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Performing Science and the Virtual

This dazzling new book from Sue-Ellen Case looks at how science has been
performed throughout history, tracing a line from eleventh-century alchemy to
the twenty-first-century virtual avatar.
Theatre and science are deeply interwoven in the European tradition, both in
historical development and in strategies of representation. As science and new
technologies become more pervasive in the social world, whilst at the same time
retreating into their own specialized disourses, performances of their power
provide a familiar, active interface with them. Performing Science and the Virtual
reviews how these performances borrow from spiritualist notions of transcen-
dence, as well as the social codes of race, gender and economic exchange.
In this daring and wide-ranging book we encounter Faust, glimpse Edison in
his laboratory, enter the soundscape of John Cage and raid tombs with Lara
Croft. Case looks at the intersection of science and performance in a way that
unsettles our assumptions across these disciplines.

Sue-Ellen Case is Professor and Chair of Critical Studies, Theater UCLA,

where she also directs the Center for Performance Studies.
Performing Science and the
Virtual

Sue-Ellen Case
First published 2007
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park,Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
© 2007 Sue-Ellen Case
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or
by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photo-
copying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Case, Sue-Ellen.
Performing science and the virtual / by Sue-Ellen Case. – 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Science—History—19th century. 2. Science—History—20th century. 3. Science—History—
21st century. 4.Technology—History—19th century. 5.Technology—History—20th century.
6.Technology—History—21st century. 7. Science and the arts. 8.Technology and the arts. 9.
Science—Social aspects. 10.Technology—Social aspects. I.Title.
Q125.C3837 2006
500—dc22 2006020716
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0–203–96716–X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-41438-5 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-41438-8 (hbk)

ISBN10: 0-415-41439-3 (pbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-41439-5 (pbk)
ISBN10: 0-203-96716-X (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-96716-4 (ebk)
For Susan Leigh Foster, divine choreographer
Contents

List of illustrations x
Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

Prologue Theater’s rebirth 7

All the world’s a theater: war and science 10

Act One Alchemy 15

From mercurial change to monetary stasis 18
Coding and decoding: Isaac Newton, alchemist 20
Gender and sex in alchemy 26
Alchemy’s antagonist: Ben Jonson 27
The gender divide: The Roaring Girl 30
Faust: the new paradigm of alchemy 32
Faust I: the fall from Goethean science 35
Proliferation of virtual spaces 39
Faust II: transcendent gender and money 41
Virtualizing the feminine gender 45
The apotheosis of gender 46
Eurythmy: erforming Goethean science 49

Entr’acte The price of admission 51

Act Two Grassroots performances of science 58

Accessing the virtual plane 60
The advent of the avatar 62
A sometimes man: fleshing out the gendered avatar 64
Embodied geography: Tibet 66
Mme. Blavatsky’s phenomenal physics vs. the theater of Darwin 70
viii Contents

The Gothic medium of matter 75

Gothic ghosts haunt Marx 77
The medium of invention: Edison and G.B. Shaw 80
Tortured alchemy meets Darwinism: Strindberg 82

Act Three A century of science 86

Scene One: the early years 89
Expressionist schematics 90
Between typewriter and electric chair: Machinal 92
Vampiric typewriters 95
Revue-ing sewing machines: Pins and Needles 96
The Adding Machine 98
Animating the machines: the robot 99
Factories of death: Gas 101
Expressionist futures 103
Machine-love: the Futurist embrace 104
Futurist futures 107
Engineering Soviet science: Aelita Queen of Mars 108

Scene Two: mid-century modern 114

Cold War alchemy 117
Grassroots sightings of science: UFOs 119
Alien abductions 122
The mechanics of memory: Samuel Beckett and tape 123
Songs of infidelity: Pauline Oliveros and John Cage 128
The theremin and the Cage 131
Virtual closet 137
Out of the sonic closet 138
Scene Three: under-modern: trash 142
Queer and cyber trash 145
Queering trash 147
Trash as dramatic universe: Jack Smith 148
Cyberpunk trash 149
Biospheres and bioreserves 151
Scene Four: neo-nature 152
Virtual Tibet 152
Harmonic Himalaya effect 155
Critical Art Ensemble vs. Frankenature 157
Doing Dolly: cloning and Caryl Churchill 159
 Running head recto ix

Act Four The avatar 163

Twentieth-century Fausts 166
Rocket science and satanism 166
Church of Science 167
Heaven’s Gate 168
Faust is Dead 170
Staging scientists 171
Fleshy physics: Galileo 172
Darwin 177
Heisenberg 181
Einstein on the Beach 182
Cyber-Darwin 185
Avatars of synth-race 185
Sun Ra: Pharoah from Outer Space 188
Channeling New Age avatars 193
Composing the cyber-avatar 196
The avatar as credit 199
Logo-centric avatars 201
The digital diva: Lara Croft 203
Waitingforgodot.com 206
Stelarc 208
The other avatar: neo-minstrels meet Cyber-Vato 209
Transgender avatars are Virtually Yours 215
Transgender express: the Brandon website 218

Notes 223
Bibliography 228
Index 236
Illustrations

1 Frontispiece from Johann Gottfried Kiessling, Relatio practica,

Leipzig, 1752 16
2 Emblem of Solomon’s Temple sketched by Isaac Newton 25
3 “David Garrick is Abel Drugger in Jonson’s The Alchemist” 55
4 Madame Blavatsky 59
5 Dr. Caligari 91
6 Ruth Snyder execution 94
7 Aelita: The Queen of Mars, “All Power to the Soviets” 110
8 Aelita: The Queen of Mars, telescope 111
9 Aelita: The Queen of Mars, set design 112
10 Pauline Oliveros at the Tape Music Center Opening 129
11 Variations V 134
12 Lunar Opera, Tibetan Monks, and Moonstrels 141
13 Final scene from Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, 1976 183
14 Sun Ra from Space is the Place 189
15 Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend 204
16 Waitingforgodot.com 207
17 Kate Bornstein in Virtually Yours 216
18 Big Doll 219
19 Roadtrip 221
Acknowledgments

First, I would like to thank my editor, Talia Rodgers. During this project, I expe-
rienced several crises of confidence and Talia was always wonderfully supportive,
assuring me that a more “horizontal” organization was viable, and leading me to
other books with similar approaches. Several UCLA graduate students have
helped with research, writing, and thinking through some of the issues: Nikki
Eschen, Ayan Gangopadhyay, Jason Farman, Heidi Miller, Yael Prizant, Kaitrin
McDonagh, Cheryl Lubin, and Chantal Rodriguez. My thanks to Candace
Moore and the UCLA Center for the Study of Women for last-minute help with
illustrations. For questions of historical accuracy, I asked Marvin Carlson and
Simon Williams to read early drafts of certain sections. Their responses were
helpful and supportive. But most of all, my partner, Susan Leigh Foster, endured
the long, summer months of obsessive writing with humor; choreographed the
time so that I could work on this project; read numerous drafts; supplied insights
and additions, and corrected my awkward grammar. Moreover, she helped to
create a rich life together that could afford this project.
Introduction

Although I have seen it inscribed on some of the older buildings at some of the
better universities, replete with its capital “S,” the grand, singular noun Science
has lost some of its power to summon. Without the capital inscription, the
sciences join the ever-more-multiple postmodern pluralities of once singular
notions such as globalisms, genders, and feminisms. Yet those of us in academic
disciplines clustered in the Humanities continue to feel the economic and institu-
tional sting of Science, as do many in the mediatized realm of documentary
reportage. While the sciences and their technologies, proliferating wildly, seem to
assimilate more and more of our social, economic, ecological, and aesthetic
reserves, they have also increasingly withdrawn into their own specialized styles
of articulation, consorting exclusively with their chosen forms of so-called facts
and figures and actively rejecting any “humanistic” tracking of their ideas as
“uninformed.” Thus, Science both impounds the social in effect and affect and
retreats from its critical articulation. This book tracks performances inspired by
the reclusive, transcendent status that Science seems to hold in the cultural imag-
inary, from performative rites of its technologies to fearful expulsions of its
machines and ideologies.
My first encounter with the seductive spectacle of new technologies occurred
when I was approximately ten years old. The only entertainment my working-
class parents could afford was Friday nights at the Sears Roebuck department
store. With popcorn in hand, we strolled past the performances of new blenders
and power saws, but the performance that always caught me up in its power and
radiance was the chromed, wailing vacuum cleaner whose reverse air flow held
multiple balls high in the air. While the other apparati simply performed their
intended functions, the vacuum cleaner invoked an invisible power to elevate
those colored orbs into the air, spinning beautifully above the racks of clothes.
Not only did its chrome sheath seduce and its power of transcendence amaze,
but its ability to keep many balls in the air had a deep influence upon my
writing—as this project will demonstrate.
As I grew older, the Sears Roebuck performances were amplified by school
field trips to local laboratories and observatories and enforced participation in
science fairs. The science fairs required me to devise a “winning” demonstration
2 Introduction

of my own little research projects and to note, competitively, how many other
students from other schools were demonstrating their own. Meanwhile, my
parents gave me chemistry sets and telescopes for Christmas, which kept me busy
performing various science-oriented tasks as entertainment, and Hollywood
served up science-fiction films with scientists as heroes. The darker side of
science and technology appeared in various forms: we practiced hiding under
our desks at school in case of a nuclear attack; sonic booms split the skies above
our backyards as test pilots broke the sound barrier over nearby air fields; and, at
school, we were brought into the auditorium to listen to a radio countdown of an
execution in the electric chair.
At the time, I was not aware that these performances of science with its tech-
nological victories and threats had derived from years, even centuries of
imagining Science. Similar demonstrations of apparati had already been
performed in the nineteenth century, notably, in this study, by Thomas Edison;
the science fairs devolved from a century or more of museums of science and the
practices of display; fears of the darker side were as old as Faust legends, and the
performance of machines had inspired numerous playwrights, electronic
composers, and grassroots rites throughout the twentieth century. In order to
review the performance of science, I realized I needed to look to the apparatus
of theater and beyond to what I am calling grassroots performances that have
played out the psychic affect of the ever-imposing rise of science in various
invented rites and social organizations. From the canonical Faust by Goethe to
decoder rings in cereal boxes, then, a variety of performances have served to
locate and define the scientific discoveries of their times. However, the perfor-
mance of science is not simply a matter of the stage or adepts imagining science.
Theater and science are deeply interwoven in the European tradition, both in
historical development and in strategies of representation. As these few examples
illustrate, if theater staged science, science also staged itself as theater.
My studies have revealed two major strategies of representation that have
worked across the fields of science and performance: constructions of virtual
space and the avatar. Both the laboratory and the stage construct a space that is
organized as alternative to the ubiquitous, pedestrian realm. Acting within that
space requires particular codes of behavior, traditions of costuming, and training
in specialized gestures or functions. In order to imagine how that space can be
set apart from quotidian spaces and how behavior in that space might be recog-
nized as “special” or “specialized,” both theater and science have deployed
notions of the virtual and its avatar that are as old as The Upanishads and as new
as cyberspace and online avatars. One way to perceive the particular meaning of
the term “virtual” is to review its definition in the Oxford Dictionary. Usage of the
term in English spans at least four hundred years, referring to both science and
philosophy. “Virtual” is first defined as “Possessed of certain physical virtues or
capacities;” in 1660, it refers to herbs as “possessing certain virtues;” in 1683 it is
a power “capable of producing a certain effect or result; effective, potent,
powerful”; in 1654 it “is so in essence or effect although not formally or actu-
 Introduction 3

ally”; in 1704, it refers to optics “applied to the apparent focus or image resulting
from the effect of reflection or refraction upon rays of light;” and, finally in 1883
from “Dynamics” “of velocity or momentum.” As for “virtuality,” the dictionary
offers three usages: “the possession of force or power;” “Essential nature or
being, apart from external form or embodiment” (1646), and “a virtual (as
opposed to actual) thing, capacity, etc; a potentiality” (1836). Thus, the English
usage of the terms “virtual” and “virtuality” moves across the fields of moral
philosophy, optics, physics, and ontology. This mix of immaterial and material
referents that all somehow display a sense of power and “otherness” is crucial to
the application of virtual space in producing theater and science. It is at once the
effect of an apparatus and a potent realm of essence, apart from function.
Today, one can experience Virtual Reality through new technologies and even
buy virtual property on eBay, finally turning the cyber-virtual realm into real
estate. The economic uses of the virtual do play into this concoction; however,
they are augmented by a crucial addition, one that I will here call “spiritualism.”
Although this term has certain nineteenth-century associations, which do pertain
here, I want to broaden “spiritualism” to include various practices that partici-
pate in alternative imagined spaces inspired by or in resistance to the reception
of science and technology. These notions are sometimes practiced by religions,
sometimes cults, sometimes eccentric individual inventions, and sometimes by
the scientists themselves. Celebrating technologies as transcendent surely partici-
pates in the tradition of elevated spaces and avatars as invented by spiritual
movements; performing spiritual spaces and avatars against science as a fallen
materialist practice also ironically recreates some of science’s own claims; and
perceiving discoveries as “damnable,” as against God and Nature repeats the
Faustian parable, even in the twenty-first century.
As noted above, costumes and specialized systems of gesture and function are
necessary for action in the virtual spaces of science and performance. The
virtual must somehow be made manifest. The tradition of avatars has been
made to represent the somehow “othered presence” in these virtual realms. From
actual scientists in lab coats manipulating their various apparati to Sun Ra with
antennae and Egyptian religious symbols performing the “Pharaoh from Outer
Space,” costumes and behavioral codes are required to mark the dimensions of
these techno-virtual spaces. Reading these codes, I begin with the alchemist, who
purposefully invoked the cosmological in the laboratory, and conclude with the
celebrated cyber-avatar of Lara Croft, who seems to belong solely to the corpo-
rate world of entertainment. Along the way, I hope to show the ways in which,
from alchemist to Lara certain borrowings from among scientific, spiritualist and
performance practices continue to produce the performance of science through
the avatar and the virtual.
While the materials of the book are organized in roughly chronological order,
I have subsumed them under headings that imitate the performative structure of
acts and scenes. My turn to the traditional structures of the play was caused by
several factors. First, as I have already argued in The Domain-Matrix (1996), I
4 Introduction

believe we are caught in an historical era that mixes the customs and beliefs of
print culture with the more performative and episodic spaces of the cyber.
Caught between books and the World Wide Web, ambivalent practices of
writing and reading suggest to me that I could not continue to frame my research
in a strictly print tradition. Thus, not strictly adhering to the confines of print
culture, I have not sought to develop one long sequential argument. While simi-
larities and resonances do prevail among these centuries-long practices, they are
not developmental. So I have assembled them under various rubrics. As the critic
Carolyn Allen remarked, this book might be read as a narrative of tropes.
Contemporary readers may want to read the book as they read the web, seeking
out certain examples of interest and ignoring others, or they may follow links, in
this case tropes that appear in various places throughout the text. I have listed
most of the examples in order to make that opportunity easier. Acts, meaning,
really, performative critical actions, inscribe sets of examples within the temporal
tropes of centuries in the same way that gestures and encounters are caught up
in the temporal form of a theatrical Act.
Even popular computer games have moved from narrative, linear forms to
topological ones, for example The Sims or the Grand Theft Auto series. In both,
players can freely roam the virtual spaces of the game. Grand Theft Auto: San
Andreas, the latest game in a series almost ten years old, even offers an entire state
to explore. Although some narrative form lingers in the game, in that the user
takes on a character and needs to accomplish missions set by the bosses, she or
he may decide to climb a mountain, play various betting games in the casino, get
a tattoo, eat, go to the gym, listen to music, and even have cyber-sex.1 Would that
I could provide these alternatives here, although during the time the reader
peruses this text, all of those activities might occur. With sales of over five million
dollars, what author wouldn’t envy this game?
Second, research today has been radically altered by the internet, particularly
when it concerns popular culture and specifically techno and internet cultures.
While my own training in print scholarship has led me to include a number of
traditional citations, much of the material has been derived from the internet
and may be considered specious by more traditional readers. Hanging on to the
authoritative power of print is becoming more and more anterior to contempo-
rary searches though, and while print does continue to offer some assurance to
the reader, it may actually be just as profligate as the digital. Error and plagia-
rism are not unique to the internet, nor indeed is the cache of documents
deemed “original.” For example, there is no better archive of materials than on
the website of The Newton Project (http://www.newtonproject.ic.ac.uk), funded
by the English Arts and Humanities Research Board and hosted by the Centre
for History of Science, Technology and Medicine at Imperial College London,
in collaboration with Cambridge University. Researchers have uploaded onto the
website an amazing number of Newton’s alchemical manuscripts, which had
previously been very difficult to access. The powerful Google search engine
provides links to many contemporary and historical practices, including images,
 Introduction 5

bibliographies, critical articles, fan websites, production histories, etc. I cannot

imagine why any researcher would ignore its offerings. So net research and net
reading have become ubiquitous in my academic endeavors as well as in the lives
of many of my colleagues and students. Thus, I have attempted to provide some
of the opportunities afforded by the web, while still “appearing” in print.
Finally, I have repeatedly asked myself why I wrote this book, since I have
dedicated the majority of my academic career to work on feminist, or lesbian
approaches to performance, and to politically-oriented productions by German
playwrights. Why now, in the fullness of my career, would I turn to the perfor-
mance of science? And what has become of the campy writing style that has
been my signature? Well, the last question is the easier one to answer. There is
one kind of camp irony that is displayed in the writing style and another kind
that is deeply embedded in the choice of topics and the treatment of them. This
book partakes in the latter. For example, the choice of the grand Mme. Blavatsky
and my insistence upon her title—my serious critical treatment of her as one
worthy to set against those giants of the nineteenth century, such as Darwin or
Strindberg, is as deeply campy as it is legitimate. Likewise, the discussion of
canonical, serious movements, such as Expressionism, set alongside considera-
tions of the harmonic convergence or channeling brings a campy negotiation of
the avant-garde and those practices generally regarded as “wacky.” Or to situate
Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape in proximity to Pauline Oliveros’s Lunar Opera
once again ironically tests the literal “lengths” auteurs have gone to imagine
recursive technologies. Without a campy approach to performance, I would
never have discovered some of these personages, or known how to approach
their work.
As for the deeper question about the object of my research, I can only reply
that I believe I have witnessed The Great Upload in my time. Previous practices
of gender, sexuality, materiality, community, and corporeality have been
uploaded into various new technological zones. While I will confess that this
upload has provoked considerable nostalgia and anger in me, it has also driven
me to witness new forms of performance and sociability—new “cultural life
forms”—as Jordy Jones put it. The damnable collusion between the military and
the corporate in the development and deployment of new technologies has also
inspired many sophisticated forms of resistance. The privileged, highly-capital-
ized, removed practices of science have awakened new grassroots performances
critical of science and its long reach into our micro and macro worlds. Whatever
the outcome, the very assembling of large groups of people at different sites in
the world to meditate on peace in a time of armament is the kind of perfor-
mance that brings me hope. So I have composed a set of examples that I hope
can illustrate historical practices of collusion and resistance, in order to amplify
the perception of how the performance of science is shaping social and
economic forces in our contemporary world.
So let’s pretend that we are in the state of performing science. We meet a
variety of fascinating characters, including the aristocratic Goethe, the imposing
6 Introduction

orientalist fakir Mme. Blavatsky, the brooding, reclusive Strindberg, and catch
glimpses of Newton and Edison in their laboratories. We visit stage productions
of robots, Einstein and Darwin, enter the soundscape of John Cage, play a
computer game with the digital Lara Croft, and become a transgendered cyber-
Brandon.
Prologue

Theater’s rebirth

The curtain opens on the traditional history of theater’s rebirth in Europe. This
story is familiar to most of us who have endured standard coursework in theater
history. The following is a retelling of the myth, or history we have received,
narrated from a different perspective, and with a different emphasis. Here, it will
serve to illustrate the myth of origins deployed in the displacement of performances
designed to induce transformation, or transmutation with a theater of represen-
tation. Hopefully, revealing the specific cultural investment in this displacement
will help to clarify how theater, and its cultural partner, the “new” science have
served to construct a strictly European tradition of the mode of representation.
The ironic tone of this revised narrative has been encouraged by the omissions
and subjugations embedded in the traditional history of origins, particularly as
they have affected the participation of women in cultural production and the
construction of “othered” cultural ethnicities. It will be argued that two basic
strategies of extraction were deployed to displace sciences and rites dedicated to
change: the special role assigned to the human subject and the notion of a
virtual space that was designed for exclusive access.
As the curtain parts, we discover a gathering of men in vestments, near the
altar in the Christian Church, on Easter day, performing the story of the god’s
resurrection. This is the site traditional histories of European theater will insist
upon as the resurrection of theater itself. As the story goes, after centuries of
Christian censure in Western Europe, theater’s rebirth took place, propitiously,
around the performance of the quem queritis (Visitatio Sepulchri), or the liturgy
surrounding Christ’s own resurrection, in the tenth century. While certain trans-
formational practices still remained in the liturgy, such as the transubstantiation
of wine and bread into the body and blood of Christ, the liturgical tropes identi-
fied as those that encouraged theater were tropes concerning the narration of
the life of Christ, celebrated at specific times in the Christian calendar, particu-
larly at Easter. Cut off from its association with other rites, what would become
theater took its cue from the Christian history, re-imagining its own roots as from
an ancient source, Greece, (from around the same period and geographical loca-
tion as Christianity’s), along with its own birth, death, and resurrection—the
latter happily coinciding with the liturgical representation of Christ’s own.
8 Prologue

Church and Theater commingled their strategies. The chronology of the

god’s life was fashioned to fit the now-traditional elements of a plot. Its ulti-
mately happy ending fashioned the god’s life into a comedy. As Dunbar Ogden
(2002: 24) describes it in his definitive study, The Staging of Drama in the Medieval
Church:

The action of our first medieval play embodies a quest which comes to a
successful conclusion in discovery. . . . The structure we may call comic in
that the play moves from complication to happy revelation, turning climacti-
cally on the two-phase revelation: the angel says, “He is risen,” the women
reacting with an Alleluia. . . .

At its rebirth, theater emulated the Christian narrative, emerging from its liturgy.
It did not spring from transformational rites, but as a plotted narrative with
certain specific characteristics of change resulting in a happy ending.
The notion of an actor, or performer, in the European tradition was not
derived from the priest’s ritual of the transformation of the wine and bread. Had
acting been understood as ritualistic and transformative, it might have found
consonance with different traditions in the world and different cosmologies. It
might have remained embedded in ritual, music, and dance and dedicated to
transformation. But the extraction of “theater” from the fusion of change,
dance, and music actually displaced those performances of transmutation. This
extraction constituted one of the major contributions of European culture—a
kind of historical dentistry that produced careful divisions among the arts,
leaving dancers mute and actors less mobile. The success of the extraction
depended on theater’s participation in narrative and representation. The struc-
ture of theater would not be the celebration of a god who corporealized through
ritual; instead the focus was shifted to a man-god who was represented as an absent
figure and whose absence evoked the presence of actors in the Easter liturgy: the
two Marys. Not to linger on the seductive theories of presence and absence as
many have done, the point here is merely that these first “actors,” took on the
representation of Biblical figures: they acted out a written story. The shift of
focus, from rites of transubstantion to representation ultimately differentiated
theater from liturgy.
In this model of theater, the god did not corporealize through, say, trance
dancing, nor was he somehow embedded in transmutating materials. In fact, as
we will see, this sanctioned form of representation was designed to displace trans-
formative rites and discourses, such as alchemy. The only transformation in the
story theater would tell was expressed through the narrative, not the enactment
of the resurrection. It was a story that promised deferred transformation to the
spectator/believers. Transformation would be an effect of spectatorship rather
than a performative action. This promise of resurrection, deferred to the end of
one’s life, became the central promissory note in the Christian economy and
created the sense that spectatorship could finally pay off. While transformational
 Prologue 9

rites of the period, such as alchemy, or witchcraft, were designed to enhance the
participant, theater promised a pay off for the audience. Later, theater would
demand payment up front for its performance of deferred transformation, albeit
aesthetic rather than religious.
Although transformation was deferred in this new form, a particular form of
exchange was practiced in the casting. It seems that the two Marys were
primarily played by men, except, perhaps, in some convents (Ogden 2002: 143).
While Ogden and others, such as myself, have expended much energy to reclaim
those early performances by women, still, what is marked here, is how represen-
tation was founded, in this tradition, on a gender exchange.1 At first glance, such
an exchange might be construed as an aberration in a form designed to displace
transformation. Could gender exchange be the one remaining element, so to
speak, of alchemical practices that imagined a debased metal transmutated into
gold? Could a man be changed into a woman through performance? Perhaps.
But this exchange, though, in one sense, an unstable element, actually stabilized
the rite of representation as belonging to the exclusive all-male realm of men in
vestments. As theater became extracted, vestments became costumes, music an
accompaniment, and the all-male realm stable in marking places of privilege.
Enter the “new” science, also designed to displace, say, alchemy. These new
performance practices also carried over into the laboratory. Access would be
limited to men in robes, experimenting through equations of stable and unstable
elements, perceived through an iterative rather than transformative lens. Although,
by now, these observations belong to an obvious, overworked interpretation of
the traditional history of theater and science, they may prove useful in an exami-
nation of rise of the “new” theater and the “new” science as contingent practices
in Europe. The uses and discoveries of theater and science may be seen to found
a kind of social realm that would extend between their sites of practice.
Moreover, the sites of the laboratory, the Church, and the stage claimed to
provide an architecture of the virtual that would become crucial to the ways in
which they would inform one another. The medieval cathedral purported to
provide an architecture of the virtual space of heaven, where the “spirit,” or the
actor/character was cast as an effect of that space. The grandiose effort and
effect of the cathedral exclaimed the virtual as a transcendent space, appropri-
ating communal labor, investment, and a dominant place in the social and
natural landscape. David Wiles argues, this “sacred” space articulated “a
complete value system” outside of which, the participating nun, or priest, had no
identity (2003: 49). Thus, the architecture of a space that claimed the virtual not
only offered a structure of meaning, it also bestowed meaning upon the
performers it encased. In her book The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace (1999), Margaret
Wertheim emphasizes the promises of such virtual space to the exclusion of
decay and the embrace of the universal, relating these earlier, Christian claims to
the promises of the new, technological virtual in the late twentieth century. Thus,
as Wertheim and others argue, technology borrowed its sense of the virtual from
the Church architecture. Theater also borrowed the claims to these powers and
10 Prologue

promises in the construction of the stage, organizing a later claim to ascendance

as “art,” and to the universality of representation. As we will see, the notion of
the primacy of a constructed virtual space, transcending the structures of
what lay outside its envelope, practiced by the Church, science and theater will
also wreak havoc on social and natural environments that lay outside their
perimeters.

All the world’s a theater: war and science

As an emblem of structural organization and investment, theater helped to
organize a variety of representations, making its specific construction of
elements operative in science as well as in war. In her book The Theater of Nature,
Ann Blair argues that “the metaphor of theater conveyed the bringing of a vast
topic under a single, all-encompassing gaze” (1997: 157). Thus, science could
organize both the terms of its practice and the nature of its object through the
paradigm of theater. The early modern notion of “nature as a theater, in which
the human is the spectator rather than the actor looking out at the world as to a
stage” helped to shift the sense of agency to the spectator (153). Theater signi-
fied a space in which a potent observant spectator could subject a field or a
bounded space to its gaze. Space, as a stage, organized elements for view and
created a unified field of objects, separated out from their social or natural
environment. An object of the gaze thus became available for isolation and
study as an effect of its staging. Perhaps this claim seems all-too-familiar, especially
when reviewed from a contemporary perspective. After all, the subject/object
binary is the central point of poststructuralist criticism. But for theater scholars,
it is important to assess how theater and science historically linked together to
create this partition; how the success of the model known as theater worked
together with the new science to suppress other available structures of perceiving
and knowing. As a result, the role for humans in this natural philosophical
“theater of the world” “is not to take part in the show, but to watch and
contemplate . . .” (154). The construction of the spectator position in science set
humans apart from the elements they would study, creating a category called
“nature” as an object of the gaze.
As a result of this binary, a special role was assigned to “man” as the spec-
tator, or knower of this vast organization (157). This special role set “him” apart
from animals, plants, stones, and metals—a separation that would later prove
deadly to many species and environments. The power of the subject as spectator
resided, partially, in a certain sanctity, wafting like incense from the Church
tropes. Walter Benjamin, in his Reflections, attacks the vitalism that partially
composed this special status for the human and its seemingly sacred origins:

However sacred man is . . . there is no sacredness in his condition, in his

bodily life. . . . What, then, distinguishes it essentially from the life of
animals and plants? And even if these were sacred, they could not be so by
 Prologue 11

virtue only of being alive, of being in life. It might be worthwhile to track

down the origin of the dogma of the sacredness of life. Perhaps, indeed
probably, it is relatively recent, the last mistaken attempt of the weakened
Western tradition to seek the saint it has lost in cosmological impenetrability.
(quoted in Hanssen 2000: 133)

Borrowing, then, from the virtual powers of the saint, the “liveness” of the
human seemed to raise “him” above the elements. As we will see, the “old”
science of alchemy provided a different epistemology, in which a shared subjec-
tivity extended across “man” and elements.
The slow development of the notion of “man” as superior subject occurred
in both the philosophies and sciences of the European tradition. In his book
The Open, Giorgio Agamben traces this development of “man” as an excep-
tional subject noting that, at first, “in the Ancien Regime the boundaries of
man are much more uncertain and fluctuating than they will appear in the
nineteenth century after the development of the human sciences” (2002: 24).
Even so, Agamben points to Linnaeus, the great taxonomer, as establishing
“man” as a special species. Through discursive strategies of self-recognition,
“man” established himself as a category (26). God-like, Christian notions of
“man,” and his special status as “live” were buttressed up by his participation
in virtual systems, such as language and self-consciousness. “Man” could
appropriate the virtual as a product of his own nature, rendering his powers as
unique. If god was in his heaven, it was man that had imagined him there.
Although, at first, the “new” science simply claimed this special role for “man”
the observer, later Darwinian notions of his origin from among the animals
challenged his virtual and saint-like genealogy and, in the twentieth century,
his role as special subject, the knowing observer, was both challenged and
maintained by physics.
Nonetheless, as special spectator, “man” claims a vitalistic dynamism for “his”
gaze, which renders the object as static. Blair notes how the seventeenth century
scientific deployment of the paradigm of theater displaced qualities of change
with the condition of stasis: “Renaissance natural philosophical authors”
observed “the static qualities of the theater of nature—its vast expanse . . . and
elaborate construction . . . ” (1997: 155). Tranformation, or transmutation, so
central to alchemy, was eschewed by the “new” science. Blair, like Agamben,
amplifies her argument by referring to the later development of the taxonomic
system by Linnaeus in 1785, which assigned organisms to fixed places within a
system of classification. The space of nature, then, as examined, would be one
that was enclosed, static and calibrated for isolated integers. The great furnaces
of the alchemists, firing up the transmutative essence of elements would be
displaced by apparati designed to reveal and record their static properties. The
objects of study would be static in their location, and self-referential in their
attributes. The emphasis is on regularity, not dynamism—iteration, not transmu-
tation. Representation.
12 Prologue

A prime example of how this paradigm of the theater literally “operated” as

science may be found in the amphitheater of anatomy, constructed in 1593 at
Leiden University, where scientists gathered around to observe a corpse. The
scientists were situated as audience and the corpse was on the operating stage.
This practice recalls that scene of the opening act of theater’s rebirth, in the
Visitatio Sepulchri, where the two Marys stood before the empty tomb. However, in
the theater of anatomy, the doctors actually discover the corpse, enhancing their
mastery of the living body through the observation of the dead. The promise of
transformation is no longer even deferred, but displaced into the acquisition of
knowledge. The spectator benefits immediately from his observation of the dead
body. The performing body has reached perfect stasis, while the spectators expe-
rience their receptive recompense. The scientific adoption of the theatrical
model secured the success of the art as the preferred cultural rite, insofar as it
could perform the new epistemological paradigm. Art and science worked
together to fix into the cultural imaginary the properties of vital subject and
static object bounded by a virtual that could iterate their essence and their
promise for future enhancement.
The essential stasis inherent in the theatrical/scientific model also defined the
conditions of wealth, or economic value. The paradigm of the static object and
the external, dynamic subject informed notions of agency and appropriation for
centuries to come. Not surprisingly, Mao Tse Tung, an activist/philosopher
invested in direct social and economic change theorized how the stasis central in
this scientific model also establishes material and social relations. In his revolu-
tionary work, “On Contradiction,” he begins by describing this mode of
perception: “perceiving things as isolated, static and one-sided. . . . regards all
things in the universe, their forms and their species, as eternally isolated from
one another and immutable.” Therefore, he reasons, the cause of change is
perceived as “not inside things but outside them, that is, the motive force is external
[emphasis added]” (2002: 45). Mao continues, “In Europe, this mode of thinking
existed as mechanical materialism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
and as vulgar evolutionism at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the
twentieth centuries.” Mao, proposes, instead, a new science or an old one if we
think back to alchemy, perceiving:

The fundamental cause of the development of a thing [as] not external but
internal. . . . There is internal contradiction in every single thing, hence its
motion and development. . . . Thus materialist dialectics effectively combats
the theory of external causes, or of an external motive force. . . . Simple
growth in plants and animals . . . is likewise chiefly the result of their
internal contradictions. Similarly, social development is due chiefly not to
external but to internal causes. . . . (46)

Combining cultural, social, and scientific operations, Mao insists that change is
an inherent part of the composition of a plant, animal, human, or social entity.
 Prologue 13

Mao portrays a dynamic universe in which change is the essence rather than the
external engine of things. Thus, the so-called attributes of all elements are actu-
ally attributes of the dynamics of essential change rather than properties that
define a single, bounded element: they serve as adverbs, not adjectives. In this
way, it is possible to imagine a materialist critique that might move toward the
integration of social and ecological elements and away from the kind of static
partition Mao eschews above.
In spite of Mao’s utopian model, what theater stages, instead, is change
through an external force. In the theater of plots and characters, the human
subject, or “motivation,” causes change in the world and among elements. In as
much as later political theater practitioners, such as Brecht, would hope to put
theater in the service of change, their dramaturgical force still resides in the
human subject as if separate from and vitally transcendent to the elements. The
function of change remains located solely within the character.
To emphasize this perception of nature as a theater, as a space managed
and observed, is not to suggest that earlier European practices embraced some
Nietzschean notion of nature as wild, or even posited an origin of the “real”
and “pure” nature. “Nature,” in England, had already been managed through
various sorts of enclosures long before those parcels of private property would
begin to appear in the eighteenth century. The management of natural spaces
that were set aside and demarcated for specific uses were at least as old as the
New Forest—the Nova Foresta—founded by William the Conqueror in 1079 for
his deer hunting. The royal management of the woods both protected them
and devastated them. The woods were designed for the needs and pleasures of
the special human subject. Certain species were decimated in favor of those
that were useful to the humans. Rules and dispensations governed hunting and
woodcutting to conserve the young game and the saplings for further use. An
even more severe appropriation of the woods was exercised once they became
a supply for the Navy’s ships. Elizabeth I had begun “encoppicing” enclosures
of forest with the idea of supplying timber for her Navy. Thus, the woods, first
designed to supply heat and game for the royals and the locals became a
factory for the production of ships sent out to expand and protect the Empire.
For these ends, the woods, the forest, the trees—the undergrowth and the
canopy—were highly planted, cut, and managed through practices of owner-
ship and surveillance, even becoming a supply terminal for imperialist
ventures.2
Science and theater offered an organization of knowing and managing as a
viewing apparatus, a lens, through which the appearance of the object was trans-
lated, with the assumption that its translation would provide a more accurate
vision of it. If science emulated theater, theater also emulated science. In “The
Artificial Eye: Augustan Theater and the Empire of the Visible,” Joseph Roach
enforces this notion, interpreting “the Augustan theater as an instrument, closely
analogous to contemporary optical instruments, especially suited to the magnifi-
cation of behavior” as well as to classification (1991: 143). Further, this drive to
14 Prologue

classification was a kind of inventory, familiar to what Roach, like Mao, perceives
as a mechanism of representation and economic value. For Roach, theater offers
a “multinational corporate vision” of trade (138–139). Theater is the apparatus
that intercedes between subject and object, yielding a vision of its essential
elements, whether they be physical or behavioral.
Act One

Alchemy

To fully situate the operations of theater and “new” science in the seventeenth
century, it is necessary to understand how they functioned as interdictions against
the occult sciences and arts. Within this general era, as imagined by traditional
histories, the occult science most at issue was alchemy. Although alchemy
continued to inform both performance and science, it was sufficiently debased by
this new collusion to lose any institutional power it might have gained in earlier
centuries.
Part of the reason that alchemy has been constructed as the fallen “other” of
the rites of representation and the new science has to do with its social and polit-
ical associations. Alchemy came into Europe from Islam, taking its name from
the Arabic al-kimiya. The founder of alchemy was identified as the possibly-myth-
ical Egyptian, Hermes Trismegistus. Alchemy was part of what R.W. Southern
describes as a “one-way traffic in ideas” in the twelfth century, radiating out from
the major Muslim centers in Spain and Sicily. Southern notes the central role the
sciences played in this influx, particularly mathematics and astronomy, from
1150 onward and he describes the complex reception this influx encountered, as
the developing sense of “Europe” began to be formed (1963: 64–66).
An anxiety of influence within Europe, alongside the fear of the growing
territories of Islam to its South and East, catalyzed the need to establish a notion
of “Europe” that could compete with the political and intellectual spread of
Islamic influence. Edward Said, in Orientalism emphasizes that orientalist discrim-
ination is never far from the idea of Europe, which established its base upon the
notion of a superior cultural identity (1979: 7). Said further clarifies this position,
noting that discrimination in the form of orientalism actually operates through
its “distribution” into aesthetic and philological texts, by organizing “orthodoxies
and canons of tastes, texts, and values . . . ” (12). In the face of such a major
intellectual and practical influx of ideas from Islam, Europe required the
construction of an “intellectual authority” that could be identified as its own
(19). The displacement of alchemy by the “new” science was key to establishing
a new European “intellectual authority.”
In part, alchemy was made esoteric, or driven into secrecy by prejudices
against it based upon superstitious reactions to its contents as associated with
Figure 1 Frontispiece from Johann Gottfried Kiessling, Relatio practica, Leipzig, 1752
(A049. http://www.alchemywebsite.com © Adam McLean 2002)
 Act One 17

Islamic beliefs. If alchemy was indeed superstitious, its reception was also super-
stitious. As Said notes, during the middle ages it was not the knowledge of
Islamic thought and practice that became more accurate, but the ignorance of it
that became more refined and complex (62). Indeed, that ignorance was lent a
certain moral value. Said illustrates how, instead of inquiry into Islamic sciences
and literature, they were constructed through a “narcissistic” approach that
made them into a mirror of European practices, but a bad, evil one (67–70). As
we will see, Goethe imagines the alchemist to be in league with the devil—the
practice to be the opposite of Christianity.
Alchemy, philosophy, and religion were all intertwined with medical and
arithmetical discourses, coloring their reception, while also establishing their
worth. Astronomy and astrology as well as chemistry and alchemy were directly
linked to philosophical traditions. As Christianity tied its discursive power to the
Latin tradition, a language elevated against Arabic, it needed to assimilate what
it could from these findings, while actively suppressing large portions of the
learning. Christian/Latin Europe devised a way to extract the findings, or the
data, as we would say today, from its embedded location within cosmological,
philosophical and occult dimensions. This extraction would “color” how scientific
knowledge was constituted. The isolation of elements for study, the sealed-off
isolation of the laboratory is a consequence of this mode of extraction.
Set against belief systems, the “new” science claimed empiricism as its differ-
ence from these ancient practices. Yet Adelard, in twelfth-century England,
recorded methods of inquiry practiced by the Arabs that suggest they may have
routinely practiced a similar experimental approach (Daniel 1979: 271). In fact,
it is easy to imagine that the Latin studies, based on disputation and iteration,
were less open to those experimental methods than the Arabs, whose science was
allied with the practical arts of metallurgy, pharmacy, and astronomy. Arguing
for the adoption of Arabic sciences with his nephew, who was ensconced in the
Latin tradition, Adelard notes: “from the Arabic masters I have learned one
thing, to be led by reason, while you are caught in the image of authority” (qtd.
in Daniel, 270). Alchemy was a science of experimentation. What knowledge
was passed down in the great emblems and poems was a result of the findings in
the labs. No alchemist was without his laboratory, or furnace. Alchemy was a
practice that fused methods derived from the various trades of metallurgy and
embalming with philosophy. Hands-on processes were well developed, alongside
the figurations of astrology. In working with the basic structures of matter,
alchemy sought to understand those structures as in consonance with those of
philosophy. While these sciences were experimental, they were not extracted
from philosophical inquiry. The emphasis on the extraction and isolation of
empiricism was the force with which the new European intellectual authority
installed itself. This European form of cultural dentistry was operating on several
fronts at once, then, in terms of theater and the “new” science.
As the active construction of Europe was proceeding through identifications
with the Latin and Chrstian traditions, it was deemed necessary to make these
18 Act One

Islamic influences appear not only as “foreign,” but as threatening. Prohibitions

against Arabic astrology arose in 1277, and manuscripts were burned (Daniel 288).
These negative characterizations of Islamic sciences and literatures continued up
through nineteenth century reconstructions of the period, allying themselves with
theories of “race” that would bind certain forms of knowing to certain peoples.
Along with suppressing and displacing the roots of Arab scientific knowledge, a
new genealogy was invented to re-imagine where the knowledge was formed.
Martin Bernal, in his study Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization,
argues that a suppression of the Egyptian influence in medieval philosophy
resulted from a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century racist bias that wanted to
establish what Bernal calls “The Aryan model.” Bernal argues that the collective,
self-conscious project of substituting Greek roots for the Levantine mix of African
and Semite practices was an attempt on the part of historians of the period to
move the origins of European culture onto an Aryan, Greek base. Bernal identifies
several lasting traces of Egyptian practices throughout the medieval period, partic-
ularly the Hermetic traditions of esoteric or secret practices such as alchemy. He
goes to great lengths to describe the specific moves made by historians to suppress
the Egyptian roots of these beliefs (1987: 130–138). In contrast to the substitution
of Greek roots for “neo-platonism,” the emergent philosophy of religion, Bernal
illustrates how it was actually the esoteric traditions that promoted the structures of
philosophy. The Jewish and Islamic diasporas brought these philosophical struc-
tures up into Spain and further north, along with the majority of scientific
knowledge and practices (145–149). The association of alchemy and the occult
sciences with Levantine, particularly Arab societies helped to make them unaccept-
able to the establishment of a history and identification of the European.
By the fifteenth century, the process of ethnic cleansing expelled the Jews and
Muslims from Spain and the Arabic manuscripts were burnt. The esoteric tradi-
tions had been banned and their practitioners were tortured. The rebirth of the
“new” science, then, was part of an ethnic cleansing. As this intellectual and
social purge exerted its influence on the imagination of the cultural producers,
an image began to appear in performance that portrayed the shrunken, isolated,
wrongly-motivated individual through the image of the alchemist. His image,
although not associated directly with Jewish or Arab characteristics, nonetheless
suggests a familiar mercenary, double-dealing stereotype. The alchemist is a form
of the cheating money-lender, perceived as a money-creator.

From mercurial change to monetary stasis

In contrast to the model of stasis, the base of alchemical practices was the notion
of internal change. Charles Nicholl describes the centrality of change in The
Chemical Theatre:

There are two directions in which alchemical mercury leads us. On the one
hand, it is a complex elaboration of a chemical substance. . . . But there is
 Act One 19

another direction . . . that transformation is something intrinsic and

contained inside matter. . . . Each stage of this self-devouring, self-generating
process bears the name “mercury.”
(quoted in White 1997: 141)

In alchemy, change, represented by the fluidity of mercury, was considered to be

the prima materia, or the basis of all matter. One of the documents central to the
science of alchemy, indeed also to Hermetic philosophy in the early modern
period, the Corpus Hermeticum by Hermes Trismegistus sets up the second “law” of
nature as “all things are changeable.”1 In other words, at the center of this occult
tradition is the kind of internal dynamic of change that Mao found missing in
later successors of the “new” science. Heralded as both a proto-science (chem-
istry) and a fake science, alchemy offered a paradigm in which the scientist takes
part in the dynamic of change in all things, rather than remaining an observer of
static elements. Although alchemy was debunked by the institutions of church
and the “new” science, it continues even today to draw a following, as illustrated
by the numerous websites dedicated to its study and practice.2
Yet in spite of alchemy’s practice of the broad base of change in all things, its
reception in the seventeenth century often reduced the worth of its practice to
the production of gold. The attempt was to convert the investment in change to
one in stability. The seventeenth century was an age of crisis concerning money
in England, as well as in several other countries. Major banks were founded in
Amsterdam, Barcelona, Hamburg, and the Bank of England. These were institu-
tions designed to protect gold, money and jewels, and to establish archives of
economic value safe from counterfeit. The creation of these institutions inter-
vened in a circulation of economic value that was, one might say, mercurial. In
addition to gold and silver, a dizzying array of substances newly traded as
money, such as tobacco in Virginia and tulip bulbs in Holland began to compli-
cate the understanding of how value might be maintained and traded.
“Wampum,” seashells collected by Native Americans, was made legal tender in
Massachusetts; goldsmiths’ notes were exchanged as if money; the Massachusetts
Bay Colony issued paper money, etc. A search for central issuance and value in
the early eighteenth century led theorists such as John Law to publish treatises on
the viability of bank notes rather than coins. Moreover, coins themselves, the
traditional metal representatives of value, had degenerated, both physically and
in terms of issue. Fears and uses of counterfeit money, led to a major recoinage
in England in 1696. This crisis in coins, based on their relation to gold was
managed, in part, by one of the leading alchemists of the age, Isaac Newton,
who was in charge of the mint from 1699–1727.3 In England, the province of
money was moving from the exclusive hold on it that the royalty had enjoyed for
centuries to provincial banks. The royalty, desperate for funding, resorted to
extreme measures, usurping all the holdings in the mint at one time, and levying
steep taxes to draw money made from labor and substances into its coffers. All of
these forces of change were forming the beginning of the modern money
20 Act One

market. Maintaining value was a driving anxiety hostile to local and counterfeit
vagaries of exchange.
In this time of anxiety about monetary value it is small wonder that alchemy
was perceived as primarily a science for turning “base” metals into gold. In the
popular imagination, the alchemists became the magi of “real” money, who
could transform other materials into the substance of ultimate value. The
alchemists were used, then, not to celebrate the rites of the potential for change,
but to mint the stability of absolute value. Alchemy, as the science of the produc-
tion of gold, was reconstituted as a conservative rather than as a radical practice
of change. Yet, although many alchemists were employed by the crown to
provide it with gold, the alchemical tradition established a long history of the
esoteric and theological management of money outside the control of the crown
and state. For example, the Knights Templars, an esoteric, international Order
served as financial agents, while the monasteries and even some convents enjoyed
rights to coinage.4 Alchemy maintained a relation of monetary value to esoteric
philosophy; it could be managed by philosophers, alchemical scientists, and even
nuns rather than by those exploited by the crown. But, at a time of the differenti-
ation of value into different substances, the perception of alchemy seemed to
reverse the process, transforming things into the one single sign of ultimate
worth—gold. As we will see, the theater partners these projects with plays such as
Jonson’s Alchemist and Goethe’s Faust, which stages these anxieties between the
uses of alchemy, paper money and the crown as a conflict directly connected to
the powers of heaven and hell.
Alongside this panic over money, the plague was inducing a panic over the
sustainability of the human body. Thus, alchemy seemed also to be focused on
producing the elixir of life, which could both bank and issue a longer youthful,
continuance of the human body. Perhaps this notion was derived from the
earliest Egyptian influences on the art, which were related to the embalming
practices—the preservation of the body. Thus, security in value and vitality
seemed to be the worthwhile promise of alchemy, and the radical core of
alchemy, mercurial change, and the transmutation of materials was put to a
conservative use, in producing the essential substance of value, gold, while
money was on the way to becoming more and more virtual. The cosmology of
change was assimilated by the science of iteration.

Coding and decoding: Isaac Newton, alchemist

Traditionally, Isaac Newton has stood as one of the inventors of the “new”
science, instituting a mechanistic and rationalistic approach to matter. His
accomplishments as a practitioner and theorist seem to situate him in the lineage
of Galileo and Descartes. This reputation was based, narrowly, on his theory of
gravity and his Opticks. His “other papers,” which constituted the most complete
collection of alchemical writings of his time, were not published until the twen-
tieth century. In 1936, a collection of his papers “with no scientific value” was
 Act One 21

purchased at a Sotheby auction by John Maynard Keynes, the eminent

economist, who bequeathed them to King’s College. In 1942, Keynes spoke to
the Royal Society Club, deconstructing the image of Newton as the prime mech-
anist and rationalist of his time, in order to regard him as “the last of the
magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians . . . ” (qtd. in White 1997:
3). Indeed, attention to these papers has already produced a popular new recep-
tion of Newton, as illustrated by the recent biography entitled Isaac Newton: The
Last Sorcerer and the online Newton Project, which is uploading facsimiles of the
Keynes collection onto the web, making his alchemical work available to critics
and others.5
In contrast to the common perception of alchemy as merely a process for the
production of gold, Newton’s work included the study of the most of the major
treatises available to his age in order to discover the master plan of change in the
world. Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, in The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, asserts that
“Newton went on . . . to probe the whole vast literature of older alchemy as it
had never been probed before . . . ” (1975: 88). With a library of more than 109
documents, Newton had the resources to create an overview of the practice (51).
Alongside his library, Newton began installing the great furnace of alchemy in
his laboratory as early as 1668. Historians conclude that he actively pursued
experiments until roughly 1696, when he devoted his energies to decoding
alchemical and biblical texts, finally composing his major alchemical treatise
entitled, appropriately, Praxis. His job, as he saw it, was to decode the writings
and drawings of other alchemists, perform the experiments that had been
handed down through them, and to reconstruct, from fragments, the whole of
the historical process and the formation of the future.
Newton’s face was turned to the ancients, as Keynes expresses in his reference
to the Babylonians and Sumerians, rather than to what might be termed the
“early moderns,” or to futuristic projects. In this practice, Newton was closer to
Mme. Blavatsky in the nineteenth century, who would reread the ancient occult
texts against Darwin, than to the kind of science that emerged, seemingly, from
Newton’s own highly edited and reconstructed tradition. Dobbs argues, in fact,
that Newton represents an even earlier alchemical practice than the one of his
time. She stresses that, among those who would be scientists, alchemy was chemi-
calized and mechanicalized in the latter half of the seventeenth century, to be
claimed later as the practice of reason and experiment that would lead to chem-
istry (80–83). Ironically, this is not the alchemical practice of Isaac Newton, who
worked in the analogical, coded manner of the ancients. While he might have
taken over the reforms of the minting process of official currency, making gold
was the least of his investments in alchemy. Instead, he invested in the “philo-
sophical mercury” of change.
Remembering that the appellation “scientist” did not appear until the decade
of the 1830s, we can better understand Newton through the terms of his time, as
a “Philosopher of Nature” (Shanahan 2002: 11). As a philosopher, Newton’s
approach implemented experimentation by decoding philosophical texts. The
22 Act One

drive to decode is a familiar one to critics and technologists in the late twentieth
century. Widespread software inventions/controls and online communications
have also inspired an obsession with decoding, from serious books like Code, to
popular science fiction novels such as Cryptonomicon. In the late twentieth century,
this decoding is related to conspiracy theories based on the seductive corporate
structuring of appearances that might not match real economic and social rela-
tions (as troped in the film The Matrix). For Newton, in the late seventeenth
century, decoding was likewise perceived as revealing the structure of things, but
in the more positive tradition of regarding the codes as inspired, prescient
models. In these studies, Newton strove to discover the principles of structure
embedded in theoretical/performative writings (Dobbs 1975: 175). In his time of
counterfeiting, Newton sought truth in the codes; in ours, we seek the structure
of the lie.
Newton’s fame is based upon his discovery of the notion of gravity by
watching an apple fall. In fact, Newton’s “discovery” of gravity has been received
as the paradigm of empirical knowledge. Yet, when situated alongside his
alchemical practices, his discovery of gravity may be understood as a byproduct
of alchemical decoding. Some critics suggest that his discovery emanated from
his study of one of the major emblems of alchemy: the star regulus (Dobbs 1975:
148–149). In this star, the power flow of the emblem is understood to draw from
the points in toward the center, through attraction, rather than emanating out
through the points. The emblem of the force of attraction, drawing in, in
contrast to the common notion of star light as radiance, projecting out, may
have inspired Newton to be able to imagine the attraction of gravity upon the
apple. My point, here, is not to discover an actual cause and effect relationship in
Newton’s work, but to excavate a mode of knowing through a familiar and
significant example of Newton. His thought contributed much to his alchemical
operations, as to the foundations of the empirical process.6 In other words, the
emblem provided a model of perception that could inform an empirical
discovery. If one could imagine the forces of attraction, one might actually
perceive them at work.
To further understand how alchemical decoding, or coding worked, we can
access a simple example on the web by “Eirenaeus Philalethes” or George
Starkey. Newton was greatly influenced by Philalethes in his most alchemical
period. Starkey (1628–65) immigrated to London in 1650, where he immediately
erected a laboratory and became the teacher of a man who would go on to
acquire fame as “the father of modern chemistry,” Robert Boyle (also an
alchemist). At the same time, Starkey wrote numerous alchemical treatises under
the nom de plume of “Eirenaeus Philalethes” (a peaceful lover of truth). These
works were read with interest by such other theorists as Locke and Leibniz. His
decoding of one rather simple poem (in contrast to other alchemical texts and
emblems) has been uploaded onto the alchemy website.7 Two lines of the poem,
followed by the decoding are downloaded here to illustrate how alchemical
images represented experiments and theories alike. In the following passages,
 Act One 23

Philalethes decodes a poem by George Ripley, an English alchemist from the

fifteenth century. Philalethes compares the writing to “Hieroglyphicks,” which
combine the visual and written image:

The poem: Toad full ruddy I saw.

Philalethes’ translation: Here we have a Toad described, and in it the whole
secret of Philosophers: The Toad is Gold; so called, because it is an Earthly
Body, but most especially for the black stinking venemosity which this opera-
tion comes to in the first days of its preparation, before the whiteness
appears; during the Rule of Saturn, therefore it is called the ruddy Toad.

The substance, gold, is figured as animated. In Benjamin’s terminology, it would

be “vital.” Here, it is as an animal with an “earthly body.” Thus, the notion of
an element as “living,” or “vital” is not limited to animals, but extended to
metals. More, what the poetic line inscribes is not “gold” as a static element, but
the smell and color of substances changing into gold. The nomenclature of the
element is really a metaphor of its aspects during the process of change. In the
process of the transmutation into the metal, the ruddy Toad, like certain
animals, has a venomosity, a resident poison it extrudes when molting. And it
responds to the Rule of Saturn as if all things are animated, situated among
affective relations to one another—even to the “heavenly bodies.” Again, this
“Rule” is a figure of temporality, a register of change rather than, say, a fixed
constellation. But the alchemical process is described through an adjectival
description, “ruddy,” rather than through an arithmetical measure.
The deployment of emblems and poetry as lab instructions created the first
version of “science fiction,” in which science and literature share a discourse.
Verse and image communicate the processes of experimentation and change by
articulating their qualitative relationships, rather than their quantitative ones.
Metaphor and analogy figure the process of transmutation as a porous interface
among different orders of things, through transmutable and affective relations.
Although this approach was later abandoned in favor of the numerical and alge-
braic representation of relationships, it never really disappeared from science.
Einstein’s metaphor of the elevator falling through space in the earlier twentieth
century illustrates how contemporary physics can still be guided by metaphor
into a formula for the structures of space.
But to continue with the alchemical poem/formula:

The poem: With drops of poysoned sweat, approaching thus his secret Den.
Philalethes: The following two Verses then are but a more Ample descrip-
tion of this work; of volatilization which is an ascension, and descension, or
circulation of the confections within the Glass. Which Glass here called the
secret Den, is else-where called by the same Author, a little Glassen-tun, and
is an oval Vessel; of the purest White Glass, about the bigness of an ordinary
24 Act One

Hen-Egg, in the which about the quantity of an ounce of 8 drachms of the

confection, in all mixed is a convenient proportion to be set, which being
Sealed up with Hermes Seal, the Glass having a neck about 6 fingers high,
or there-abouts, which being thin and narrow; is melted together Artificially,
that no Spirits can get out, nor no Air can come in, in which respect it is
named a secret Den.

In this passage, the specific apparati and effects required for the chemical process
are described as actions, “sweat,” and place, “den.” The toad is moving and
changing, both externally and internally. The tube in which the chemical effects
take place is a “den” where the toad lives. The alchemist is interacting with a
vital substance, rather than manipulating one that has a mere object-status. The
subject itself is changing, within its environment, rather than representing proper-
ties within an external force of change. Alchemical discourse does not read as an
address to the alchemist, such as “now add a drop of mercury, “ evoking him as
the subject who acts, but figures the actions in terms of the elements themselves.
Emblematic practice included more than the decoding of alchemical poems.
Newton’s projects, like the lines above, sought to think through experiments of
conjunction rather than through the isolation of elements. Using Pythagoras, he
sought a consonance among the lengths of strings and the distances among
planets. He spent many years of his life endeavoring to reorganize fragmentary
references to Solomon’s temple in order to compose a pattern, a mandala (in
New Age speak) of space that would organize all of history as well as the future.
He reconstructed its floor plan as an emblem of the world’s change through
time.8 Even his renowned anti-trinitarian stand, dangerous in terms of the collu-
sion of church and state, refused the partition embedded in the notion of the
trinity. In his era, this conjoining of practice and poetry, of science and art, of
rite and experiment within the emblem was being partitioned into discrete and
sometimes opposing practices. Finding the “big picture,” an integrated sense of
the world across species and elements, through history and future, was aban-
doned for smaller and more tightly focused projects. Charting movement and
change became numerical.
Even though the sense of the emblematic expresses the alchemical science in
figures more suitable to its sense of a shared, changing universe than the
language of numbers, there still lingers the sense that the practice of experimen-
tation has been encoded into these emblems. So the question remains, to what
end? This question prompts some consideration of alchemy as an esoteric, secret
practice. Part of what the esoteric tradition is designed to effect is social protec-
tion surrounding the knowledge of potential transformations of power—a
hermetic hermeneutics, if you will. As the twentieth century would witness, the
unleashing of transformative power, as in fission, can be threatening to the whole
planet. While the Faust legend individualized the dangers of that power,
rendering them a moral risk for the soul, alchemy, as esoteric, claims to shield the
social rather than the individual from the misuse of such powers. In its coded
Figure 2 Emblem of Solomon’s Temple sketched by Isaac Newton
(http://www.world-mysteries.com/awr_8sbynewton.gif)
26 Act One

exchange of knowledge, it forms an exclusive “brotherhood” as do contempo-

rary, elite practices of science. Yet alchemy’s exclusions were meant to remain
underground, never to become official or institutional, in league with states, or
churches. As the Royal Academy of science began to gain prominence in this
era, espousing those values now identified as early modern, this secret brother-
hood sought to maintain ancient practices of power that were hermetically
sealed off from nation building. The alchemists sought to hide the great powers
of change from those who would deploy them for base motives. Moreover, this
esoteric protective barrier required ethical behavior of the practitioner, in order
to remain within the secrets of the practice. The success of the experiment and
the true understanding of its goals were available only to those who were initiates
into the right uses of transformation. Famously, Newton applied these strict
codes of behavior to himself as part of his overall alchemical practice. The
scientist was not separate from his science—both operated within a code of
ethics. In the twentieth century, the project of imagining the ethics of scientific
discoveries and of the scientist will become an urgent, but difficult project.

Gender and sex in alchemy

As far as we know, alchemy was a secret fraternity of men. For women, at least
publicly, the rites of transformation were related to witchcraft, which had more
to do with herbs and remedies, perceived to be more like cooking than experi-
menting. As we will see, Goethe would proximate the witches’ kitchen to the
alchemist’s study in his Faust, reproducing the gender codes that determined the
perception of these occult practices. Yet within alchemical discourses, gender
appears as an element of change, assigned across substances. Within the
paradigm of alchemy, it is possible to imagine gender not as a code controlling
human action or confining human identificatory processes, but operating more
in an adverbial manner to animate substances in their transformation. Those
animations are specifically sexual in nature, so to speak.
In working from Philalethes, Newton describes an experiment in this way:
“Another secret is that you need the mediation of the virgin Diana” (quoted in
Dobbs 1975: 182). Diana’s virginal, gendered status indicates how the elements
will change. Her qualities figure silver interacting with other substances as a form
of embodiment, replete with aspects of gender and sexuality. In Philalethes’ full
description below, which describes the production of “true philosophical
mercury,” we can see how this virgin enters into a mode of elemental change
that is understood as a sexual relationship:

Grind the mercury . . . the doves of Diana mediating, with its brother, philo-
sophical gold, from which it will receive spiritual semen. The spiritual semen
is the fire which will purge all the superfluities of the mercury, the fermental
virtue intervening.
(quoted in Dobbs 1975: 182)
 Act One 27

The virgin Diana is not anthropomorphized here, made into a woman who
would receive sperm; instead, her “doves” serve as mediators of germination.
Her gender, her virginal status, is thus more adverbial than adjectival. Her doves,
her virginal gender, mediate the cleansing fire of sperm, to produce the base
material, the essential, at once both the philosophical and natural ferment of
change.9
Traditionally, such examples are read as a kind of “primitive” understanding
of matter, merely emulating the human condition. More radically, one can read
attributes of gender and sexuality as aspects of transmutations across substances
rather than codes of strictly human behavior. “Diana,” her virginity, and the
actions of “sperm” are not attributes of regulated gender identification, nor of
prescribed sexual practices. They are figures that ferment the action of transmu-
tation, momentary and progressive in their functions. As adverbs rather than
adjectives, gender and sex can be perceived as attributes of change across a field
of elements and processes.
The understanding of gender that grew up with the “new” science accompa-
nied its observance of elements as discrete units, with properties that help to
describe and bind them. Gender ceased to operate across elements as a dynamic
of change and became, instead, a fixed attribute of humans. As we will see, the
same year in which the alchemist took the stage as a character in The Alchemist,
the staging of gender as strictly human, and its change as strictly adjectival
appeared in The Roaring Girl. As an attribute that bounded identity, gender
became one of the most crucial and most socially devastating codes of partition
that accompanied the rise of science and theater.
The assignment of gender exclusively to the human subject accompanied the
general enhancement of the human subject. “Nature,” or the world of elements
became the object of the human subject: the “new” scientist. New Historicists
have brilliantly transcribed the empowering of the agency of the human subject
in this early modern period. In fact, they have focussed “new” history on studies
of human agency. What was lost, as the alchemical papers of Newton document,
was the ascription of that agency to any other substance.10 The scientific labora-
tory was cleansed of such a sharing of agency across materials. Theater’s
contribution to the partition resides in how it could preference motivation over
transformation, character rather than magus, and the stage as the virtual space.
Theater became the social mechanism of the new science, installing human
agency at the center of virtual space.

Alchemy’s antagonist: Ben Jonson

Alchemical practices were literally character-ized by performance. Faust playlets
were puppetized in popular gathering sites, Jonson satirized the alchemist as a
con man, and Goethe set Faust’s own initial “fallen” experiments on the day of
the liturgical celebration of the corrective quem queritis. As the human was
installed as singular subject, the perception of alchemy was shifted from practice
28 Act One

to character, from alchemy to the alchemist. The transmutation of elements, the

dynamics of internal change, were exchanged for an eternal motive, as Mao
would phrase it. The engine of motivation, devised as a character-istic of char-
acter, was fired up in the portrayal of the alchemist. Motivation is a key strategy
for representing the individual as subject, disconnected from the fabric of an
essential integration with so-called nature.
The technology of staging was designed to throw focus on this singular
subject. Design, a favored term in emblematic discourses no longer connoted the
symbiosis of all things, but the arrangement and concealment of devices that
focused human optics on the actor. “Theater” then connoted both a space for
scientific presentation and the representational playing of the human engine—
motivation.
Alchemy served Ben Jonson well—not as a practice, but as an object of his
theatrical satire and his scripting of apparati. Jonson treats alchemy fully in two
pieces—a masque and a play. Masques had established a showcase of technology
through performance. Belonging primarily to the court, they linked new tech-
nologies with the performance of privilege—a link that would endure. Masques
exhibited technology as an engine of power, primarily as the showcase of royal
power. Coding became concealment with curtains, flats and wings to conceal the
engines of show, and emblems were downgraded into allegories. Masques served
as an entertaining laboratory for the frivolous, luxurious reproduction of nature
as the mirror of power, an accessory of the privileged. Inigo Jones, the leading
engine-er, designer of the masques, worked together with Jonson to stage these
inventions. Jones arranged illusion into perspective, aligning representation with
human optics and thus installing the observing subject as the definition of the
space. The masque, then, was well-suited to the representation of alchemy, or
rather, the character of alchemy.
Jonson’s masque Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court (1616) focuses on
the alchemical notion of Mercury as a subject of change. Mercury, now a char-
acter, escapes from the alchemical furnace to pronounce a witty monologue to
the court. He portrays his central role in alchemical experiments:

It is I that am corroded and exalted and sublimed and reduced and fetched
over and filtered and washed and wiped; what between their salts and their
sulfurs, their oils and their tartars, their brines and their vinegars, you might
take me out now a soused Mercury, now a salted Mercury, now a smoked
and dried Mercury, now a powdered and pickled Mercury: never herring,
oyster, or cucumber passed so many vexations. . . .
(1970: lines 47–55).

It seems that Mercury is less the catalyst of change than the object of the
alchemist’s machinations. In fact, his description of his ordeals suggests cooking,
the fallen practice of chemistry and pharmacy, rather than laboratory experi-
ment. The wit resides in bending the high-minded practice to a base one. This
 Act One 29

Mercury is a fragment of court wit on its way to the bawdy joke: “Get all the
cracked maidenheads and cast ‘em into new ingots; half the wenches o’ the town
are alchemy” (lines 92–94). Alchemical terms offer a metaphoric discourse for
the expression of sexual peccadilloes. This Mercury is not a figure of elemental
change so much as a fickle lover. Through the form of the masque, Jonson uses
alchemical figures to flirt, concluding with a pleasurable and, hopefully,
promising dance for those who participate. Alchemy is made to seem antique,
while theatrical engines of illusion would appear as “early modern.” Moving
Mercury into character overlays alchemical scripting of transmutation with
theatrical representation.
Jonson’s play The Alchemist (1610), however, deals a more serious blow to the
perception of alchemy, leeching out its internal dynamics to firmly establish a
different order of change—motivation. As the title of the play suggests, the focus
is displaced from the practice of alchemy to the alchemist. Whatever seems to
appear in the way of transformation is undercut by revealing the cheating moti-
vations of the characters. Moreover, the characters are merely animations of
social taxonomies, catalogued, like elements in the “new” science, within a
taxonomy of characteristics, with names like Subtle, the Alchemist; Dapper, a
lawyer’s clerk; Abel Drugger, a druggist who sells tobacco; Sir Epicure Mammon,
a voluptuary; Pertinax Surly, a doubting Thomas; and Dame Pliant, a widow.
The adjectival overcomes the adverbial in a form that portrays characters as
representatives of static qualities. So, while the identity or identification of the
character is static, his or her motivation provides the engine of the plot. In this
way, motivation is foregrounded as the single element of change within the
otherwise static qualities of the characters.
Yet this motivation is a base one. In a lengthy argument about alchemy in Act
Two, Surly characterizes alchemy as “Tricks o’ the cards, to cheat a man/With
charming” (Jonson 1967: lines 181–182). “Charming” and “cheating” are the
focus of the play, illustrated through alchemy but referring to motivation. In one
sense, all change is debased as it becomes only the illusion deployed to cheat
others out of money. One can imagine how the theater worked its charm to
socially discredit the alchemical rites.
In Mercury Vindicated, the alchemical furnace is something to escape from, out
into the society of the court. In The Alchemist, the mythical alchemical lab is
tended by squatters in a house vacated by those who fled the plague. Staging the
fallen lab in a house may reflect, as David Noble suggests, the taint of the
domestic on the scientific, as the “new science” begins to form its special,
removed space, free of women (quoted in Shanahan 2002: 45). We have already
observed how the culinary terms for Mercury’s change in the masque are used to
denigrate the methods of alchemical experiment, but in The Alchemist their
domestication is also made illicit. The house does not even belong to the con
artists who pose as alchemists.
In Jonson’s The Alchemist, change itself is indicated through its association
with subterfuge. Alchemical practice is portrayed as a mere farcical trick—a
30 Act One

mystification designed for profit. Mathew Martin, in his article “Play and Plague
in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist,” refers to the play’s “anti-transformative poetics”
indicating that the corruption in the play furthers only character motivation, but
founders any possibility for social or material change (2000: 401). Remembering
Mao once again, the potential for internal change in the make-up of matter, as
Martin points out, accompanies the possibility for social and economic change as
well. Martin goes on to describe the lab as the space of “unlicensed theater,”
surreptitiously performed in a temporarily vacated house. Martin summarizes
the effect of the play: “Jonson offers no external, stable vantage point from
which illusory existence might be distinguished . . . only equally illusory and
groundless epistemologies competing in the theatrical marketplace” (407). In the
era of an economic crisis over value, filled with anxieties of the counterfeit and
the simulations of the money market, the alchemist, who was thought to produce
gold, that ultimate value, is really only a con, a performer, an illusionist.
However, the price of the ticket has changed the operations of access. Illusion
extracts a cost, while delivering little. We will attend to the practice of licensing
later, but for now, it may suffice to note how many details of the play point to a
satire of its own theatrical conditions of production: the audience pays to see a
two-hour show which concerns two hours of con work through a fake experi-
ment; the house in which the play takes place is located in Blackfriars, where the
theater itself was located, and the epilogue addresses the audience directly to
articulate the pleasures of illusion, inferring that perhaps they, too, have been
gulled.11 Mercury has truly jumped out of the fire into the frying pan, where he
will be served up to the paying public. He no longer catalyzes baser metals into
gold, but exchanges money for illusion. Like city comedy, of which The Alchemist
took a part, the virtual becomes a space designed for for-profit illusion. As the
alchemists were employed to make gold, theater will be licensed to make money,
and the “new” science will be turned toward invention and product.

The gender divide: The Roaring Girl

Meanwhile, in another theater in London, at approximately the same time, The
Roaring Girl (1608–11) represented how gender attributes that in alchemy were
distributed across elements, could be singularly and definitively assigned only to
the human agent. As Jonson set up a stage that worked its illusion against rites of
transformation, Middleton and Dekker staged the operations of gender as defini-
tive of human identity. Even Jonson’s alchemist still offered up some of the
discourse of the dynamic, adverbial play of gender across substances that the
traditional alchemy practiced:

. . . mercury is engender’d;
Sulphur o’ the fat and earthy part: the one,
(Which is the last) supplying the placed of male,
The other of the female, in all metals.
 Act One 31

Some do believe hermaphrodeity,

That both do act, and suffer. But these two
Make the rest ductile, malleable, extensive.
(Jonson 1967: 160–166)

The “malleable” and the “ductile,” however, would delve underground with the
esoteric practices and “hermaphrodeity,” a figure of the fusion of sexual differ-
ence, would become a utopic fantasy, perhaps corporealized in the human. In
contrast to this dynamic muddle of matter, Middleton and Dekker staged Moll—
a woman dressed as a man. Moll’s gender exchange operates as a counterfeit
crossing. She appears to some in the play as one who “strays from her kind/
Nature repents she made her” (The Roaring Girl 2001: 211–212). Sex/gender,
which, in alchemy were an aspect of nature’s dynamism are Moll’s iteration of
social codes. Insofar as her performance of gender is malleable, she “strays.” She
is a counterfeit. Note how the term “nature” here functions as an attribute of the
human condition.
Moll character-izes how gender appears as a property of a human subject,
locating it within strictly social relations. Rather than an element of natural
philosophy, as it operated in alchemy, gender becomes a key definitive element in
the organization of the social, displacing the aspiration to conflate matter with
metaphysic. As Jonathan Dollimore, in his book on the era, Sexual Dissidence,
describes it: “The metaphysical is displaced by, and then collapsed into, the
social” (1991: 295). If Jonson foregrounded the virtual as illusion, Middleton and
Dekker portray it as the social sphere—a space of partition and conflict.
Dollimore (280):

The early modern view of identity . . . was also, and quite explicitly, a
powerful metaphysic of social integration. . . . Metaphysics here underpins a
discursive formation of the subject, of subjection.

As gender attains the status of a regulatory code, rather than an aspect of trans-
mutation, its properties become fixed and fix the location of the subject. The
imagined construction of the virtual realm is signified as the social. As character
and motivation take center stage, the remains of the perception of a unified field
of the virtual are gradually sucked into the construction of individual interiority.
Gender will become key to what Dollimore characterizes as the era’s “quest for
authenticity: underpinning and endorsing a philosophy of individualism” (284).
The seventeenth century, according to Michel Foucault, established the discourse
of sexuality as it installed gender.12 Change is no longer the nature of the fabric
of matter and the social, but a disruption of it—Sexual Dissidence, as Dollimore so
aptly termed it. Theater and the new science thus initiate humans into the exclu-
sive rights of the subject position, taking the stage for their machines and
machinations of the illusory and the social for the virtual realm of their conflict
and wedded harmony.
32 Act One

Faust: the new paradigm of alchemy

Said’s argument that medieval notions of Islam did not originate in knowledge
about its beliefs, but were constructed as an evil imitation of Christianity seems
particularly resonant in Goethe’s version of alchemy in Faust. The experiments
in metallurgy and ur-chemistry so central to alchemy are not represented in the
play; rather, Faust, the alchemist, practices a form of devil worship. The prime
emblem in the play, the pentagram, is designed to hold the devil in its space and
Faust begins his journey to damnation on the day of the quem queritis. Unlike
Jonson, who still retained some of the actual terms of alchemy in his play, Goethe’s
sources are more from the philosophy of religion, with fragments of Latin rather
than Arabic. Goethe organized a new paradigm for the “fallen” scientist in his
Faust plays, not only by overwriting the Arab traditions, but also by locating the
scientist within a binary metaphysical space of transcendence/damnation.
In overwriting the Arab tradition, Goethe was in sync with the restrictions of
his age. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, even an interest in Islamic
texts was a liability. In 1709, William Whiston, Newton’s successor at Cambridge,
was expelled from his post for his scholarly interest in Islamic texts (Said 1979:
76). Goethe succeeds in untying the depiction of the alchemist from these
censored Islamic roots, even though he was well familiar with Islamic writings.
Once he had successfully claimed alchemy as within the Latin discourse in Faust,
Goethe could overwrite, in a more celebratory fashion, an original Islamic text.
In 1819, he composed a poetic meditation based on the fourteenth-century Muslim
poet Shams-od-Din Muhammad Hafez entitled West-östlicher Divan, or the West-
Eastern Divan. (Note: the term “Divan” means a collection of poetry, and the
name “Hafez” means “Koran memorizer.”) This work is the very definition of
orientalism, dreamily portraying an “araby” of symbolic and aesthetic remove,
but the invention of such an orientalist fantasy could come only after the real
inheritance of the Islamic sciences had been successfully displaced.13 Once
untied from its deep scientific and philosophical roots, “araby” could be
extremely useful in charting exactly that remove, through floating significations
that represented the “pure” aesthetic realm.
From this perspective, one can view the complex and numerous appearances
of the ancient Greeks in Faust II as an insistence upon the sort of displaced
“roots” that Martin Bernal traces in his book, Black Athena. While Faust I situates
the medieval alchemist securely within the Latin tradition, scripting none of the
contest of cultures the practice incited, Faust II stages the inherited intellectual
and cultural traditions of Europe as Greek, Greek, Greek. Thus, the Arab and
Jewish traditions become philosophically mute and ethnically unfixed. The
godless results of alchemy are writ large in these two plays, while the sociopolic-
ital referent of that godlessness, Islam, is subsumed into the Protestant realm of
individual moral motivation.
Nonetheless, Goethe did not invent the Faust legend. The historical Faust was
known, both by his contemporaries, and by those who followed, to be “the most
 Act One 33

accomplished alchemist that has ever lived.”14 Numerous puppet plays and frag-
ments inspired by his legend had enacted the story for more than a century.
Perhaps these shows offered one of the first examples of grassroots performances
of science. Alchemy, the science of the day, was imagined in this popular realm
through puppets.
However, one Faust commentator, Erich Trunz, figures Paracelsus to be the
more persuasive model for the character of Goethe’s Faust than Faust legends.
Some critics contend that Goethe actually read Paracelsus during his convales-
cence in 1768 (Zajonc 1998: 21). So perhaps Goethe’s source for the character
was an alchemist who practiced and taught as a medical expert. In other
words, a scientist. Paracelsus was a leading medical innovator and alchemist of
his time (1493–1541), a recalcitrant practitioner, who was rewarded for his
medical innovations and shunned for his direct challenges of the Latin tradition.
His discoveries and his biography haunted the intellectual traditions that
followed, making him a rich historical figure from which Goethe could derive
the character of Faust (Trunz 1976: 461). If Goethe was ruminating on
Paracelsus, then his suppression of the Islamic origins of the practice is even
more obvious, for Paracelsus traveled extensively through Egypt and other
non-European sites and brought back his alchemical discoveries to Switzerland
and beyond. His success derived from the inventive, one might say the experi-
mental, hands-on tradition of the Islamic and alchemical practices. In the
idiomatic language of an enthusiast, Manly P. Hall, a contemporary chronicler
of esoteric traditions, describes how Paracelsus gained his knowledge in
Paracelsus, His Mystical and Medical Philosophy: “not from long-coated pedagogues
but from dervishes in Constantinople, witches, gypsies, and sorcerers, who
invoked spirits and captured the rays of the celestial bodies in dew.”15 Successful
in treating medical problems with new techniques learned on his travels,
Paracelsus was made chief medical officer and lecturer at the University in Basel.
However, he became so agitated about the iterated practices of medicine
unquestionably received from Galen, that he publicly burnt the manuscripts.
Of course, the public spectacle caused the demise of his employment in public
office and he hurriedly fled Basel to wander through much of Europe. His biog-
raphy resounds with the combination of great medical innovation and a
dedication to alchemy and astrology. On the one hand, he was respected for his
experimental approach to maladies, and on the other, he was regarded as suspect
for his public reliance upon alchemical texts such as the Corpus Hermeticum. Trunz
interprets Goethe’s turn to this figure as characteristic of his age, when, in
Germany “Die paracelsische Sehnsucht nach Erkenntnis ist religiös” (“the
Paracelsian longing for knowledge is [was] religious”; 1976: 461). Thus, the
reception of the figure was, by then, less focused on his introduction of medical
techniques, such as cauterizing a wound, than in the philosophies within which
these practices were located. An adept, Paracelsus was re-translated into one who
“longed” for knowledge—was unsatisfied by his expertise. The opening scene of
Faust illustrates this shift.
34 Act One

Two maneuvers are evident in this eighteenth-century reception of Paracelsus:

first that the practice of science and medicine can be extracted from the system
of natural philosophy and second, that the ideological contest Europe staged
with Islam could be transcribed into a strictly moral battle, in which the sociopo-
litical referent is embedded in the cosmic figure of the devil. Ironically, then, the
intimate connection alchemy enjoyed between experimentation and philosophy,
the practice of science and ethics, as Newton demonstrated, once severed, was
depicted as devoid of both.
For Goethe, as for Jonson before him, the character on the side of alchemy is
a con artist. Goethe’s Mephistopheles is the supreme trickster, ever intent upon
conning Faust through illusions. Jonson’s Mercury is Goethe’s Mephistopheles.
Yet, in Faust, the use of astrology and alchemy in the quest for knowledge is
translated as an anti-religious impulse, rather than as a seductive form of court
play. Moreover, the religious act is caught up in forms of economic transactions.
Faust “sells” his soul through a written contract for un-earthly delights and is
finally condemned to hell. He writes a promissory note to the devil for his soul.
In Faust II, the issue is literally paper money, which Mephistopheles proffers to
the Emperor.
Prior to Goethe’s scripting of the story, puppet plays depicting Faust’s fall
circulated throughout the fairs, staging the story in the very venues of barter and
exchange. The performances of Faust, then, originated in a space coincident with
the marketplace. Its dialogue and narrative worked in an atmosphere of barter.
The negotiations between Faust and the devil concerned the exchange of goods
for a soul, animating the commercial process into the virtual realm of absolute
value for the entertainment and instruction of the traders. The devil lures Faust
into a bad bargain, in which he exchanges “goods,” or the good, for counterfeit
payment. The scenario must have resonated, both comically and tragically
among the negotiators at the fairs and beyond, in an age that was anxiously
creating new forms of material value and money itself.
In Goethe’s Faust, the metaphysical barter is expressed through references to
the two metals popularly associated with alchemy, gold and mercury, as if metal-
lurgy and transformation were now somehow embedded in market trading. Faust
rhetorically asks the devil what materials he has to trade, gold that doesn’t hold
its value and quicksilver that runs through your hands (lines 1679–1680). These
metals are not part of a laboratory experiment, but part of a bartering process.
While the play transcribes the traces of the marketplace, it also demarcates a
tension between theater and the marketplace by setting up a spiritual/virtual
realm, as theater set up a distinct, removed, theatrical space that seems to be in
contrast to the material. The notion of the transcendent virtual space will
become an effect of this barter. Once Faust sells his soul, he is given access to
virtual travel.
The written pact can also be perceived as the issuing of a kind of letter of
credit, which will become the literal referent in Faust II. While Goethe is widely
received as an artist, in the Romantic sense, he was also a lawyer, and, appointed
 Act One 35

in the early 1780s to the post of minister of mines, war, and finance in Weimar.
Surely aware of the spirit of his time, he observed the world of contracts and
financial obligations of his time and perhaps did not find them completely
divorced from theater and the metaphysical. Laura Brown summarizes the
dynamics of the age in Fables of Modernity (2001: 97):

The early eighteenth century was the first age to live the immediate intensity
of credit, loans, discounts, shares, futures, national debt, deficit spending . . .
An international money market and a futures commodity market were
established in the first decade of the Restoration.

Although Brown is discussing England, the practices were widespread, including

the notion of mortgage, which plays an important role in the scene of Faust’s
bargain. The discussion concerning the elements of the promise of payment is
one of the most dramatic in the play. These haunting lines suggest the broader
anxiety of the age: “a parchment alone, inscribed and stamped is a specter, from
which all shrink” (1726–1728). Signing one’s name as a mortgage of the soul, a
line of credit, with a distant due date, is, in itself, a terrifying event. Something
about a promise, an aspiration caught in a promissory note resounds with
cautionary rhetoric. Although resonant with the relation of alchemy to gold,
Goethe returns the depiction of alchemy to the frame of the liturgical inheri-
tance of theater, relocating transformation within a promissory note of salvation.
Paracelsus, the alchemist/scientist must somehow account for his practices
through economic forms.

Faust I: the fall from Goethean science

Goethe was a practicing scientist for most of his mature years. While his literary
works have earned him continued veneration, his scientific work inspired only a
few somewhat esoteric practices, until the past two decades when his work
gained a new acceptance among phenomenological and ecological approaches
to science.16 Goethe’s scientific studies spanned such diverse fields as geology,
meteorology, botany and plant development, morphology and embryology, and,
perhaps most influential, the nature of color and vision. Reading his version of
Faust with his theories of science in mind helps to chart the way in which the play
is in dialogue with his own notions of science and the portrait of the scientist.
In his youth, Goethe was introduced to the studies of alchemy, from which he
derived certain principles he later combined with the practices of the new
science to create his own version of what constituted scientific knowledge. While
he was not an alchemist per se, he wrote in a letter as late as 1770 that “Alchemy
is still my veiled love” (quoted in Zajonc 1998: 21). Goethe shared Newton’s
alchemical desire for integration, inventing a scientific method that would
combine observation with integration. He termed his approach a “delicate
empiricism.” In his Maximen und Reflexionen (Maxims and Reflections) Goethe
36 Act One

suggests that “There is a delicate empiricism, which identifies itself with the
object” (quoted in Cottrell 1998: 259). In other words, in Goethe’s paradigm, the
scientist would not act as a removed observer, but one who would somehow
share the subject position with the object, if only through identification. From a
shared sense of the experience of the object, as in alchemy’s notion of a qualita-
tive not quantitative measure, the scientist would come to better understand the
object of study. In this way, Goethe’s scientific practice was dedicated to this
principle of interaction, as exemplified by the title of one of his essays, The
Experiment as Mediator Between Object and Subject. The research experience, for
Goethe, was positioned as a binding one. Moreover, the translation of the
observed into language also troubled the immediate, bonded apprehension of
the living: “Yet how difficult it is not to put the sign in the place of the thing;
how difficult to keep the being (Wesen) always livingly before one and not to slay
it with the word” (quoted in Zajonc 1998: 24). Understood as a version of
phenomenology, Goethe’s notion of observation, if that’s a suitable term, is one
that “accedes with one’s intentionaliy to their [the subject/objects’] patterns . . .
” (Amrine 1998: 37). As Frederick Amrine puts it, in “The Metamorphosis of the
Scientist” (38):

In direct contrast to prevailing scientific methodology, Goethe’s ideal scien-

tist tries consciously not to reduce phenomena to a schema but, rather, to
remain inwardly mobile. . . . Thus, while mathematical formalism may be
the most appropriate Vorstellungsart [type of representation] for mechanics, it
may well be entirely inappropriate for chromatics. Goethe felt this, and it
was the real basis for his polemic against Sir Isaac Newton.

Goethe understood his scientific practice and findings on color and light to be in
direct contradiction to Newton’s. Around 1666, Newton began a study of color
by using light and prisms, publishing his Opticks, in 1704. He divided the white
light into the seven colors of the prism that composed it. The problem, as
Goethe saw it, was that Newton studied light in isolation, extracting the under-
standing of it from other forces, most importantly, the human perception of it. In
his Theory of Color, Goethe finds that the perception of color is related to optics,
the eye itself, which both perceives and produces color, thus co-constituting the
process along with light and substance. Color, then, is not an entity, a bounded
zone with properties, as in the prism, but as Goethe describes it in the opening
remarks to his 1810 edition, “Colors are the deeds of light; its deeds and suffer-
ings . . . ” (quoted in Zajonc 1998: 19). For Goethe, colors are actions, not things.
As he phrased it, more generally, the “objects” (Gegenstände) of nature are better
viewed as “acts” (Tätigkeiten) (Fink 1991: 44). For this reason, Goethe preferred
the classical Greek discourse of color to the German. In the Greek, color is not
fixed as a noun, with properties and differences; instead, it acts as a verb: yellow
can “redden” and red can “yellow” (Fink 1991: 47). Goethe also criticized
Newton’s omission of the role of darkness in the production of light, calling it a
 Act One 37

“light darkness polarity.” Light could only appear in a dialectic with darkness—a
dialog, if you will, invoking the Faust/Mephistopheles duality.
While color presents a more obvious example, Goethe located dynamic
change in all substances—even granite. He perceived a “play of elements” (Spiel
der Elemente), in which all things enjoy an “inner development” over time (quoted
in Fink 1991: 18). Goethe’s paradigm of knowing, then, is an active one in which
the researcher enters into an ongoing relationship with changing substances,
altered by and co-constituted with the substances involved. While it is not exactly
alchemical, it is certainly reminiscent of its basic assumptions.
For Goethe, “delicate empiricism” contested both the overdetermined scien-
tific empiricism and the philosophical abstractions of his era. He disagreed with
Hegel’s dialectics because, he argued, they were conceptualized as operating
apart from continued direct observation, and he wrote against the received tradi-
tion of Newton’s mechanistic universe. He also opposed what he termed
“mathematical formalism,” arguing against “Mathematics [that] must . . .
declare itself independent of everything external, must proceed according to its
own spirit and laws” (quoted in Heitler 57). Rather than these paradigms of
removed reason, or causal chains, or quantifying mathematical equations,
Goethe sought an empiricism combined with an interrelational dynamic.
Experience and change were categories of knowing within these bonded rela-
tionships.
Reviewing Faust from the perspective of Goethe’s scientific studies, we can
perceive, most obviously, the scripting of the interaction of dark and light
(Mephistopheles and the Christian God) as necessary to what Goethe believed to
constitute the structures of appearance. Recalling Mao’s sense of contradiction
and dynamism as the essential make-up of the elements, Goethe’s dialectic mode
of the production of appearance seems to invoke this more potentially alterable
universe. The prelude in the theater initiates the virtual space of representation,
where one can actively observe appearance through the dialectic/dialogue of
opposing forces. In viewing Creation, the god welcomes a wager with
Mephistopheles that makes the dramatic conditions occur. Contradiction is the
apparatus of appearance. Instead of the moralistic message that most readings
of Goethe presume, the play may actually be staging the conditions of Goethean
optics.
Faust could be understood as the alienated scientist, whose distanced, with-
drawn relation to the object of learning is signified by his remove in his study.
Although he longs for a more dynamic relation to the world, he maintains a strict
division from it in his study. The esteemed German critic, Georg Lukacs, puts it
this way: “Faust longs for the same thing for which the young Goethe longs: a
philosophy [and we might add practice] which transcends the solely contempla-
tive, dead objectivity, and the disunity between the knowledge of nature and
human activity” (1968: 168). Faust’s fault resides in his resistance to an active
engagement with what he would know, preferring, instead, to peruse the contem-
plative texts. Goethe writes this against “pure” contemplation:
Discovering Diverse Content Through
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foot and a half deep. We did not know that the time would come
when these dark, rude huts would seem luxurious quarters.
Our mess was composed of George Thomas, Clay Lowe, Bob
Bond and myself. George had been left behind at Fredericksburg,
where he was ill for some time. He and a private from another
company decided to come to camp and spend Christmas with the
boys. They left the train and tramped a mile and a half to surprise
the mess, arriving in the nick of time. George said they could not
bring us turkey, so they brought some whiskey and eggs. They
began beating eggs early Christmas morning, and they made a huge
pan full of egg-nog. We invited the officers and our friends to take
some with us. In the evening the boys went for Col. Fagin and
invited him to drink egg-nog. By that time they were pretty full and
Clay Lowe told Col. Fagin that he wanted him to understand that he
was “Fifth Sergeant of Company G.” He succeeded in impressing the
Colonel with his rank. Then everyone began to make things lively.
I did not touch the egg-nog, therefore did not enjoy their hilarity.
I left the hut, found Sam Shoup in his hut, and we went out and sat
by the fire thinking we were away from the crowd. But the boys did
not intend to let us off so easily. When we came back into the hut
we could not see very well. The cabin was dark, as the only light
came from the doorway, and the snow had blinded us. The boys
made a rush for us. I got into a dark corner, and after they were all
in we both ran out. They caught Sam, but failed to get me.
Clay Lowe, followed by about twenty-five of the boys, went down
to the middle of the company grounds and commenced to make a
speech, which he could do so well. Some of the boys, not wishing
Clay to have all the glory, put John Loftin on the stump to make an
address and he began: “My friends, I am not as eloquent as Clay,
but I speak more to the point.”
That evening at dress parade, Sam Shoup as corporal had to
march out and present arms, reporting two commissioned officers,
four non-commissioned officers, and twenty-seven privates drunk.
The rest of the regiment was there, and to our consternation, we
were ordered to cook three days’ rations and be ready to march at
daylight. The order read that any private who straggled or failed to
keep up with the command would be court martialed.
When we stopped late next evening on the march, Clay was
nearly dead and could hardly walk, from the effect of the Christmas
spree. Colonel Fagin rode along by our company and seeing how
Clay was said, “Hello, Fifth Sergeant of Company G, how do you
feel?” Clay replied, “Colonel, I am damned dry; how are you?”
December 26, 1861, we reached Aquia Creek and went into
winter quarters in log huts and tents. Here we had “Sunday
Soldiering.” We were close to Fredericksburg, and could order what
we wanted to eat. Confederate money was good and we could grab
things cheap with it. Fifty cents a gallon for shelled oysters; twenty-
five cents a pound for butter; pies and cakes every day. Think of
such grub for a soldier! But, ah, to stay in the snow, eighteen inches
deep, and guard the Potomac river all night! No shelter, but a corn
stalk house; no fire, but a driftwood blaze, not very bright either, as
it would be a signal for the enemy to cannonade. That was like war
and soldier duty.
We had three points to guard on the river, one on the island with
battery, and one at the lower end of the line. It required a whole
company for all points at night, since the guard had to be relieved
every twenty minutes. Otherwise he would have been frozen by the
snow and sleet which swept across the Potomac.
One night a squad from our company under a sergeant was
ordered to the island, which was only guarded at night. We had to
cross over in a flat boat. The evening before supplies had been sent
to the island for the use of the Battery Company and they had failed
to haul them. The squad on the lower part of the guard line found
them, all unused, in a pile on the landing. The night was bitter cold,
the snow was deep, the wind blowing a gale, no wood was in sight.
The supplies were bacon. It was good to eat, and in this emergency
it was good to burn, so the boys proceeded to burn it. Dawn
revealed other things besides bacon. They discovered two jugs of
red liquor, which they immediately confiscated. At daylight they were
ordered to camp two miles away and proceeded to march—and drink
on empty stomachs until the whole squad was drunk. We, on the
upper part of the guard line, had to wait in the snow and wind until
they came up, for all must report in camp together. We did not know
what caused their delay, but we were in no pious frame of mind
when we saw them coming, wabbling from side to side, yelling like
Commanches. The officers with us were red-headed and said things
to that squad that “were bad”.
But the boys from the lower end knew how dry the officers were
after being out all night, so they offered the jug of snake bite
medicine. The officers found it so good they did not let it go in a
hurry. After that the privates could not refuse for fear of making the
boys angry. By the time we reached camp almost everybody was
overcome. The officers went to sleep, and when they awoke they
forgot all about discipline. So nobody suffered but the Battery
fellows, and they could never prove who captured their supplies.
Sometimes a company would buy a barrel of oysters, take it to
their hut and open it, and find in the center a five gallon jug of red
rye. It was so concealed to pass the provost guard on train. But the
boys did even worse. Seven of them from other commands, went to
Fredericksburg, bought a coffin and filled it with jugs. With sad faces
and measured steps they carried it solemnly to the train. But the
joke was too good to keep. The boys unscrewed the lid and yelled at
the guard. Of course, when the train returned no one could name
the offenders.
But our “Sunday Soldiering” did not last long. The regiment was
composed of one year troops, who now re-enlisted for three years,
or for the war. The re-enlisted men were ordered to rendezvous at
Memphis, to reorganize the regiment, but later were ordered to
Corinth, Mississippi.
The Virginia people had been good to us, and had tried to make
us feel at home. Some of the boys had gone into society at
Fredericksburg, and found it hard to part from their new friends.
George (my old friend, George Thomas) “had it mighty bad.” He said
to me, “Bill, I must go to Fredericksburg to see my girl. Will you cook
my three days’ rations? I’ll meet you at the train tomorrow.” “But
Pard, how will you get off?” “I’ll ask Col. Fellows.” He went to
Colonel Fellows, who was in charge that day and told his tale of
woe. The colonel was in deep sympathy with the boy (perhaps he
had had the disease himself sometime,) and agreed to help him.
George went to Fredericksburg, and the next day I saw him there
with his girl. Our train pulled out, I yelled at him, but still he
lingered. They gazed and gazed at each other, and it seemed that
George did not have the nerve to tear himself away. Finally they
parted and by hard running he caught the train and stood waving to
her until we were out of sight. The mails were kept hot after that.
Poor George was killed at Atlanta. He was the bravest man I ever
knew, and if he had lived, would have made that girl a noble
husband.
March 17, 1862, at Corinth, Mississippi, the re-organization of the
regiment took place. The newly elected officers of Company G were:
Samuel Shoup, Captain.
A. T. Watchell, First Lieutenant.
Clay Lowe, Second Lieutenant.
John R. Loftin, Third Lieutenant.
W. B. Densford, First Sergeant.
Henry Clements, Second Sergeant.
W. H. Reid, Third Sergeant.
George Spaulder, Fourth Sergeant.
Thomas Davis, First Corporal.
John W. Baird, Second Corporal.
T. S. Logan, Third Corporal.
Forrest Dillard, Fourth Corporal.

We camped at Corinth, Mississippi, and the army was under

General Beauregard until General Albert Sydney Johnston arrived.
April 4th we marched to Shiloh, arriving there April 5th. The
constant rains had made the roads so bad that we had to pull the
cannon by hand as the horses mired in the mud. But by this time we
were used to hardships, and nothing discouraged that superb
commander, General Albert Sydney Johnston. Every soldier loved
him and was ready to follow him to the death. At the battle of Shiloh
we were placed in the Gibson Brigade, Braggs’ Division. On the night
before the battle the Medical Department ordered six men from each
company to report to headquarters for instructions.
 L. C. GAUSE
First Lieutenant, Company “G”, First Arkansas Infantry
 CLAY LOWE.
Second Lieutenant, Company “G”, First Ark. Infantry]
I was one of the six to report from our company. The Surgeon
General ordered us to leave our guns in camp and follow behind the
company at six paces, as an infirmary corps to take care of the
wounded. We reported our instructions to Captain Shoup, telling him
we would not leave our guns, as we intended to fight. After hard
pleading Captain Shoup consented. We took our guns and also
looked after the wounded.
At four o’clock in the morning we began the march on the enemy.
Each man had forty cartridges, all moving accoutrements and three
days’ rations. General Johnston was cheered as he rode by our
command and I remember his words as well as if they had been
today, “Shoot low boys; it takes two to carry one off the field.”
Before we started Captain Scales of the Camden Company,
begged his negro servant to stay in camp at Corinth, but the old
negro would not leave his master. When we were in line of battle the
captain again begged the negro to return to camp, but he refused to
go. Just after the last appeal the fight began. A cannon ball whizzed
through the air and exploded, tearing limbs from trees, wounding
the soldiers. One man fell dead in front of the old negro. Then there
was a yell, and old Sam shouted, “Golly, Marster, I can’t stand this,”
and set out in a run for Corinth.
We moved forward with shot and shell, sweeping everything
before us. We drove the officers from their hot coffee and out of the
tents, capturing their camp and tents. Captain Shoup and John
Loftin and Clay Lowe each got a sword. In the quartermaster’s tent
we found thousands of dollars in crisp, new bills, for they had been
paying off the Yankee soldiers.
Thad Kinman of the 7th Arkansas, who was under Ellenburg,
quartermaster department, had loaded a chest into a wagon when
he was ordered to “throw that stuff away.” He told us afterwards,
“That was one time that I was sick,” but Ellenburg would not let him
keep it.
Our command moved steadily forward for a mile or more. The
Yankees had time to halt the fleeing ones, form a line of infantry and
make a stand in an old road in a thicket. We were to the left of the
thicket, fighting all the time in this part of the field. I saw Jim
Stimson fall, and being on the Infirmary Corps, I went to him. I cut
his knapsack loose and placed it under his head, tied my
handkerchief about his neck, and then saw that he was dead. I took
up my gun again, when in front I saw a line of Yankees two
thousand strong, marching on the flank. I could see the buttons on
their coats. I thought I would get revenge for my dead comrade, so
I leveled beside a tree, took good aim at a Yankee, and fired. About
that time the Yankees fronted and fired. Hail was nothing to that rain
of lead. I looked around and found only four of our company. One
was dead, two were wounded and I was as good as dead I thought,
for I had no idea I could ever get away. To be shot in the back was
no soldier’s way, so I stepped backward at a lively pace until I got
over the ridge and out of range, assisting the wounded boys at the
same time. I had not heard the command to oblique to the right and
close up a gap, and that was how we four happened to be alone in
the wood. But I did some running then, found my regiment at the
right of the thicket and fell into rank. When I got there the company
was in a little confusion through not understanding a command,
whether they were to move forward or oblique to right. Captain
Shoup thought his men were wavering, so he stepped in front of the
company, unsheathed his new sword and told the boys to follow
him. He had scarcely finished with the words when a bullet struck
his sword and went through wood and steel. The boys were red-
headed. They told him he did not have to lead them. They were
ready to go anywhere. So we went forward into the hottest of the
battle where the roar of musketry was incessant, and the
cannonading fairly shook the ground. Men fell around us as leaves
from the trees. Our regiment lost two hundred and seventy, killed,
wounded and captured. The battle raged all day and when night
came the enemy had been pushed back to the verge of the
Tennessee river. But our victory had been won at a great price, in
the loss of our beloved General, Albert Sydney Johnston, who was
killed early in the action.
 General Beauregard, next in command, succeeded Johnston, and
the battle opened again at daylight the next morning. During the
night the enemy had been strongly re-inforced, and our men were
steadily pressed back.
John Cathey, John R. Loftin, Waddell and I were among the
wounded. We were sent to the field hospital several miles back in
the wood. When the Surgeon General went to work on me he gave
me a glass of whiskey, saying it would help me bear the pain. I told
him I would not drink it. He then handed me a dose of morphine. I
refused that. He looked me squarely in the face, saying, “Are you a
damned fool?”
Our men, fighting stubbornly all the while, were pushed back by
superior force through and beyond the Yankee camps we had
captured so easily the day before, and at last retreated to Corinth,
amidst a terrible storm of rain and sleet. We had lost about ten
thousand men. That was the beginning of our real soldiering and the
greatest battle we had been in. About thirty thousand men were
killed, wounded and captured in those two days, the loss on each
side being fifteen thousand.
At Corinth we awaited re-inforcements and prepared to renew the
struggle. The Yankee forces advanced to Farmington, and we had a
little more fighting. They captured one of our outposts, then we
drove them back to their lines. Colonel Fellows was always on the
front line. At this battle he plunged after some cavalry, following
them he struck low, boggy ground. He got stuck in the mud and lost
his hat, but succeeded in capturing the enemy.
We kept heavy guards at night. One night eighteen of our
company were put on out-post, but our cavalry was still further out.
George Thomas and I were stationed inside a fence row. We were
told not to fire, and we were to be relieved before daybreak. We
were not relieved however, and when day came we found ourselves
only a short distance from the Yankee breastworks. We could have
kept concealed by the grass and bushes, but George, who knew not
the meaning of fear, stood in his corner of the fence-row. As he
watched the Yankees walking their beats on the breastworks he
thought it a good opportunity, and before I knew it, he had shot his
man. Oh, then three cannon and two thousand infantry turned loose
on us! The fence was knocked to smithereens. The rails, filled with
bullets, crashed over us. Limbs falling from trees, covered us, and
we were buried beneath the debris like ground hogs. We could not
get out until darkness fell again. Then we found some of our cavalry,
and tried to get back to our regiment, but the Yanks were between
us and our command. The cavalry said we could fight our way
through their lines, and we did. The cavalry soon left us behind.
Yankees were shooting all around us and yelling for us to surrender,
but we ran into a ravine, where we were hidden by the thick
undergrowth, and so we got away.
On May 29, 1862, General Beauregard evacuated Corinth. We
retreated on a dark night through a densely wooded bottom road.
About two o’clock we halted. As soon as we stopped we dropped in
the road anywhere, anyhow, and were fast asleep. Some devilish
boy got two trace chains and came running over the sleeping men,
rattling the chains, yelling “Whoa! Whoa!” at the top of his voice. Of
course all the commotion—we had it then. Soldiers grasped the guns
at their sides, officers called, “Fall in, fall in men.” When the joke was
discovered it would have been death to that man, but no one ever
knew “who struck Billy Patterson.”
We marched forty miles and camped at Twenty Mile Creek on the
Mobile and Ohio railroad. On June 5th we reached Tupelo. We were
put in Anderson’s Division of General Walker’s Brigade and camped
at Tupelo until August 4th, when we were ordered to Montgomery,
Ala.
We went on the train to Mobile. Here I went up into the city with
Colonel Snyder and two of his friends, I being the only private
among them. It seemed ages since we had enjoyed a square meal.
We went into a fine restaurant near the Hotel Battle House, four
half-starved Confederate soldiers. Just at the smell of oyster stew I
collapsed. But we ordered everything—oysters raw, fried, stewed,
fresh red snapper; just everything. We ate. I hope we ate! I think
that proprietor was astounded, but it was only our pocketbooks that
suffered. At last when we could eat no more, we had fine cigars, and
as Dr. Scott said later, “This was good enough for a dog.”
We went from Mobile to the railroad station on the bay, where the
water flows under the platform. The train was two hours late, so the
boys shed their clothes, and in ten minutes there were a thousand
men in the bay. They swam about splashing, kicking, diving, having
fun until some of the boys went in where the palm flags were
growing and espied a large alligator with his mouth wide open. In
less time than it takes to tell it there was not a soldier in the bay.
Strange! Men, who had stood firm in battle, had faced cannon, had
endured shot and shell, now fled from one alligator!
We went by rail to Montgomery, where we arrived August 7th. We
went into camp near the river and had a chance to swim without
fear of alligators.
Montgomery, as the first capital of the Confederacy, was a noted
place and many celebrated people lived there. Dr. Arnold and I had
bought ourselves “boiled” white shirts, thinking we might be invited
into society, but we seemed to have been forgotten by the “haut
ton.” But it was a beautiful city and we inspected it thoroughly. We
were too many for the police, so they “gave us rope to hang
ourselves.”
We went on next day to Atlanta. When we got there we hoped to
eat a big Georgia watermelon, but to our consternation, found the
provost guard destroying every watermelon in the city. They were
fresh, red and juicy and made our mouths water, but discipline had
improved and we touched not, tasted not, handled not the unclean
watermelons. The doctor said they would make us sick. Citizens and
negroes might eat them. For soldiers they were sure poison.
We passed up the Sequatchie Valley with its fine springs, stone
milk houses, and rich bottom land. We camped on Cumberland
Mountain and we camped on Caney Fork. We marched thirty-five
miles to Sparta, Tennessee, and camped, and there we were ordered
to wash our clothes and to cook three days’ rations. All this marching
was on the famous Bragg Kentucky Campaign and the old general
trained us to walk until horses could not beat us. We marched
eleven, twelve, thirteen____ ____fifty miles. We waded the
Cumberland river, and it was very swift and deep. My messmate,
Bob Bond, found a sweetheart here, but he could not tarry and they
parted in tears. We camped at Red Sulphur Springs, marched thirty-
eight miles and camped on the Tennessee and Kentucky line. We
passed through Glasgow, marching all night. These forced marches
were hard on us, seasoned infantry as we were. Dr. Arnold, my file
leader said:
“Bill, I can’t go any further, don’t you see I go to sleep walking? I
can’t stand it any longer.”
“You’re no good,” I replied, “you can stand it as well as I can,
besides if you leave the road you will be captured and will have to
eat rats.”
“Goodbye, old friend, I am gone,” was his answer. He ran into the
wood twenty or thirty feet from the road, dropped down and was
asleep by the time he hit the ground.
He said when he awoke he heard sabres clashing and cavalry
passing. He thought he “was a goner”, but he soon heard the
familiar voice of General Hardee. He was calling to get up and go on.
He said even a soldier’s endurance had a limit, and that limit was
now reached. We would not go much further without a rest. Then he
ordered his body guard to charge the sleeping men. Dr. Arnold had
to run for his command or be court martialed. Panting for breath, he
joined us after we had gone into camp, and exclaimed, “Bill, I wish I
had come on, for I am nearly dead, and old General Hardee is after
me hot and heavy.”
On September 17th we left Case City at daybreak, and marched
fifteen miles to Mumfordsville, which we surrounded, placing a
battery on every hill and knoll that commanded the town. We had
eighty cannon ready to open fire, and then demanded the surrender
of the garrison, and on September 18th six thousand men marched
out, laying down six thousand guns. While Will Reid of our company
was loading guns into a wagon, one went off accidentally and shot
off his arm. General Hardee was riding over the battlefield, and
seeing Reid with his arm dangling at his side asked his staff surgeon,
Dave Yandell, “Who is that man’s surgeon?” Yandell pointed out Dr.
Young. Dr. Young had gone out in our company a graduate surgeon.
He was young and up to that time he had made no operation of
note. He begged the staff-surgeon to help him, but Yandell refused,
saying he had no time. He stayed, however, to look on, and
embarrassed the young surgeon still more. When Dr. Young took the
knife his hand shook like a leaf, but he performed the operation
successfully and according to all the laws of surgery. After the war
he returned to his home at Corinth, Mississippi, where he stood high
in his profession. He died in 1892.
At Mumfordsville while in line of battle, marching slowly and
stopping often, we passed through an orchard. Nice juicy apples
were lying all over the ground and one of the boys of a Louisiana
Regiment, stooped down and picked up two or three. His colonel
happened to be looking in his direction, and he had that boy gagged
and buckled every time the line stopped. After that every soldier
thought hell was too good for that colonel.
On the 20th we marched all night and camped at daylight at New
Haven. On the 21st we marched seventeen miles, and camped at
Haginsville. On the 22nd we passed fine orchards. My partner, Dr.
Arnold said to me, “If you will carry my surplus luggage, I will take
the risk and get some of those apples.” “Now Pard, you are in for
more trouble.” But he would not listen, and taking his blanket to hold
the apples he started off.
He was not the only soldier under the trees, and while on a limb
getting his share of the apples, lo and behold, the provost guard
came to arrest them! He fairly fell from the tree, broke through the
high corn and ran for his life, the guard calling after, “Halt, or I
shoot.”
He got back to us with the fruit but said the apples had cost him
so much labor and so much fright that they did not taste good.
Because we laughed at him, running with his load, he would not give
us any until the next day.
 We marched fifteen miles and camped at Bardstown until October
4th, when we marched seventeen miles. We marched twelve miles
and camped at Springfield. The heat was terrible on those long
sunny pikes, with never a sign to mark the grave of a hero, noble
sacrifice to their cause.
One day an assistant surgeon carrying an umbrella was marching
along the pike in the rear of his regiment when General Hardee
came along. The General had nothing to shield him from the sun but
a little cap. He rode up to the surgeon and said, “What is your
name?”
The man told him his name, rank and regiment.
“Well sir,” said General Hardee, “just imagine this whole army with
umbrellas.”
The doctor shut up his umbrella and pitched it over into the field.
General Hardee was always joking his men on the march, but
when the fight was on no one did his part better than he.
On October 6th we marched through Perryville, but on the 7th we
marched back and camped in the main street of the town.
Some of the boys stole a bee-hive and many of them got stung so
their faces were swollen and eyes closed. Dr. Arnold was one of the
injured ones, but he did not fail to eat his honey. As we lay on the
ground that night I teased him, saying General Hardee would need
no further proof; that he carried his guilt in his face. The doctor did
not relish this so I turned over to go to sleep when a bee stung me
on the cheek.
“Who’s the guilty one now?” laughed the doctor and the joke was
surely on me. But I knew where the medicine wagon was, and went
and got some ammonia. I bathed my face, and the swelling went
down at once, so I came out ahead after all.
By daylight we were in line of battle and honey and bee-stings
were forgotten. The Battle of Perryville was fought October 8th,
1862. We were on the extreme left and our battery, on a hill at our
rear, was not engaged until late in the day. The heaviest fighting was
on the extreme right. Both sides were contending stubbornly for a
spring of water between the lines and were dying for water.
Sometimes one side would have the advantage, sometimes the
other. When called into action we crossed a bridge in the center of
the town, formed a line and advanced to the top of the hill. Our
battery was planted and had begun its work when we received
orders to recross the bridge and occupy our former lines. We had to
retreat under battery fire, and after we had got our battery over the
bridge we marched along the pike. The enemy opened on us with
grape and cannister and did deadly work. We double-quicked into
line and their sharp-shooters gave us a terrible assault from behind
the houses. But when our line was formed, our sharp-shooters
deployed and our battery opened fire, they had to retreat. So the
battle went on, but finally we had to give up the struggle and
evacuate the town. The loss was heavy on both sides, about eight
thousand men being killed, captured and wounded.
October 9th we marched fifteen miles and passed Harrodsburg.
On the 10th we marched sixteen miles to Camp Dick Robinson. Here
a council was held while General Bragg gave his wagons time to go
South. It was the greatest wagon train ever seen in the army; was
three days passing at one point. Here George Thomas and I each
bought three yards of undyed jeans to make ourselves some
trousers when we got back South.
The defeat at Perryville and the failure of the Kentuckians to join
us as we had hoped, made our campaign anything but a brilliant
success from a military point of view, notwithstanding our victories
at Mumfordsville and Richmond.
But we had captured six thousand men, we had secured arms
and ammunition which were sorely needed, we had gotten
enormous quantities of supplies which were a great help to the
Confederacy, and the men who did get back were tough as whit-
leather, ready for anything.
October 13th we marched twenty-three miles, passing through
Lancaster, October 14th we marched seventeen miles, going through
Mount Vernon, and halted a little before dark.
 Dr. Arnold and I went down to a creek about a mile from camp,
and there in a field we found a fine pumpkin. He said if I would help
him cook it I might help him eat it. He said it would have to cook
until one o’clock to be well done. I told him I would help take it to
camp but I’d be dinged if I’d stay up until one o’clock to cook it. I
was too nearly dead for rest and sleep. We got it to camp, cut it up,
put it in the famous old army camp kettle and Doc began the
Herculean task of staying awake to cook his pumpkin. He did stay
awake until one o’clock and got it nicely done, but was afraid to eat
it at that unusual hour, as he might have cramp colic. He found an
old fashioned oven with a lid, put his pumpkin into it, fastened the
lid, placed the oven under the knapsack beneath his head and went
to sleep. But first he took the trouble to wake me and tell me I
should not have a bite of his pumpkin because I would not stay up
to help him cook it.
When reveille sounded he woke up and began to guy me, saying
“You shall not have a bite.” He took up his knapsack and behold, the
oven, pumpkin and all, was gone! Oh, he was furious, and fairly
pawed the ground. He thought I had taken it for a joke, but soon
found that to be a mistake. We decided that some soldier had stolen
and eaten it. If he had found the man he would have fought him to
a finish. He never did see the joke.
October 19th we marched eleven miles. We passed over a
battlefield, where General Buckner had fought, and crossed Wild Cat
River. We marched thirteen miles and passed through Barkersville.
This was a strong Union town in the mountains. The “Jay Hawkers”
shot at us from the top of the mountains; women and boys pelted
us with stones, shouting, “Hurrah, for the Union.” As they were
women and children, we had to take it.
Once we were marching on a road cut out of the mountain side.
On one side was a cliff of solid rock, on the other a deep precipice.
The command to halt was given and the men fell down to rest,
completely filling the road. Arnold and I were in the rear, and one of
the ambulance drivers, seeing the crowded condition of the road,
told us to get up with him, which we did. There was a trail just wide
enough for the horsemen, single file, and along this trail rode
General Hardee looking after his men. When he reached this
ambulance he stopped opposite Arnold and said to him, “Are you
sick?” “No, sir.” “Well, get down off that wagon.”
“Are you sick?” he called to me, but by that time I was out on the
ground. Then he said to the driver, “Let no soldier ride unless he is
sick or wounded.”
A Kentucky Colonel brought with him his five hundred dollar
carriage, and had his negro drive it at the rear of the regiment. In
his rounds General Hardee had found some sick men and told them
to get into that carriage. The negro and rear officers explained
whose carriage it was, but the General only said, “No use going
empty when it can serve so good a purpose. By tomorrow perhaps
none of us will need it.”
So the umbrella man, Arnold and myself were not the only ones
upon whom General Hardee kept an eye.
October 19th we marched fourteen miles, crossed Cumberland
River, then on through Gibraltar, Cumberland Gap, and on across
Powell River into Tennessee. We marched past Taswell, crossed
Clinch River at Madisonville, and, on October 24th, camped about six
miles from Knoxville. Here we were given time to wash and dry our
clothes. On this raid we had only one suit and to get it clean meant
to strip, wash, let the clothes dry on or hang them on bushes to dry,
while we waited. With our battles and forced marches we could not
stop for that; so creeping companions were large and furious, and
made deadly war. But at Knoxville everybody got busy, went into
warfare with our creeping enemy, and the thousands destroyed in
that fierce combat will never be known.
George Thomas and I brought out our white jeans which we had
bought in Camp Dick Robinson, and had carried all these miles. We
got some copperas from a kind old rebel lady, took walnut hulls and
dyed our cloth. It was a good job too.
The boys were getting short on tobacco, and it looked as if the
whole army would be forced to reform on this line. But they
borrowed Dr. Ashford’s horse and sent me to buy tobacco, chewing
tobacco, smoking tobacco, hand tobacco, giving me plenty of
Confederate currency.
I rode into the beautiful town which I had not seen since we were
flying into Virginia. Then we wore good clothes and had Sunday
Soldiering. Now we were soldiers with the dust of a thousand mile
march, ragged and unkempt, bleeding from the wounds of two hard-
fought battles and numerous skirmishes. Then we were raw,
undisciplined troops, now we were seasoned veterans. Such was the
change in a few short months.
Riding to a drug store, I hitched my horse, went in, and bought
my wholesale bill of tobacco. When I came out again to the sidewalk
I saw a policeman leading off my horse. I yelled at him to stop, but
he went on, I rushed up and grabbed the reins. He told me it was
against the law to hitch a horse to a post in that city. About that
time twenty of our boys came running to my rescue. They lined up
and told the policeman to turn the horse loose. He did the wise
thing, or there would have been a “hot time” right there. I took the
horse and I made a bee-line for General Braggs’ Brigade, and took
joy and delight to my tobacco-starving friends.
November 2nd we passed through Knoxville and camped on the
railroad. At daylight the 154th Regiment Band awoke us with the
sweetest music I ever heard. It brought back such poignant
memories of home, of the boys and girls around the piano, of
charming plantation melodies.
But the next tune was not so sweet. It came to the tune of orders
to “cook three days’ rations, and be ready to move at a moment’s
notice.” We rode cars to Chattanooga, from there on November 10th
we went to Bridgeport, Alabama. From Bridgeport we crossed the
Tennessee River, marched fifty miles and camped at Alisonia.
November 24th we marched twenty miles, passing through
Tullahoma; November 25th we marched fifteen miles and camped on
Duck River at a short distance from Shelbyville. At this time the
Medical department decided to give all the one-course Medical
students then in the army a chance to pass the examination for
promotion to assistant surgeon. Dr. Arnold was one of these one-
course students and decided to try the examination. We diked him
out in the best clothes we could get together in the company. I
contributed my white shirt, other boys brought him hat, coat, shoes,
and collar. When he stood before us for inspection he could have
passed for a lawyer or preacher just from town. With his book,
“Smith’s Compends,” he walked twenty miles to the Board of
Examiners, stood before the “saw-bones,” shook and answered
questions. Perhaps his borrowed plumage helped him, at any rate he
passed, and was given a certificate. He walked back, changed from
the rank of a private to that of a captain! When he came in sight two
hundred braves met him; when shown his certificate they rode him
on a rail and kept up a rough house for an hour or two. He had no
horse, no money, and no books except his Smith’s Compends, but
the older doctors helped him, and soon he was fully up in medical
affairs and made a good surgeon too.
December 8th we marched twenty miles and camped at
Eaglesville. From there we marched to College Hill.
December 28th we marched to Murfreesboro, and camped on
Stone River within cannon shot of the town. Here we prepared to
meet Rosecrans with his army, forty-five thousand in number. We
were in line of battle on the extreme right. After dark on the
thirtieth, still in line of battle, we moved our position to extreme left
and camped, without fire, in a cedar rough. Our orders were to
advance as soon as it was light enough to see. At dawn, December
31, we moved promptly on the enemy, advancing through an open
field. The enemy, protected by a fence and the trees, received us
with deadly fire and our loss was great. But we flew after them and
our work was just as disastrous to them. Dead bluecoats were thick
in every direction. We soon had them on the run.
Our company Color Bearer William Mathews, the same who had
defied the Yankee fleet on the Potomac, had been ill and this was his
first fight. As we followed the fleeing Yanks he said, “Boys, this is
fun.” One of the men answered, “Stripes, don’t be so quick, this is
not over yet; you may get a ninety-day furlough yet.” In twenty
minutes Mathews’ arm was shot to pieces.
George Thomas was in front of all the company. He had killed two
men and was pulling down on the third, when one, but a short
distance away, shot him, wounding him in the arm. But George
spotted the man who shot him and wanted to go on with one good
arm. However, he was taken off the field and sent to the hospital.
We drove the enemy three miles. The fire all along the line was
terrific. The cannonading could be heard for miles. The rattle of
small arms was continuous. Our line on the left was pressing on over
a terrible cedar rough. Anyone who understands a cedar rough can
understand what that means. Limestone rocks, gnarly cedar trees,
stub arms sticking out of the ground, make it almost impassable at
best. How much more difficult with an enemy in front concentrating
his fire upon us. We pressed on through rocks and thicket. One of
our brave boys, Arthur Green, was struck by a cannonball and torn
all to pieces. Other parts of the line were as hot as ours. We got
possession of the thicket but could not get the cannon through it; so
we hardly got a man of their line.
When we got through, we found the Yanks with sixty cannon in
line fronting the cedar rough. Our ranks were so depleted we could
not charge two lines of infantry and sixty cannon. There was nothing
to do but hold our position and await re-inforcements.
We lay in line all night. Orders were sent to the quarter-master to
send rations, if he had any. Two negroes, belonging to two of the
officers, arrived, bringing food for their masters.
As all was quiet then, and it was raining, they decided to sleep by
the fire until daylight. To keep off the rain they drove forked
branches into the ground, laid a brace across them, stretched their
blankets over all, and pegged them to the ground at the four
corners. Before long hard firing was heard on the outpost. Bullets
rained on their tent, struck the logs of the fire, cut loose the corners
of the blankets, letting the rain on their faces. When they saw the
flying bullets, they awaited no instructions from their masters. With
eyes popping out of their heads, they grabbed their blankets and set
out for the wagon train. They were not long in getting there.
Next day the struggle was renewed with fearful carnage.
Each side fought with grim and settled purpose, finally a fierce
onslaught scattered our forces. In twenty minutes we lost two
thousand men, and the day was lost. Orders for retreat were given.
General Braggs’ loss was about ten thousand men, while
Rosecrans reported his at twelve thousand.
In the battle our Lieutenant Colonel Don McGregor was mortally
wounded. When he was taken to the hospital, his faithful old Samuel
was by his side. The Colonel’s sister, who lived a few miles from
Murfreesboro, had come to relieve the suffering and nurse the
wounded. (Ah, those brave, never-to-be-forgotten daughters of the
South!) When she drove up to the hospital in her carriage she found
Sam waiting with his own and his master’s horse saddled ready for
the trip to her home. When we retreated General Rosecrans’ men
came in, and his guard took the two horses, and drove off in the
carriage. What could be done? Samuel said, “I will get them back.”
At this particular time of the unpleasantness, the Yankees were
burning with sympathy for the poor, oppressed negro, and negroes
were permitted to do pretty much as they pleased. Samuel went to
Rosecrans’ headquarters, told him the horses were his, that he had a
wounded friend in the hospital and he wanted a pass to the country.
All his requests were granted. He drove the Colonel and his sister to
her home, and nursed his master until he died.
After Colonel McGregor died Samuel got a pass through the lines
and returned to our camp. He delivered the Colonel’s horse but kept
his own and asked our Regiment Colonel for a pass to Arkansas. He
then told the boys to write to their fathers, mothers and
sweethearts, as he was going back home to see his mistress. We
received answers to these letters, showing that Samuel had made
the journey safely, faithful to the end.
We retreated by night. We were nearly starved. It was raining,
cold, cold rain, and we were wet to the skin. We were so sleepy that
if we stopped for a moment we would go to sleep. We had gone
almost as far as human nature could go.
One of the boys thought he would rest a few moments beside a
fire left by some wagons. He took pine boughs and laid them on the
wet ground, dropped down with all his accoutrements, and went to
sleep. General Hardee came up, spied him, called to his Adjutant,
“Roy, come here; here is a fellow who has gone regularly to bed.”
About then the soldier woke up very much frightened. He thought
he would be shot. He got away from there in a hurry, and was with
his command before his absence was discovered.
January 5th, 1863, we marched forty-two miles to Manchester.
January 6th we marched eighteen miles to Alisonia. From Alisonia
we marched to Tullahoma, and there we camped for the winter.
We were in General Hardee’s Division. We had tents and were
comfortable. We drilled four hours a day, and by way of diversion
General Hardee had contests in drilling. We become so expert that
we could have made the Virginia Cadets ashamed of themselves.
Our company was third best and that took good practice. A
Louisiana company was ahead of us. It beat us in quickness at “trail
arms”, “lie down”, at “double quick.” At walking or running none
excelled us at any army maneuver. We had other amusements, too.
We played “town ball” and “bull pen” and had some lively games.
We dressed up the smaller fellows as girls and we danced. Joe
Hamilton, Dick Hayden, Sam Shoup and Bill Barnes were the
musicians. Bill Shackleford was ready to play pranks, and made fun
for the crowd. Now and then we got a pass and sent our best
foragers out for “fancy grub” and vegetables. Then we would have a
big dinner and a big day.
April 23rd, real fun began again, but we were alive, active, young,
healthy, well-drilled, well-disciplined—in perfect fighting trim. For
fear we would forget how to march a walking track was opened up
from Tullahoma, and we marched daily five, ten, eighteen, twenty,
thirty miles, making expeditions to all the surrounding towns—
Wartrace, Bellbuckle, Hoover’s Gap, Duck River, Bridge, Railroad
Gap, Manchester. Manchester was a nice little town in the hills,
where there were numerous springs and streams in which we could
swim. June 22nd we went there to relieve a Louisiana Regiment.
When we arrived they were on dress parade, eleven hundred strong
and their drill was simply fine, but they had never smelt powder nor
marched at all. They wore nice caps, fine uniforms, white gloves,
fine ——shop-made laced high shoes. They carried fat haversacks
and new canteens, fine new fat knapsacks with lots of underclothing
and even two pairs of shoes. They laughed at us in our shabby
dress, with our dirty haversacks and no knapsacks. We had one suit
of underwear wrapped in our blankets and our accoutrements were
reduced to the lightest weight possible. They said we were too few
to meet the enemy, but we told them we would stay with any who
came to engage us. We also told them that they couldn’t get
through one week’s campaign with such knapsacks. Some of the
boys said, “We will follow in your wake and replenish our
wardrobes.”
This was a sad camp to us. One of our men, Garret, got angry
with Mr. Bragden, the Beef Sergeant, who divided the company
rations. Taking his gun, he went to Bragden’s tent where he was
unarmed and shot him like a dog. Garrett would have been lynched
if the officers had not hurried him off to another part of the army.
June 27th we marched to Wartrace, June 29th to Tullahoma, June
30th we were deployed to build breastworks, but we retreated at
eleven o’clock at night to Alisonia on Elk River.
July third, we camped in the Cumberland Mountains, near the
school which had been established by General Polk and the
Quintards. It was an ideal place for a school and I am glad to say it
bears, today, an honored name among educators as the University
of the South.
We had marched all day in the hot July sun, clouds of dust had
parched our throats, and we were almost perishing for water when
we reached the spring. As we rested at the side of the road whom
should we see but our crack Louisiana Regiment—the one we had
relieved at Manchester only ten days before. They were dusty, dirty,
lame and halt, with feet sore and swollen in their tight shoes, a
bedraggled and woe begone set of youngsters. How we joshed
them.
“Don’t cry, mama’s darling;” “Straighten up and be men;” “Brace
up like soldiers, so the army won’t be ashamed of you.” These were
some of the commands we hurled at them. They would have fought
us if they could have stopped, but a soldier cannot break ranks.
July 4th, 1863, we camped in the valley on the Tennessee River.
Then we crossed the River at Kelly Ford to Lookout Valley. July 9th
we marched through Chattanooga and camped at Turner’s Station.
August 17th we marched to Graysville. Here Dr. T. R. Ashford got
a four days’ furlough. Dr. Ashford had married in Georgia and had
gone with his bride to Arkansas and established himself as a
physician. When the war broke out he joined the army from his
adopted home, going out as assistant surgeon in our regiment. His
wife returned to her mother in Georgia and he had not seen her for
two years. As Graysville was near her home, she came to visit him
and there they had a happy meeting.
Dr. Ashford, always kind and sympathetic, was a great favorite
with the boys. Highly educated and a fine surgeon, he was modest
and unassuming, a sincere Christian gentleman. After the war he
settled in Georgia. Dr. Ashford, Dr. Arnold and I were close friends
through those long dreadful years.
August 21st we camped at Harrison on the Tennessee River. On
August 23rd we marched fourteen miles and camped at Gardner’s
Ferry.
Here several of the boys went foraging and got some nice green
apples. George Thomas, Captain Shoup and others made apple
dumplings and put them in a large camp kettle to cook.
They were standing around the fire, with mouths watering,
thinking every minute an hour, when the Yankees on the other side
of the river began to shell the camp. They had run up four globe-
sighting 16 shotguns to the top of a small hill. We were too far from
our guns and there were no orders given to shoot, so they shelled
us a plenty.
While the boys were watching the kettle a cannon ball struck the
fire, upset the kettle, passed between the legs of one of the men
and exploded a little farther on. This did not seem to cause any
alarm. They had heard cannon balls explode before, but a mighty
wail went up over the loss of the apple dumplings. The air was blue
around there, and at that particular moment the boys would have
charged the enemy joyously.
I was with the doctors that day. They had a negro who was a fine
forager. He even brought us fried chicken. We had a royal spread in
front of the doctors’ tent and were consuming the good things with
great relish, when a cannon ball went through the tent! It looked like
it was going to smash us to smithereens, grub and all! We got away
from there. We grabbed the grub and, went down the line where we
finished our meal. Not royally as we would have done, but hastily
and stealthily.
But our sharp-shooters in the dumps on the river got even with
them. The Yanks drove out into the field with two six-mule wagons
to get some fine rebel fodder. There were about thirty men in all,
teamsters and guards. Some of them stood on the rail pen
surrounding the fodder, others climbed on the shock to begin at the
top. Our sharp-shooters shot the mules first, then the men, and few
lived to tell the tale. Sherman said, “War is Hell.” In this case it was
hell to them.
September 10th we marched down the valley toward Lafayette.
As the dust was a foot deep and water scarce we moved slowly and
we went into camp about ten o’clock.
Dr. Scott of our Division, was sent for to see a citizen who was
very ill. He went and relieved him, and left medicine, not asking pay
for his services. After he had returned to camp a negro brought him
a huge tray heaped with good things to eat. The doctor looked at
the pile of grub, and said, “You boys must dine with me today, I
can’t eat all of this.” We needed no further urging for our blue beef
and water corn-dodger was rather poor fare. We lit into it, and as
hungry wolves devour a sheep, so we devoured that pile of grub.
Then the darkey took his tray and departed with a note of thanks.
Our gratitude was truly sincere.
September 19th battle was on hand. We were in General Polk’s
Brigade, to which the Hardee Corps had been transferred. When
orders were read we found ourselves named as reserves.
Cannonading began on our right, and we were moved quickly to the
sound of the shot, about three miles. As we drew nearer to it we
were ordered to double-quick. When we came to Chickamauga
Creek we began to pull off our shoes to wade when General
Cleburne came along saying, “Boys, go through that river, we can’t
wait.”
Through the creek we went, and were among the first to be
engaged instead of being reserves. When our line was deployed and
ordered forward we were the very first. We struck stubborn western
troops who knew how to fight. The conflict was terrific and raged all
day. When night fell the engagement was stopped. Throwing out
skirmishers we found that the lines were mixed up terribly. We were
among the Yankees and they were calling, “What command is this?”
It was midnight before the lines were reformed. Then we had a
night’s sleep on the ground, knowing that on the morrow some of us
would fall in defense of our country—some of us would never see
home and mother again. General Longstreet arrived in the night with
re-inforcements, bringing a division from Virginia. At daybreak the
struggle was renewed. On both sides was the determination, “God
being our helper, we will win this day.” Wave after wave of deadly
lead was sent against those Western troops, who contested every
inch of the ground, who would stand a charge, and stay on the field.
But our blood was hot, we fought for home, and against an invading
foe and we could not give up at all. At the end of two days a battle
of battles had been fought and won for the Confederate cause. But
alas, how many Southern boys had bitten the dust. The field was so
thickly strewn with dead we could scarcely walk over it without
stepping on the corpses. Our Regiment lost 42 killed and 103
wounded, and of the 120,000 men engaged on both sides, 28,000
were killed and wounded.
Longstreet’s men said to us, “Boys, you have tougher men to
fight than we.”
If we had followed up our victory and had Forrest cut off the
enemy’s supplies what a difference it would have made. We might
have stretched our lines to the Kentucky border. Such are the
mistakes of war.
At this battle one of the boys captured two horses and gave them
to Dr. Arnold. He said he would draw feed for them and on the
march I could ride one of them. I named my horse “General
Thomas” but before we left our first camp the assistant surgeons
could draw feed only for one horse so I was afoot as I had been for
two years.
We established a line of breastworks on Missionary Ridge and
held Lookout Mountain, a mountain over a mile in height, and, as we
thought, commanded Chattanooga.
The Yankees saw that something must be done or things would
be booming in Dixie. They brought to the front Dutch, Irish,
Hottentots and all kinds of troops, and by the last of October the
Sequatchie (?) (Wauhatchie?) Valley was swarming like a beehive.
Once a Dutch corps of 15,000 went down the valley through a
gap to reach our rear. Bragg sent to meet them about 15,000 troops,
placing them arrowed in front. He had a line under General
Hindeman with orders, at a certain signal, to rush across, cutting
them off entirely from the main army. The signal was never given
and we do not know why to this day. At that signal we were to
follow across the valley at double-quick but Mr. Dutch discovered he
was in a trap and he marched out again.
There was a Union man living on the route of this Dutch Devil,
who had not joined either army. He had lived on his farm
unmolested by the Southern troops, and supposed that of course he
would be protected by the Northern troops. As the Dutch marched
down to attack us they stopped at this man’s home, searched the
place, insulted his wife and knocked him down. As they came
running back they had no time to tarry, but one at a time, a
straggler, would drop into his smokehouse to see if there was one
ham left. The Union man took a long, keen bowie-knife and stood in
the dark corner of the smokehouse; when only one man entered he
stabbed him to the heart and put his body into the well. He killed
three men. Next morning, he with his wife and children, walked into
our camp. He said he was ready to fight to the bitter end. He took
his family South and came back and made a bad soldier for them.
November 23, 24 and 25 we fought the “Battle Above the
Clouds,” the terrible conflict of Lookout Mountain and Missionary
Ridge. We were fighting continuously during those three days. We
were in breastworks on the ridge near Lookout Mountain, but when
the fighting was fiercest we were sent to relieve the commands at
the extreme right of the Yankee army. They came in solid front five
columns deep and charged our breastworks but were driven back
hour after hour with terrible slaughter. Late in the afternoon they
made a concentrated attack on our center and drove our men out of
line. We had to give up Lookout Mountain and we retreated to the
Ridge about midnight. Throughout the night Sherman’s troops were
coming up, and next day we were attacked in front and flank. Our
breastworks were of no use as Lookout Mountain commanded the
Ridge, so in spite of desperate struggles we were ordered to retreat.
At Chattanooga it had been agreed that there should be no firing
on the line of pickets without notification. Here between the picket
line and the main line of battle our sporting boys sought “sheckle
luck,” those who were fortunate enough to have a few sheckles of
Confederate money. One day when General Hardee was officer of
the day he ordered a regiment deployed around the gamblers, but
soldiers from all parts of the field yelled to the boys to run, and run
they did. General Hardee did not get many.
In our company was a Kentucky lad named Barnett who had a
brother in the Union Army. They got permission to spend the day
together. When the day was over they separated, each going back to
his command. That was a war! Brother against brother, father
against son, arrayed in deadly combat.
We went to Dalton, marching all night. As we crossed the river it
seemed the coldest night our thinly clad men had ever experienced.
Our corps under Hardee was the rear guard. General Cleburne’s
Division was immediately in the rear. General Polk was our Brigadier
General. About two o’clock we passed General Cleburne.
[…]
mountain, looking and thinking.
“Something is going to happen” I said to the boys.
“Why?”
“Look at General Cleburne, don’t you see war in his eyes?”
We had crossed Ringold Mountain, but we were sent back to take
the horses from the cannon, put men in their places, and pulled it
quickly to the top of the mountain, so to the summit over rocks and
between trees two pieces were carried. Our regiment was sent to
the top with them. Two minutes more would have been too late. Not
fifty yards away on the other side of the hill were Yankees climbing
for the same goal. Then the firing began. We had the advantage in
having a tree to use as breastworks, and in being able to see them.
Whenever one stepped aside from his tree to shoot our men got
him. Captain Shoup and John Baird rolled rocks down the hill and
when a Yankee dodged the other boys shot him. We picked off
dozens. When the cannon was got ready and began shelling the
woods, breaking the trees, tearing up rocks and showering them on
the lines below, they had to break and retreat in haste down the hill.
If we had not got there as soon as we did our line would have
been the one to retreat.
General Cleburne took us next to Ringold Gap, a gap dug by the
railroad through the mountain. He made a talk to the boys, telling us
that we were there to save the army, which was five miles away and
could not possibly get help to us. Our task would require nerve and
will of which he knew we had plenty. We were to form two lines of
battle across the gap and were not to fire until he gave the signal,
(by signs, as commands would not be heard in the roar of guns.)
The Yankees having failed to break our line on the mountain had
massed their forces at the gap, determined to break Cleburne’s line,
when the rest would be easy for them.
They came on seven columns deep to our two. We watched them
advance and seconds seemed hours. We felt they would be on us
before Cleburne ever gave the signal. Would he never give it? At last
when the time was ripe, he, who knew the art of war so well, gave
the signal to fire, and such deadly work did we perform as was not
surpassed in the whole four years of war. We let loose on them four
pieces of cannon. The command to stop firing was not given until
the number of dead in our front was greater than our Brigade. This
fight showed strategy and bravery. It checked the advance of an
army five times greater than our Division, and it proved to General
Hardee that he had one man who could plan and execute a battle
with any adversary. Ever after, Cleburne with his Arkansas,
Tennessee and Texas men was placed in the hottest part of battle.
Our loss was 88 killed, 23 wounded, and their loss was reported in
Northern papers as 2,000 killed, wounded and captured.
We went into winter quarters at Dalton, our regiment being in
front of the general army. We camped near Tunnel Hill. We had good
foraging ground and could get chickens, eggs, butter, so we lived
high. John Loftin was captain of the foragers and he was a good one
too. He only got caught once but he lied out of that. Two negroes,
who belonged to two doctors of our Brigade, went to Dalton one
night to see the sights and buy half-moon pies, big sorghum ginger-
bread, and other things. Coming home at midnight they were
crossing a railroad trestle when two robbers called on them to halt.
Sam began to parley with them when whack! they hit him over the
head, and told him to give up his money. He yielded up his shin-
plasters, all he had. They then took Tom’s can. He did not have
much so they told him to pull. He was a good runner especially
when scared, and he lit out over rocks and brush, beating his
partner to camp. With eyes as big as saucers he related his exploits
to his master. They did not visit Dalton at night again. We used to go
over there to see the girls and have parties and sorghum “candy
pulls.” It was a great diversion, and between the lines, when the
guards were on to it they would arrest, but the boys could usually
outgeneral them.
From this camp I was sent on a three days’ furlough to Augusta
to buy some drug supplies not to be found in Atlanta. When I
reached Atlanta whom should I meet but George Roberts, one of my
old mess-mates who had been transferred to Morgan’s Cavalry.
Morgan had been captured, and all that was left of the command
was at Macon re-organizing. George was buying horses. He was
flush and wanted me to take a thousand dollars, but I had lots of
money, at least for these days. He went to the depot to see me off.
Robert was a fine fellow. He was a regular city rat. We country boys
used to get him to pilot us around the city. He would know all the
streets in a day and could take us anywhere we wanted to go. After
the war he settled in Texas, where he was cashier of a bank. He died
several years ago.
In Augusta I met Colonel Snyder of the Eighth Arkansas. He was
from Pocahontas, Ark., and was then on a furlough. I also met Ed M.
Dickinson, Thad Kinman and Ben Adler. They belonged to the
quartermaster’s department under Captain Bridewell and Major
Moon. They kept books as big as a dining table. As they belonged to
this particular department they helped me to draw a new jacket suit.
They lived in a fine city and fared sumptuously, so knowing all the
ropes they made it mighty pleasant for me. Through Ed I met an
uncle whom I had not seen before. It was on a crowded street in the
city, but I knew him at once from his resemblance to my father.
When I accosted him he was very dignified and seemed to doubt me
until I told him the names of the whole family. Then he insisted upon
me going to his home. He had an interesting family. My grandmother
died at his home and was buried in a cemetery in Augusta. I got
back to camp on time. After living off the fat of the land our regular
diet of blue beef and corn bread somehow failed to tickle the palate.
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