July 5

The Last of the Magicians: Newton’s Principia

(Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.)

On this day in 1687, the Royal Society of London published Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, the book that would become the foundation of classical physics, the definitive statement of the laws of motion and universal gravitation, and one of the most consequential scientific documents in human history. Isaac Newton’s Principia gave the world a mathematical universe—predictable, mechanical, governed by laws that could be calculated, verified, and applied. It launched the Scientific Revolution into its final, triumphant phase and helped establish the idea, still central to how most people understand science today, that the universe is a machine and human reason is the tool for reading its blueprints.

What it did not include, because Newton judged the omission strategically necessary, was the source of the central idea.

When the economist John Maynard Keynes purchased a cache of Newton’s private papers at a Sotheby’s auction in 1936, he found himself holding hundreds of manuscripts that Newton’s heirs had quietly kept out of public view since his death in 1727—deemed, in the Royal Society’s own words, “not fit to be printed.” Reading them, Keynes arrived at a conclusion that shocked the scientific establishment when he announced it in a 1942 lecture to the Royal Society Club. Newton, he said, was not “the first of the age of reason.” He was, rather, “the last of the magicians.”

A Million Words on Alchemy

The papers Keynes purchased told a story that the official history of science had successfully suppressed for two centuries. For twenty-seven years at Cambridge, Newton had pursued alchemy and Hermetic philosophy with an intensity that exceeded his investment in physics and mathematics combined. Scholars now estimate that he wrote over a million words on the subject, filling approximately 169 books and manuscripts with alchemical notes, experiments, and theoretical speculations, plus thousands of additional pages of his own observations.

His laboratory at Trinity College ran continuously, day and night; he tended his furnaces through the small hours, monitoring temperatures with the same obsessive precision he brought to his telescopic observations; he copied alchemical texts by hand, corresponded secretly with other practitioners, and developed his own private symbolic system to veil his findings—a habit the alchemical tradition had always encouraged, and which Newton embraced with genuine conviction. Alchemy was not merely illegal in seventeenth-century England (it was, at least in its treasure-producing applications); it was, for Newton, the innermost chamber of a lifelong quest that physics occupied only a middle room.

Around 1680, Newton produced his own English translation of the Emerald Tablet, the foundational Hermetic text attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, whose famous formula—“as above, so below”—encapsulated the organizing principle of the entire Western esoteric tradition. Newton did not approach this text as a curiosity or a historical artifact. He approached it as a practitioner approaches a primary source: as encoded knowledge about the actual structure of reality, left in deliberately obscured form by ancient sages who understood that such knowledge could not be safely made available to all. He believed the ancient Egyptians, the Pythagoreans, and Solomon himself had possessed a complete and true understanding of natural law—a “Prisca Sapientia,” or primordial wisdom—that had subsequently been corrupted and fragmented, and which the alchemical and Hermetic tradition preserved in veiled form. His entire scientific career was, on one level, an attempt to recover and verify this lost wisdom through empirical experiment.

But there was a concluding section to the Principia, found among Newton’s papers after his death, that he wrote in two versions and ultimately chose not to publish. The reason, according to scholars who have examined the suppressed material closely, was unambiguous: the basis on which his ideas of subatomic forces operated was too obviously derived from alchemy and the Hermetic tradition. What he called “active principles”—the invisible forces operating between particles of matter that he identified as the mechanism behind gravity, light, and chemical change—came directly from the alchemical concept of sympathies and antipathies: the Hermetic doctrine that all things in nature are related by invisible bonds of attraction and repulsion, corresponding to the celestial influences above. When Leibniz attacked Newtonian gravity as an “occult quality”—meaning a quality that acted without any intelligible mechanical means, simply at a distance, without contact—he was, somewhat ironically, identifying precisely what it was. Newton strenuously denied the charge publicly. Privately, he understood it differently. One Newton scholar has stated flatly that Newton could not have visualized attraction at a distance had it not been for his alchemical work. The concept of a force that acts across empty space without any material medium to carry it is, in strictly mechanical terms, a magical concept. It works like sympathy. Newton knew this, because he had spent twenty-seven years studying how sympathy worked.

His acceptance of Hermetic principles of attraction and repulsion—the same principles underlying what alchemists meant when they spoke of metals loving or hating one another, of the magnetic sympathy between lodestone and iron, of the hidden affinities that governed chemical combination—gave him the conceptual framework that the strictly mechanical philosophy of Descartes had failed to provide. Descartes’ universe was all contact and collision, matter pushing matter. Newton’s universe had something more: an invisible reaching across space that pulled things toward one another without touching them. The name he gave this force was gravity. The tradition from which the concept came was Hermeticism.

Newton’s Own Law of Attraction

There is a direct, if tortuous, lineage from Newton’s Hermetic gravity to the concept of the “law of attraction” as it circulates in contemporary New Age and self-help culture—though the lineage runs through several transformations that Newton himself would not have recognized or endorsed. The Hermetic principle that like attracts like, that thought and intention shape material reality through invisible sympathetic bonds, that what is above mirrors what is below, traveled from the ancient Hermetic texts through the alchemical tradition into Newton’s laboratory notes, from Newton’s unpublished papers into nineteenth-century occult revival movements like Theosophy and New Thought, and from New Thought into the contemporary wellness and manifestation culture that sells the idea on podcast sponsorships and vision board workshops.

But Newton’s active principles were mathematical, precise, empirically testable; the New Age law of attraction is none of these things. However, the underlying intuition—that reality has an invisible, intentional dimension that responds to the structured direction of consciousness, that attraction is not merely a physical force but a principle operating at multiple levels of existence simultaneously—is recognizably the same intuition Newton encountered in the Emerald Tablet and spent twenty-seven years trying to formalize. The conversation between magic and physics that Newton conducted in private has never fully ended. It has simply moved venues.

The Principia that the Royal Society published on July 5, 1687, was a triumph of precisely the kind Newton intended it to be: a mathematical demonstration of universal law that could stand on its own terms, without reference to the esoteric sources from which its central concepts had been drawn. Newton was a strategist as much as a genius, and he understood that the Principia would be received very differently if its debt to alchemical sympathy were made explicit. He had already watched Leibniz dismiss gravitational attraction as an occult quality unworthy of a serious natural philosopher. He was not going to give the critics additional ammunition.

And so, the concluding section went unpublished. The Hermetic framework went unacknowledged. The million words on alchemy went into a chest that his heirs declined to open for two centuries. And the world received the Principia as the founding document of a purely rational, purely mechanical science—which it is, but only partially, and only on its surface.

OCCULT READS PRESENTS: DAILY OCCULT REVIEW

Modern Occultist is proud to present today's "Daily Occult Review" from our new ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... In honor of Don Pedro Jaramillo's legacy and curanderos everywhere...

Hermetica I: The Corpus Hermeticum, Asclepius, and Nag Hammadi Hermetica Ordered as a Path of Initiation

By M. David Litwa, Ph.D. | Illustrations by José Gabriel Alegría Sabogal | Anathema Publishing

■ Physical specifications: Quarter-bound in Ratchford Windsor book cloth & Elefantenhaut High White paper | Gold foil blocking | 140 gsm Arena Rough Natural paper | Gold head and tail bands | Matching gold bookmark ribbon

Since the Renaissance, scholars and seekers have wrestled with the Hermetic corpus in an order that Ficino inherited and no one substantially questioned—an order, as M. David Litwa demonstrates with elegant thoroughness, that corresponds to neither the internal logic of the texts nor the spiritual journey they describe. Hermetica I corrects this five-century-old editorial accident, and the result is genuinely transformative for anyone who has worked with the Corpus Hermeticum in its conventional arrangement.

Litwa, a scholar of Hellenistic religion whose academic credentials are impeccable, reorders the entire corpus—including the Latin Asclepius and the Nag Hammadi Hermetica, both frequently neglected in popular editions—into four progressive movements: introductory tractates, general discourses, detailed discourses, and revelatory discourses. The sequence mirrors the path of spiritual initiation the texts themselves suggest. Reading them in this order, a focused commentary following each tractate, produces the sensation of being guided rather than simply reading—of the Hermetic current organizing itself into something coherent and directional for the first time. The commentary is invaluable; Litwa writes as a scholar who takes the texts seriously as spiritual documents, not merely as objects of historical curiosity, and the balance between academic rigor and genuine engagement with the material is well-maintained throughout. The result is the most usable edition of the Hermetica in English—one that functions simultaneously as scholarship and as practice.

As a physical object, this Anathema edition commands immediate respect: the quarter-binding in Ratchford Windsor bookcloth and Elefantenhaut High White paper, the gold foil blocking, the Arena Rough Natural pages at 140 gsm, the matching gold headbands and ribbon marker—these are not affectations but functional expressions of the book's status as an object of sustained use. José Gabriel Alegría Sabogal's illustrations, commissioned specifically for this edition, add a visual dimension that rewards contemplation alongside the texts.

An essential acquisition for any serious student of the Western esoteric tradition, Litwa has given us not merely a better Hermetica, but the right one.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

Modern Occultist