecticut colonies into one entity, and was the basis of Connecticut’s government even several decades after the United States became an independent country from Britain.
The Esoteric States of America
Today, an often discussed political trope is whether America is/was a “Christian nation.” Without a doubt, American culture has its foundations in Christian faith. But to be more precise, Winthrop’s story bares witness to the fact that America is and always has been an esoteric nation, even in its Christian cultural expressions. Winthrop life affirms the early nature of experiment in faith, science, and society that were key to defining the American experience. We should likewise not forget that Puritans were very interested in material prosperity, even going so far as to claim that being rich might have indicated a person was in good graces with God, so modern notions of combining the American dream with a quasi-spiritual “You-do-you” are quite a logical extension of the philosophy that many of those scary, dark hat wearing Calvinists would have felt at home with.
That being said, the degree of You-do-you—ism varies depending on what region of America you find yourself in. Puritans might have indeed been interested in the transmutation of the world, but there was nothing touchy-feely about it. Remember, these were the people who organized their own War on Christmas. God help you if didn’t quite conform to the requirements of the church, or be a member of another group like the Quakers (gasp!); you might literally find yourself at the end of a rope.
Though New England’s Congregational churches have long since transformed out of being witch-hanging institutions and nobody in the government in Boston is too interested in theology as governance, some would argue that this ghost of stern utopianism still haunts contemporary politics in Massachusetts, which has lead to people in other parts of the country to see the Yankees as intrusive do-gooders. But, in the spirit of Winthrop, perhaps we should take such spectral evidence with a grain of salt. America is largely a nation of nations, and to the extent that You-do-you—ism is a part of our broad culture, there are still many arguments about how to go about doing it. The creature called America is constantly shapeshifting and defies clear explanation. One thing is for certain: in between the pursuit of profit, property, God, and happiness, there has been a whole lot of experimentation. The story of American alchemists like John Winthrop Jr shows us it was there right from the beginning.